Transcription
So, in this video, we'll go through the weight loss protocol I used to lose 28 kilos. I started at 94 kilos and went down to 66 kilos. And at the most efficient version of this protocol, I lost 16 kilos in 16 weeks. And this was after I'd already been in a calorie deficit for 8 months.
So, I started this weight loss journey because I started to get some real health concerns with this high amount of body fat that I had. And I didn't have a specific goal in mind for my weight. I just wanted to go down to roughly 10 to 15% body fat. At this level, my hormones will still be very healthy. And this is often a body fat percentage that's recommended to aim for rather than having a fixed number on the scale as a goal. And on this lower body fat percentage, your abs will also start to show. So, it's a good visual cue to aim for. And for women, the body fat percentage to aim for is around 20 to 30% to keep your hormones healthy.
And I want to mention that I'm not a health expert, but I've built this protocol based on the research papers available on all the topics we're going to talk about in this video. And these work great for my own personal journey. And I will add all these papers in the description of the video. So you can all take a look at them cuz they are very interesting.
So this video is divided into eight sections. I created this video because I wished all this information existed in one video when I started my weight loss journey. It would have saved me from a lot of mistakes and mental health problems and put a lot less stress on my relationships. But this video is also for the athletes and climbers that want to figure out how to increase their food intake and potentially take their training to the next level. This weight loss protocol can be reverse engineered to figure that out. So I will make all these steps as clear as possible over the course of this video. So let's get started.
So we will start with a calorie calculator. So this calculator is just a rough starting point. We have no accurate idea of how much calories each of us I'll burn every day. That's very personal. But this calculator gives us a starting point. So the example that I used here is a male 35 years old, 180 cm tall, weighing 80 kilos. And also give an estimate of your activity level. So choose the daily exercise or intense exercise three to four times per week. That would be a good start for this protocol. As you can see, this gives us a potential maintenance calories of 2,720 calories per day. So, if you want to lose half a kilo a week, we should lower our calories to 2,200. And I want you to know that a kilo fat is roughly 7,700 calories. So, then we need to burn an extra 3,850 calories in 7 days. And that's 550 calories per day. So, that's why we're getting the results of a 500 calorie deficit. So, with this goal to aim for, we can start organizing our food and how much training we should do and how much activity we should do each day so we can burn roughly 2,700 calories per day so we can reach this 500 calorie deficit. So, we will go through all this over the next 10 minutes in the video. And after that, I will explain what will happen within your first week of this weight loss protocol and what kind of results we want so you know that this protocol is working for you. And I will continue to use the 35-year-old 80 kilo man as an example when we go through how you should divide up your food and calories every day.
So let's start with food with our macros, also known as fat, protein, and carbs. And we'll start with the very important fat here. With fat, you want to go with 0.5 to 0.8 g per kilo of body weight. This will keep your hormones healthy. So that would be around 40 to 64 g of fat daily. And I would recommend to be on the higher dosage of 64 grams. That's 576 calories. The reason why you should be on the higher end is because fat is very important for the production of testosterone and estrogen. You also need fat daily for absorbing important vitamins. And this will keep your immune system working as normal. And during the weight loss, your body is already under a lot more stress than normal. So you want to do everything we can to lower that stress to really take care of your fats.
Then we have protein. 2 g per desired kilo of weight. So let's say you you want to go from 80 to 70 kilo, then you want 140 grams of protein daily. And since there's four calories per gram of protein, that's 560 calories. And the protein will help keep and build muscle in this weight loss. And this will increase the amount of fat you burn every day and how fast you are done with this weight loss. With fat and protein counted, it's at 1,127 calories per day. That means we have 1,73 calories left for carbs. This is 268 grams per day. The carbs will give you energy for work and training but most importantly for sleep. Carb releases insulin which helps tryptophane enter the brain where it gets converted to serotonin which regulates your mood and then later it's converted to melatonin, a hormone that promotes sleep.
I also want to add that you can lose weight on a fat and protein diet as well. It's a calorie deficit each day that makes us lose weight. But the right macros should make us feel as good as possible each day. And that in turn most likely means that we move around more and that makes us burn more calories each day, speeding up the weight loss.
So, I know there's a lot of information here, so we're going to summarize it. You have 64 g of fat per day. You have 140 g of protein per day. And you have 268 g of carbs a day for this example. And over the course of this weight loss, you'll come a lighter and smaller person. So you have to update your weight on this calculator and see how much you should lower your calories. So now that you know kind of the structure of the food, you can use this model for your specific height and age and weights and kind of figure out what you need. And for this, you'll need to buy a gram scale h and be ready to count the calories because doing a sustained weight loss without actually knowing how much calories you eat is very difficult.
And now for the second part, it's weight training protocol. I did a low volume highintensity training. So, I would do two sets of warm-up before each lift, then two working sets per muscle group, aiming for seven reps each time, very close to failure. I would rest three to five minutes in between sets. So, let's use an example for this structure. So, for chest, I would do two sets of dips and then I would do two sets of incline bench press. And those would be my two exercises for my chest during this weight loss. And then I would do the same for my back. Two sets of a rowing exercise and two sets for a pull-up or let's say weighted pull-ups. And then you do the same for your legs, your shoulders, your bicep. I did full body training Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. But you can do any kind of structure you want. The important part is to keep the intensity high and the volume low. If I went higher on the volume, I got more tired throughout the day and the volume also increased my hunger. So, I had a harder time to get to sleep. So, test a few different approaches for yourself and kind of see what works.
To summarize the weight training, go hard with good form. keep telling your body like you need the muscle you have so it doesn't break down the muscle for energy and you can also apply this structure to your climbing session and find boulders that are like appropriate for your energy level with 3 to 5 minutes rest between each try on the boulder but I would however go to the gym after my climbing session and train the muscles that I felt that I didn't hit uh through climbing.
And now we're coming to the walking. This is the special sauce. This is the main lever for your fat loss and we have a lot to talk about here. So, let's start from the top. So, the goal each day is to go a minimum of 10,000 steps with like a end goal is to reach 12 to 15,000 steps each day. This might take a few weeks or months, but this will really speed up the weight loss. And I want to go over the reality of the walking in in all its nuances. Depending on your size, a 10,000k walk will burn between 300 to 700 calories. This doesn't sound that impressive at first, but I'll explain what kind of doors that opens.
So, walking has a really low impact on your body. So you can walk every day and recover each night and do it all again. This gives you a stable way to burn calories each day and you can create routines in your life around this. During my weight loss, walking became one of the best and most important parts of my day and life. I took long walks with my friends, checking in on them, how they were doing in life, having long and important conversations that I would never have had if I hadn't had if I hadn't done the walking. I had also phone calls with family members from far away on a weekly basis. And going on these walk and having these conversation really made the time fly and a 10 to 20,000 steps a day felt easy and efficient. And I also had time to reflect on my own life, my own shortcomings and the things I wanted to improve and things I wanted to be grateful for. This made the walking that I had hated in the start become like the thing that I enjoyed the most.
Walking has also really low impact on hunger. That's why the goal of 12 to 15,000 steps a day is great for fat loss. You can increase the amount of calories you burn each day without paying the price of increased hunger. And the walking should just be like a brisk speed. No sweating, no hard breathing. This kind of effort will tire you out too much and lower the energy output you can do during the rest of the day. And it will also most likely increase your hunger. But once again, like the benefits of the walking isn't even over yet. If I walked early in the morning, I felt I had a lot more energy throughout the entire day. So that made me move around more and also be in a better mood, which made me burn even more calories. The walking also really improved my sleep because I'd walk in the morning. I'd set my circadium rhythm. So I woke up and fell asleep the same time each day. And I've also recommended this walking, this time of reflection to people around me, and they've all kind of felt similar benefits like better sleep, better training sessions, and more energy throughout the day.
Since you have the weight training protocol with a lot of rest in between sets, you can start walking in the gym while you rest. I got an extra seven to 10,000 steps in each gym session just because I was like pacing around in the gym like this. And that was really a cheat code to find the time to get the steps in every day. So to summarize this, each step you take burns calories. So just moving the legs and get those steps in will add up a lot throughout the day. It's an amazing tool for fat loss and you should find all the ways you can to really enjoy this part of your life. One of the big reasons why I lost a kilo per week for 16 weeks in a row was because I walked 20,000 steps each day. But this is not the only way to lose a kilo per week. In the next part of the video, we'll go through ways you might not need to actually walk 20,000 steps each day to lose a kilo per week if that's the fat loss that you want. I've had friends organize their weight loss with this protocol and they've lost a kilo per week while walking 15,000 steps a day because I figured out more ways to speed up the weight loss every day. We will start covering these steps now.
And now it's time to talk about meal timing. In the start, I tried three meals a day, but I felt that amount of food never really satisfied me. And the small amount of carbs made me kind of crash throughout the day. This really affected my energy level throughout the day. So, I kind of move around less. I had a harder time to stick to my routines and it really affected my mental health. So in the beginning I tried two meals a day and that worked better than three meals a day. But what worked the best for me was one meal a day. This amount of food was something that I could like really look forward to each day and also saving all my carbs in for the evening really improved my sleep. I also had a lot more stable energy throughout the day without the carbs. So I would train later in the evening and have this meal after my training. I would really suggest to try out different meal structures and see what you respond well to. The most important one is the one that gives you the best sleep.
So, if you decide to try one meal a day, like a 24-hour fast, essentially look into the potential side effects of that on your hormones and on the extra stress it might put on your body. I also want to add if you decide on a longer fast, if it's 12 hours, 24 hours, have some salt in your water each time you drink so you get your electrolytes in. You also don't have to worry about the protein throughout the day. There are more and more studies coming out that your body can utilize more than 100 grams of protein in one sitting. The important part is you gain the right amount of protein per 24 hours. And I can definitely agree with this. Like I kept a lot of my muscle even though I was in a very long deficit and had one meal a day for 6 months.
And now it's time to cover metabolism. It was one of the main reasons people didn't believe I could be in a calorie deficit for over a year and continue to lose weight. You know, they believed that my metabolism would crash and I would just hit this wall and the weight loss would just stop. But that didn't happen. Like I lost 28 kilos and I kind of control this system for 15 months. So think about your metabolism like a chemical engine that is constantly running even when you're sleeping. It's the thing that keeps you alive and moving. It breaks down food into energy. This engine powers everything from your heartbeat to breathing to thinking and moving. And the more you move and the more muscle mass you have, the more this engine needs energy every day. And when you're in a calorie deficit, you burn more energy every day than you get from food. So the body has to use your stored fat for energy. That is the purpose of body fat. But the longer you continue to eat up your stored body fat, the body will find all the ways it can to lower the amount of calories you burn each day. And it will do this in all the ways it can. It does it in strange ways. And I have a few good sneaky examples from my life. So over the course of the weight loss, my body took away my hand movements when I talk to people. So I would just stand there like a stiff board, not moving when talking. And I usually move my arms a lot when I talk to people. It also took away me moving my body when I'm editing these videos. Like I usually tap my feet, jam with good music when I edit. I find myself tensing up quite a bit when I'm focusing. And over time I realized that my body had stopped doing that. had taken away my mobility when editing. So the body will do these subtle things that's really hard to notice and this saving of energy all add ups and you might burn 500 calorie less because of it and that could really pass your weight loss and I also found myself doom scrolling on my phone a lot more. If I plan to sit 10 minutes I end up sitting 30 minutes without really noticing it.
Since we're now aware of these things we could set timers on the phone. So, if I'm just going to sit for 10 minutes, then we have a timer for 10 minutes and then it's back to the plan for the day. I also made decisions to like move my body when I was talking to people. And I was also like moving my feet, moving around uh when I edit, I just kind of manually had to do it now. And if I felt tired in the gym, like I felt like I didn't really have energy to do my weight training protocol, for example, or I kind of felt low in energy that made me maybe feel a bit more negative in life. I just asked for some assistance from my gym partner to like hype me up. Let's get some energy from somewhere else from like positive attitude. And I was always surprised how fast my strength came back. I strug struggled to like do reps with 10 kilo dumbbells when I was in this low energy mode when I got high energy. I was like back to my 15 kilo dumbbells again. The mind will do all these tricks to lower the amount of energy you're going to do and it's going to affect every part of your life. But if you know about it, then you can start organizing your life. So these moments rarely happen. This is also why the 12 to 15,000 steps are so great because it will keep you busy walking. So you won't have much time to like sit down and preserve this energy. And it also kind of gives you some extra budget. So let's say you don't want to do all these manual tricks that I just talked about. If you just add more walking that would kind of take away the brakes that your body is trying to put on you.
And I also want to talk about the perception a lot of people have about the metabolism. And I've heard this all my life. It goes like, man, just wait until you're 30. That's when you really start to gain weight. I kind of believe that at first, too. Like, uh, I started then to gain weight for the first time in my life when I was 34. So, I kind of bought the idea of this mythical force that just like randomly makes you gain weight when you're above 30. But that really isn't the case. It's nothing mythical about it. And as a simple answer, I just didn't move around as much as I used to. My daily average steps back then were around 3,000. And I didn't train as much either. My lifestyle had become less active. So every week I'd eaten a little more food than I needed. And over the years I've gained a lot of weight. And I would say like this is true for most people. Like when you were younger you moved around a lot more. You were most likely walking every day to class in school multiple times throughout the day. There was recess. There were athletics. You went on adventures. You had big plans with your friends. And this kind of lifestyle mostly would continue through university and through your 20s. And as you try to explore the world and find your way through it, you have created eating habits for that high activity life and most likely a lot of food and calories. But by the time you're 30, you're probably locked in your career and your family life. And you might have more stress and more bad nights of sleep. So you have lower energy, so you move around less. This all adds up over the years. And by the time you're in your mid30s, you've gained a lot of weight. your metabolism doesn't slow down until you're 60 and even then it's only around a percent each year.
So to conclude the metabolism for weight loss, keep an eye on yourself. If you find yourself sitting too often, then try and do another activity and that could be play computer games, do the dishes, find ways that you enjoy in your home that is more active than just sitting. And if you find yourself losing a lot of movement in your daily life and you don't want to think about it, go on those 12 to 15,000 steps daily and that will take away the breaks that your body is putting on you.
So now that we have gone through how to calculate your calories, the weight training, the walking, the meal timing and the metabolism. You will apply this to your first week or weight loss and you'll get a result. If our protocol is working as it should, you should lose around 1 kilo the first week. This is because your body has started to break down the energy in your muscle called glycogen. And it will do this before it goes after the fat. And glycogen holds a lot of water. So that's why the weight loss is so rapid generally in the first 2 weeks. And so if your weight loss starts slowing down on week three to like let's say half a kilo, then we have a calorie deficit that's pretty manageable and often preferred by most people. But if you want to continue to lose a kilo a week, then I should recommend to increase your walking and your general activity. And you should do this before you start lowering the amount of food you eat. Remember like food is important for your vitamins and minerals and your muscle building and most importantly your sleep. So don't lower your food before you have optimized activity in your life that is sustainable for you. And if you didn't lose any weight the first week, even if you walked 10,000 steps each day and did everything we talked about, then you need to lower the amount of calories you eat with roughly 500. This situation feels highly unlikely. So, if this happens, write me a message in the comment section, and we will troubleshoot the issue, and we'll solve it.
And now, it's time to cover what to do when you're done with the weight loss. Let's say you went down from 80 kilos to 70 kilos, and you did this with walking 12,000 steps each day, and you optimize your metabolism. And now that you're done, you only want to walk around 8k steps each day. So, you've changed your activity level in some areas of your life quite a lot. So, how do you find the right amount of calories each day so you don't eat too much and regain weight? So, let's say you ended this weight loss with eating 2,000 calories every day. Then I would suggest to increase your calories by 400. So, you start eating 2,400 calories each day. And these extra calories should come from carbohydrates and fat. Because now that you're 7 kilos, you're going to keep the protein intake the same. And depending on your sport, you should keep the fat at the same at 0.8 or increase it to 1.3 g per kilo of body weight if you do high volume cardio sports. But let's do the macros for a 70 kilo climber. Now that you're done with the weight loss, then you should have 140 grams of protein each day. Then you should also aim for 70 grams of fat each day and the rest is for carbs. So you have energy for training, recovery, and sleep. So this increase of 400 calories should mainly come from carbs. You do this for an entire week. And if you didn't gain a kilo the first week, that means you still haven't found your maintenance calories yet. Why we want a kilo is because you'll be slightly heavier from just having more food and water in your stomach. So the small increase in weight could give you a false positive. So that's once again why we aim for 1 kilo the first week. And if you didn't gain a kilo the first week, then you increase your calories with another 200. So that means that you'll eat 2,600 calories every day going into the second week. And if you start gaining weight now a kilo the second week, that means you potentially have found your maintenance calories. Your body is restoring glycogen in your muscle. And as we mentioned before, this will add water to your muscle and that's why you gain that 1 kilo so fast that week. And with this, you'll most likely start to feeling more energized and you'll start moving around more and your body will also start regaining these hand movements that gets taken away. It's restoring you to your normal movement patterns. So that means like those things will start burn calories like they haven't done in months. So your weight might plateau again here. So try add another 100 calories on week three. So now you eat 2,700 calories each day and then see how everything is progressing. Once you have found your maintenance calories, you'll gain between 1 to 3 kilos based on your size just because you will have stored energy and water within your muscles. So if you're 70 kilos after your weight loss, you're actually 71 to 73 kilos. So don't get stressed if you're gaining 1 to 2 kilos really fast. It's just that you're getting energy and water into your muscle again. So this is completely normal.
So, now we have gone through the weight loss protocol and you've gotten a better understanding of the benefits of macros, walking training, and how to find your deficit. Now, it's time to reverse engineer this for all you athletes and climbers, the ones to find your true maintenance calories each day, so you can have better training sessions and feel better. So, we will go back to the calculator and put in the data for a 75 kilo climber, 180 cm tall, and get a rough estimate of how much calories he should eat each day to break even. This gives us a potential maintenance calories of 2,682. So once again, we have a rough starting point for how much food we should try and eat daily for this first week. So since the guy is 75 kilos, we'll double that. So we have 150 g of protein each day. That's 600 calories. And then we aim for 75 g of fat per day. That's 675 calories. So that gives us 1,275 calories from fat and protein daily. This gives us 1,47 calories each day from carbs. And that's 351 gram of carbs each day. And this gives us a total of 2,600 calories. And now that we have this rough start and the macros to aim for, you can look over your eating habits. Take a closer look at the amount of food you have been eating the last week. If you have roughly the same meals and volume each day, you can start counting the calories and see kind of what you've been eating these last seven days. And if you have different meals most days of the week, try your best to count them for a week and see kind of roughly what you land on. So let's say you do this counting calories of your eating habits and you realize you eat 2,200 calories each day and most of those calories comes from fat. Then you know like, okay, potentially I could eat more with my lifestyle, so let's just try it out. So then you can change your macros so you get the right amount of carbs and protein each day so you don't lose muscle mass and so you also have the most energy for your training. And then you can increase your calories with 200 each day. So you go from 2,200 to 2,400 calories per day. And you do this for a week. And if you don't gain any significant weight that week, that means you can just eat even more food. So for the second week, you can increase the calories with another 200 to 2,600 calories. And just continue this until you gain half a kilo to a kilo. This way, we have started to find your optimal maintenance calories. And here you will recover faster, have more energy for your immune system and training and there will be less stress on your body. And since you now know how to lose weight and also find your maintenance calories, I will go through how to do a bulk. I plan to do a bulk four to five months each year so I can get the most out of my training during that period. I want to be the best athlete that I can be. So I want the best training sessions I can get and I also want the best recovery from each session. A bulk is a calorie surplus. It gives the body the extra energy it needs to be able to recover and train hard. And in the past, I thought I would need to eat a lot to get the benefit of a bulk. But I now know you just need around 300 to 500 calories extra every day to get the full effect of the bulk. So I would do a 300 calorie bulk. That is around roughly 9,000 calories every month. And as we talked about earlier, a kilo fat is roughly 7,700 calories. So that means if I train four to five months each year to get the most value and fastest progression in my training, I will gain four to five kilos of fat. And that is not a big bulk. And now that we also know how to lose fat, we can do a cut and be in prime shape for performance in under two months. And this is a cycle I will do each year moving forward.
And now we're on the final chapter. I want to talk about undereating. The stories I've heard through my time in climbing and also share my own experience with it 10 years ago. I know so many climbers that have been the same weight all their adult life telling me they have a hard time gaining muscle and even if they train hard in the gym, they don't see much results and they also feel that their progress is very slow and they kind of feel like oh this is, you know, I'm unlucky that genetically I'm like that. But then I asked them how much they eat and majority of the time they don't know actually. But they reassure me they eat enough because they feel good and they have good energy in the gym and they have progress in climbing even if it's very slow and they kind of say all of this not realizing what they're actually saying. They have had the same eating and training habits for years and they haven't tested to eat more and see how they feel. And most of the time these life choices are just because they're scared of gaining weight and they don't actually know what kind of life they're trading away because of that decision.
So, this is what I think most likely happened a few years ago. So, we can just use this example. In the beginning, when they started training many, many years ago, they burned 2,500 calories per day, but over time, they started to eat less and less and train more, and the body eventually started to lower their energy expenditure like what we covered earlier. So, they would just be like sitting around more, moving less, you know, be more sick more often, have less energy in general. As you mentioned like the body is trying to to make sure that the calorie deficit stop. All this was me 10 years ago. I like I chase to be like the leanest smallest most efficient climbing machine I could be. Like I was always sick. I had low energy. I could not deal with tension when I climbed. That required too much energy physically and mentally. So I just started campus everything. That became my style. And I thought that was my decision. But that wasn't really the case. Like my body made that decision for me. And this also meant that I never trained or reached my full potential. You know, maybe I was always at like 70% capacity and over time this 70% capacity uh became my new normal. And that's where I also measured my progress from. So that's how you think you could have good sessions, good energy in life, but over the years lose complete perspective of when actually is good or great. And you accept this is your new norm. And for a lot of climbers, this has been going on for 10 years. And this is why you're starting to hear more and more stories from climbers around the world that they started to eat more and they started to have crazy progress. And the reason is like they for the first time ever reached their full potential in training and they could sustain it for a longer period of time and that created these crazy results they had never seen before.
I hope this video has given you a clear picture of what you need to do in your weight loss journey. But I also hope it gives you as an athlete and a climber a better understanding of why eating more food is so important. I wanted to take away all the fear of gaining weight by showing you all the steps of how to lose weight so you have nothing to fear. I hope this video gets you psyched to give your body the right amount of fuel each day so you can train as hard as possible and reach your full potential. And I would like to ask for some help with this video. If you have gotten value out of this information and want more people to find this video, you can use the new function of hyping this video. This will have a big impact on the YouTube algorithm and how much it's promoting it to other people. I look forward to hearing about your progress in your weight loss journey. So, keep me updated in the comment section over the next months and years, and I will do my best to answer as many questions as possible each day. So, I want to say a big thank you for watching this video to the very end.