Transcription
How to lose belly fat in one week? My name is Michael Diamond, and in my first year of medical school, my primary goal was to finally get rid of my belly fat. I applied what I learned in medical school with my own research and managed to get into the shape of my life. At the time, I turned my small-time fitness hobby into my life passion, improving on my knowledge and applying science. I've taken my body through multiple transformations since, and over the past seven years, I've become a doctor. I've even stepped on stage and even won. Taking it a step further, I've helped hundreds of my clients achieve the same results, if not better, over the last three years.
But before we dive in, a lot of research and editing goes into making a video like this. I work my ass off. Just do me one favor, if you wouldn't mind, gently bless the like button. I'd greatly appreciate it. And if you enjoy this kind of content, subscribe and hit the notification bell if you're new. Let's kick it off.
You can't lose all your belly fat in one week. It's impossible to go from 30% body fat to 10% in one week or lose a tremendous amount of fat in that space of time. Fat loss is also not site-specific. You lose fat in a holistic fashion over time. This was my latest transformation in 2021. I lost 30-plus pounds between the two photos and almost seven months worth of dieting and training. Watch this video till the end, and I'll show you how to lose that belly fat for good with complete transparency. The reason I made this video is because if you search this title, the content out there is just false. My hope is someone who needs this help finds the right information so that they can be in a healthier position after watching this video.
Before we answer how to lose belly fat, let's answer how long it will take you to lose that belly fat. For the purpose of this video, I've used my scale reading of 24% at the start of my diet. I've left you a body fat percentage calculated in the description and the chart I'm about to use in this video. When you know what you're doing, getting a shredded midsection doesn't take nearly as much time or effort as you may think. The following chart breaks it down. This chart assumes an average of just one pound of fat loss per week, and it'll give you an accurate estimate on how long it will take for you to get rid of your belly fat and see that six-pack. The upper limit of the recommended rate of fat loss is two pounds per week, which would give you then half the time.
Here's how to use it:
1. Locate the column, the vertical division at the top, with your current body fat percentage.
2. If you're a woman, follow the column down until you hit an orange cell, and if you're a man, follow it down until you hit a yellow cell.
3. Number three, trace that row, there horizontal division, to the left-hand margin and look at the number, and that's approximately how many weeks it will take you to see your abs.
So, for example, let's say you're a guy currently sitting at 22% body fat. First, you find the column for a starting body fat percentage of 22%. Second, you follow that column down until you hit the yellow cell, and voila, you see that it's going to take you about 25 weeks to get that killer six-pack. I started at 24% body fat, which gives me roughly 29 to 30 weeks to see my abs according to the chart. However, this is at a rate of one pound per week. My rate of fat loss was two pounds per week, which would give me 15 weeks, and that is an accurate estimation.
Now that I've figured out how long, let's figure out how to.
So, step one: You've heard that the diet is the most important, so let's begin here. You need to be in a caloric deficit to lose weight. What that means is you need to eat less food than what your body needs or burn more calories through your activity than what you consume. Let me show you how to figure out your calories and macros the realistic way. To track your calories and more so your macros, use an app called MyFitnessPal. Any other way is a shot in the dark and it tends to be overcomplicated. It's super simple, so I'm going to show you how I use MyFitnessPal to build a diet and also to build the correct macros to be able to lose fat and build muscle.
Our main goal is to lose weight. I highly recommend you choose one pound per week. It's very tempting to want to choose two pounds per week because you want to get to your goal quicker. In my own experience, individuals tend to have a lot of repercussions with having such an aggressive caloric deficit. I highly recommend one pound per week. Awesome, and based on the data, it's giving me 2,280 calories, and that's going to put me in a caloric deficit at 2,280 calories.
Now we've figured out our calories. Now we want to figure out what our perfect macros are, and I'll go through my thought process in terms of setting up the best macros, and you can do the exact same. So, my general rule is I like to eat more than one gram per pound of body weight. So, if I'm 175 pounds, I want to eat between 175 and slightly above that to be able to maintain or even build muscle mass. 200, that's 35. I'm okay with that. And typically, when I choose fat, which is the next parameter, I like to choose between 20% and 25% of my total calories. So, I'm going to bring that down to 20%, and that gives me 51 grams of fat. I'm happy with that. And as you can see, we just need to balance things out, and we're going to reduce carbohydrates from 50% to 45%. And we're going to click check, and that is perfect.
You will see that your goal is to be able to get as close as possible to 200 grams of protein, get as close as possible to 257 carbs, and 51 grams of fat. In my experience, the individuals who hit these numbers the closest are the ones who tend to see more detail in their body. So, we don't want perfection, we just want progress. It's super easy. This is what I do. This is what a lot of individuals have done in terms of being able to make this transformation. I highly recommend trying MyFitnessPal out. Any other questions you have about it, leave it in the comment section down below, and I'll gladly answer.
Fundamentally, this is the most important step. Once you follow a diet, you need to do so consistently for the time you calculated in the beginning of the video. Once you're in a deficit, the amount of fat you lose totally depends on how long you spend in the deficit, your consistency, and finally, diligence. If you want me to show you the diet I ate, let me know in the comments down below. Just comment down below, "Mike, show me the diet," and I'll make that video happen.
Step 2: Resistance training. It is the driving force to body recomposition, meaning it's easy to lose fat by using the diet alone, but nearly impossible to build muscle without weight training. Weight training is paramount to building muscle and improving body composition. The goal is never to just lose weight; it's to lose as much fat as possible while retaining or building as much muscle mass at the same time. That being said, we want to build the best training plan that fits the following parameters: we want to take into consideration your experience in training, how often you want to train, and maximizing your muscle gain.
If you're a beginner, training three to four times a week is ideal, and doing a full-body split would maximize your gains, allowing adequate stimulation to your muscles for growth and enough time to recover from your workouts. If you fall between being an intermediate to an experienced trainee, you may be better suited to do a five-day or a six-day push-pull leg split. In my experience, focusing on your compound exercises such as your bench, deadlift, squat, and overhead press gives you the biggest bang for your buck.
What I want you to focus on:
1. Your form and technique. Here, we want to focus on how to execute the exercises without causing harm or injury to yourself and to attain maximum benefit.
2. Choose the heaviest weight you can to achieve the desired number of reps in each set without sacrificing your form.
3. Rest when performing compound movements like the bench, squat, deadlift, and overhead press. I normally take two to three minutes of rest between sets. With accessory exercises, one minute is enough. With ab exercises, I normally take about 20 seconds.
4. Record your weight. Progressive overload is when you gradually increase the weight, frequency, or the number of repetitions in your strength training routine. This challenges your body.
Now, let's move on into step three: Cardio. It's a great tool for fat loss. Without getting too deep into HIIT versus LISS, the main goal is to burn more calories. My best advice is to simply start walking. I like to start walking at 8,000 steps a day. The physical and mental benefits are life-changing. The following week or two weeks after, increase your steps, and over time, work your way to 13,000 steps, creeping increasing your steps by a thousand-step increments. I've personally gotten to as much as 20,000 steps per day for competition. As you keep seeing progress with the loss of your belly fat, you can control the rate of your fat loss with either decreasing your calories or increasing your overall expenditure through walking.
Step 4: Recovery. It is, in my own experience, if we truly want to achieve pure fat loss, we simply have to pay more attention to how much sleep we're getting. At this stage, we've heard the integral pieces of the puzzle: building muscle and losing fat, the diet, training, and cardio. But one piece of the puzzle which is possibly the biggest and unfortunately very underrated and can impact your composition success on an enormous scale is sleep. How much sleep do we need to build muscle to lose fat? The National Sleep Foundation recommends seven to nine hours of sleep per night for a young adult and adult seeking general health and well-being. Personally, I recommend anywhere from seven to eight hours of sleep to adequately provide enough rest for your body to recover and for your brain to function properly. To be clear, you can still achieve results with less sleep, but if you're in the game of optimization, we want to sleep eight hours.
Step 5: Supplementation. Although this plays a minor role in body recomposition, and without bias for a beginner, I'll mention most trial-and-tested supplements from examine.com.
1. Whey protein: It's a high-quality, well-absorbed source of protein that's very useful for hitting targeted daily protein goals. Its benefits extend to the benefits of increasing protein intake in general, such as augmenting muscle gain in conjunction with resistance training, limiting muscle loss during low-calorie diets, and modestly limiting fat gain during periods of excessive calorie intake. My personal favorites are the peanut butter flavors from Optimum Nutrition and IsoPro from EHPLabs. I've linked that in the description below, and using "DIAMONDS10" directly supports me.
2. Creatine: The primary benefit of creatine is an improvement in strength and power output during resistance training. For this purpose, creatine is well-researched, and the effects are quite notable for a supplement. When used in conjunction with resistance exercise, creatine may modestly increase lean muscle mass.
3. And finally, for me, pre-workout: Pre-workout supplements are extremely popular and are well-researched. They can contain a combination of ingredients that increase training volume, muscular endurance, improving blood flow to the muscles, and even enhances focus. For me, it's Pride from EHPLabs by far the best one I've used. If you do choose to purchase these supplements from EHPLabs, use my discount code "DIAMONDS10," that directly supports me, and I can promise their products are second to none.
I hope you enjoyed the video, and because you've stuck with me till the very end, I'm giving away three gift cards worth a hundred dollars each of either EHPLabs, Gymshark, or Alphalete. You're going to get to choose. All you need to do to enter the giveaway is:
1. Like the video.
2. Subscribe.
3. Comment down below answering or asking any of the questions that I asked earlier in the video.
That's all you need to do. I'm going to use a random generator to pick the three winners, so you all have an equal chance. So, good luck, and I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.