Transcription
All right, what is going on everyone? So, still being so early here in the New Year, I figured now would be a good time for me to sit down and do a quick video on fat loss and lay out a few of my favorite fat loss strategies that don't require that you actually track macros or follow a strict diet.
Because I would imagine many of you have probably started a new diet or some new macros here in the New Year, and while I hope many of you are able to follow through and stick to the diet and get to your goal, I also know that many of you will in fact fail with your diet and not get to your goal. A classic study on New Year's resolutions out at the University of Scranton asked 213 adults about their New Year's resolution success. The most common resolutions were smoking cessation and weight loss, and by the end of the first week, only 77 percent of people were still succeeding with their resolution. By one month, so February, that was down to 55 percent, and after two years, only 19% of people had actually followed through.
So anyway, hopefully, we can skew those numbers up a bit here with these four tips that focus on dieting behavior, not the diet itself. So you can apply them to whatever diet it is that you're on, or even if you're not following a diet or tracking macros at all.
Now, first, I want to start with a quick review of what I would consider to be the three pillars of positive body composition change. And I say body composition change here rather than just weight loss because I think what we really want to do is lose fat while maintaining or building muscle. So every diet that works at getting you the body that you want will follow these three things: You need to be in a caloric deficit to lose fat. We need to eat high enough protein to keep or build muscle. And you need to train with weights to keep or build muscle.
Now, there are a few exceptions to these rules, such as if you're using anabolic steroids. And I've talked about body recomposition in other videos, showing that it certainly is possible to build muscle in a caloric deficit. But for our practical purposes here, if your main goal is to lose fat, and I think you're gonna want to be in a caloric deficit. And I would say even at the very high level, say getting like something below 10% for men and 18% for women.
Now, you really just need to follow these three things. I would say things like diet breaks and refeeds can help you stick to the caloric deficit for longer, but it really does just come back to a caloric deficit for fat loss and protein plus weight training for muscle. A 2014 meta-analysis looked at 48 randomized controlled trials on 10 popular diets, including Atkins, South Beach, Jenny Craig, etc., and the authors concluded that the differences were small and unimportant. And because people respond differently to different diets, the ideal diet is the one that is best at here tubes that they can stay on the diet as long as possible.
Now, that isn't to say that some diets aren't better than others for other reasons, like overall health or dietary adherence. But when it comes to losing fat and maintaining or building muscle, for every diet and macro breakdown that's out there, that really does come back to those three pillars. So on paper, it sounds pretty simple. You just gotta pick a diet and then actually stick to it. But when putting that information into practice, your brain can start to interfere in all sorts of ways, which brings me to my four tips.
So the first tip here is a bit more unorthodox. You may not have heard of it before, and it won't work for everyone, now, but I do think it's a cool strategy. And the idea here is to rotate carbs and fats at each meal. So, for example, let's say you eat four meals per day. In meal one, you eat protein and carbs with minimal fats. In meal two, you'd eat protein and fats with minimal carbs. Then in meal three, you do protein and carbs again, and meal four, protein and fats again. And there's nothing magic about this macronutrient distribution, but it will probably quite easily restrict the number of calories that you actually eat, since it is most often the combination of carbs and fats that makes food so much more palatable and easier to overconsume. So if you separate carbs and fats at meals, that'll probably make it much harder for you to overeat. And if you never tried this before, you can give it a shot and see if it works for you.
So the second tip is going to be to increase periods of fasting between meals or before your first meal. And in my coaching experience, I have found that breakfast skipping or fasting longer between meals is really effective for many people when it comes to reducing their total daily food intake. This won't work for everyone. Some people may skip breakfast and then be so hungry later in the day that they just end up overcompensating. So it will be individual, but it is an option. And there is scientific evidence to suggest that if you reduce the timeframe in which you can eat, even by just a few hours, that can lead to a caloric deficit, even in the absence of conscious dieting. A new 2018 pilot study reduced the eating window to eight hours every day in 23 obese adults. So they started eating at 10 a.m. and then stopped eating by 6 p.m. And as you can see here in the graph, they lost about 3% body weight in the 12 weeks compared to controls, which just ate as normal.
So yeah, I wouldn't say that it's amazing weight loss by any standard, but considering that they weren't tracking their macros or dieting or really restricting anything but their feed and window, I would say that this data does suggest that time-restricted eating is a pretty solid strategy, especially if you combine it with intentional weight loss strategies like the ones we're discussing here.
Okay, so tip number 3 is to reduce or eliminate liquid calories altogether. This was highlighted in a more interesting paper I've read recently, which looked at the effect of viscosity or thickness on food intake. So they had 108 subjects and go to the movie theater and watch three romantic comedies on three separate occasions. Each time, they were given either a liquid, semi-liquid, or semi-solid chocolaty drink and allowed to drink as much as they want. Now, all three drinks were similar in caloric content and taste, but subjects drank 30% more of the more liquid drink than a semi-solid drink. This led the authors to conclude that the consumption rate of liquids is much higher than that of solids. So limiting your intake of liquid calories could actually be pretty helpful if your goal is fat loss, especially if you're not tracking macros or following a diet, since as this research shows, it is much easier to overconsume on liquid calories than solid calories.
And the fourth and final tip that we've all probably heard before here, it actually does have quite a bit of science to back it up, is to simply eat out less often. A 2016 study by Urban Atholl found that restaurant meals in the U.S. contained about 1200 and 5 calories on average. Of course, there was a large range depending on the meal, from 113 to 3008 calories as well. It certainly is possible to make healthier, less fattening choices when eating out, but that 1205 calorie average does really point toward just how large restaurant portion sizes can be, especially in the States. And people are also notoriously bad at guessing the caloric content of meals. And the more calorie-dense the meal is, the more they tend to underestimate the true caloric value. There is this very well-established bias to think you're eating fewer calories than you actually are. And then, by the same token, that isn't to say that you can't or shouldn't go out to eat at all, but if you were to simply reduce the number of times that you go to eat in the week, that simple behavior change on its own could actually have a significant impact on reducing your total weekly energy intake.
Okay, so those are my four tips for fat loss without following a diet or needing to track macros. You just want to keep in mind that none of these things are required for fat loss, but can be used as simple behavioral tools to make maintaining a caloric deficit a little bit easier without having to be excessively restrictive or even really consciously dieting.
Now, that's all that I have for this one, guys. Thank you so much for watching, and I hope that you guys really get on your way with your New Year's resolutions and fat loss goals. If you found this video to be helpful, please leave me a thumbs up. Don't forget to subscribe to the channel, and I'll see you guys all here in the next video.