The smartest way to get lean this year

Let me level with you: If you want to look lean, athletic, muscular, and defined, you need to get your diet in order.  No matter how many hours you spend in the gym, lifting weights or doing cardio, your diet will still be the smartest lever you can pull to lose fat.

Even after all the muscle and the strength that I’ve built over the past few years, If I were to let my diet slide and regain a bunch of weight, I would restore fat all over my body and I wouldn’t look the way I do anymore. The love handles would come back, the belly fat would come back, my face fat, and the man boobs.

But I don’t do that because being lean feels amazing for me.  It’s also great for my health and it does wonders for my self confidence.  And honestly, when I first got into this whole fitness thing, looking like I was in shape and looking fit was a big motivation for me. I recall doing squats in my parent’s garage, and watching YouTube fitness channels like Elliot Hulse and Matt Ogus and just working out at the local rec center that smelled like a swimming pool.

Yeah, the self improvement stuff was cool and getting stronger excited me too, but I also just wanted to look lean.  I wanted to look like I lifted weights. I wanted to see my abs.

Ultimately, my diet was the main driver of my success there.  Yes, building muscle transformed my body, but until I figured out the diet thing, I never got as lean as I wanted to. And until this day, it continues to be the linchpin that holds together my physique. If I were to let that slide, I wouldn’t look like this anymore.

Look, building muscle is pretty straightforward.  Most guys can build a good chunk of muscle just following a basic simplified training plan.  If you get stronger over time on a few basic exercises and you push hard consistently in the gym, it is going to work. Most people actually are getting tripped on the diet side of things. Their lack of knowledge and inability to master their diet is what’s holding them back from accomplishing the physique they want.

The smartest way to get lean is by focusing on improving your diet. Here’s how I use ‘unsustainable’ fat loss diets to lose a serious chunk of body fat and why you should consider it, too.

The ‘Sustainable’ diet illusion

‘Your diet should be sustainable.’: It should be something that you can do for the long term. It should be a lifestyle you can adopt for the rest of your life. Otherwise, don’t do that new diet. That’s trendy. That’s sexy. That’s a very marketable thing to talk about.  But when it comes to real world fat loss dieting, it’s not practical.

That’s not going to get you very far. Effective fat loss dieting requires you to lose weight over time, over weeks and months. Any diet that helps you lose that weight is going to help you burn a big chunk of body fat, and weight loss is inherently unsustainable.

Think about it.

If I were to lose one to two pounds a week, I’m not going to do that for the rest of my life because my life is going to end in a year if I just keep doing that.  If I keep losing weight, I’ll starve to death. Fat loss is an inherently unsustainable process, and it’s not something you want to do for the long term. It’s something you do for 8, 12, 16 weeks or so.  You get in, you lose a bunch of weight, you lose a bunch of body fat, and then you call it. Then, you can eat at a maintenance level, which is far more sustainable.

Maintenance will give you plenty of calories to play with. Training is easier, you’ll sleep better, your mood will be better, and your energy levels will be better.  Now, that is sustainable. If you’re aiming to lose fat all the time, you’re doing it wrong.

Once you learn how to do it properly, fat loss is just a button you push.  There are no mysteries about how it works, or whether or not it’s working.  Have you ever been a week or two into a diet and thought:  “Oh my God, I can’t do this. I’m so hungry. There’s no way I could eat like this forever.”

You’re not alone and that’s the point.  It’s something that you do to alter the course of your body composition and send a meaningful signal to your body that it’s time to give up a good chunk of body fat. You don’t have to do it forever.  If you have those alarm bells going off saying, this is unsustainable, you can’t do this forever… That’s okay.  Just take a deep breath and realize that this is only something you’re doing for the short term because in a few weeks, you can just take your foot off the gas, bump your calories up by an additional 500 to 1000 per day.  That’s when you have all the flexibility in the world to go out on date nights and eat all the fun foods.

Don’t see it as a temporary detour

In reality, if you were to just be on your regular eating freeway, you can take a detour for 8 to 16 weeks where you lose a good chunk of fat, you get back on the same freeway you were on before, except now you’re 10, 15, 20 pounds lighter, and you just keep living life as you were.

Build healthy long term habits is a great idea. 

Eating lots of fruits and veggies, being active, sleeping more, and training with weights. All those things are great. But dieting for fat loss is not a long term habit. Anything will work.  If you want to do keto, carnivore, paleo, grain-free, or you want to just eat a healthy diet… any of those will work. Because all those diets use one key factor that makes them successful.

Tackle your calorie balance. 

Diets that force you (or at least encourage you) to eat fewer and fewer calories each day than you burn, they work. And that calorie deficit is ultimately what’s going to drive your fat loss progress. You just need to find a style of eating that you can stick to for a short to medium term.

Use any diet you want to help you lose weight.  But no matter what type of diet you try, track your calorie intake. That’s going to be the biggest factor in whether or not you’re losing weight or not.

Tracking is simple

And it gives you another layer of flexibility. Let’s say you’re eating keto, but one day you’re craving carbs like crazy.  Well, guess what?  You can still eat some carbs.  And as long as you stay within your calorie goals for the day, you’re still going to lose fat that day.

By tracking calories, you start to see behind the curtain. You see that for weight loss, it’s more important to focus on how much total food you’re eating than which types of foods you’re eating.

That’s a liberating idea.  It shows you that anything can work as long as you get your total food intake under control. So stop worrying about which diet is best for you, whether you should do this one or that one. As long as you can stick to a diet that helps you bring your calories under control for something like 2 months to 4 months, that’s going to be a super effective fat loss diet for you.

Then go back to eating at a maintenance level where you have all the flexibility in the world. Most people are able to eat a lot of food and maintain their weight. About 15 times your body weight in pounds as a calorie goal will likely lead to weight maintenance for you. Some more active guys may even be higher than that.

So for a 160 pound man, that’s 2400 calories and that is a lot of food. If you have a relatively nutritious breakfast and a healthy lunch, you can still work in a crazy amount of calories for dinner and get away with it, while maintaining your weight. That’s where all the sustainability and fun and long term lifestyle stuff starts to shine.  Yes, maintenance is amazing. Training feels good. Sleep is good. You’re not putting your foot on the gas to tell your body to change.

But, until you send that solid signal and say, look, it’s time to lose fat, you’re going to keep spinning your wheels.

Matteo Marra is a Squamish-based personal trainer who helps busy people lose fat and build muscle with a simplified approach.  As a formerly overweight short-order cook, he’s learned that nutrition and training can upgrade your life. Visit marrastrength.com to know more about him or see his YouTube channel for videos on health and fitness.