The Smartest Way To Get Lean (Shredding Science Explained)

so in this video i'm asking five highly qualified nutrition experts about the most effective science-based strategies for losing body fat no matter how you slice it uh the relapse statistics are still pretty bad i don't want you to get too hungry i don't want you to get too full while none of these strategies are incorrect necessarily they're also not required uh stuff that does in fact increase energy expenditure eventually they will come off of that stubborn area your body has to pull it from somewhere eventually so to get everyone on the same page first i

spoke with dr eric helms about the fat loss fundamentals eric has published a ton of science-based papers in peer-reviewed journals including recommendations for physique athletes protein intakes during caloric restriction and even binge eating behavior so he started out by reminding me that on a physiological level fat loss is very well understood and actually quite simple yep so fat loss comes from an energy deficit so consuming less calories than you need to maintain weight real briefly you can technically see your body fat percentage go down eating at maintenance while you gain muscle and you could possibly

even like if you had a really strong stimulus to gain weight maybe lose or gain muscle i should say maybe lose fat in a small surplus perhaps but energetically you need to be an energy deficit and on our call eric emphasized that it isn't enough to just lose weight we want to lose as much of that weight from fat as possible and as little of that weight from muscle as possible and to help us do that he laid out five keys for maximizing fat loss while preventing muscle loss and i'll do these in order of

importance so one is got to have the energy deficit uh the second thing is well how do we know that what we're going to lose is fat and the best way to do that is to stimulate muscle to stay so that is progressive resistance exercise so that's the the best tool we have after that the next most important thing is making sure that the size of the deficit is appropriate a good general rule of thumb is somewhere between 0.5 to as much as 1.5 of your body weight but i wouldn't use that higher end unless

you are pretty high in body fat after that you probably want to have a sufficient protein intake a good rule of thumb is i would say higher than 2 grams per kg and if you are someone very high in body fat quick rule of thumb that normally puts you in the right range so you're not over consuming based on your lean mass is to use your centimeters in height that typically scales pretty well for most people and then finally the thing i'd mention is an appropriate volume of cardio so you don't want to completely get

your deficit from it and modality and timing is important here so not right before training and you don't want something that has a ton of high impact or eccentric components so a lot of running would probably be not the main choice decent rule of thumb is make sure that your volume of cardio is no more than half of your volume of resistance training which is something i pulled out of my butt but it's a decent line in the sand and to make it slightly more specific eric suggested doing no more than 30 minutes of low

intensity cardio per day and no more than one to two high intensity interval sessions per week again assuming you're trying to prevent muscle loss as much as possible so with the most important variables in place next i ask eric about the different types of foods we should eat there are some foods simply better than others when it comes to fat loss a lot of people especially in the mainstream will obsess over the types of foods they're eating like people seem to think these foods are better for fat loss and these foods are worse for fat

loss where do you stand on the it really comes down to hitting the macros versus there really are some foods that are inherently more fat burning than others both of those statements can be true in the right context so it does just come down to macros however there is some data that suggests highly processed foods have a lower tef so the thermic effect so the energy output side would be lower but it would just come down to lowering your macros even more so it still always comes down to energy balance it also comes down to

do you want to make your fat loss process easier to follow and less likely to rebound or do you just care about getting lean for a temporary time period if it's the latter and you just don't care about white-knuckling it then yeah you could just lower the deficit track your macros not worry about it and have some semblance of variety to make sure you're covering your micronutrient basis but that's not most people if they really think about it so i would say for enhancing satiety preserving energy output and general control of hunger signaling you probably

want to consume mostly single ingredient food items and not eating a lot of hyperpalatable foods but there is a balance to be had there to where you don't want to make these foods off limits you need to have your adult card that's the way you like to put it like if someone says you're not allowed to have this anymore the natural rebellious teenager comes out so you need to feel like i'm making a conscious choice i'm a part of these aren't hard rules this isn't a black and white approach but most my meals are going

to be fruits vegetables lean proteins and a carb source and then if i feel like it if i really want to and it would help me actually follow my diet sure i'll have a snack or a treat and i'll work it in so after eric laid out the fat loss fundamentals next i spoke with someone who's extremely specialized in getting people absolutely shredded cliff wilson is one of the best natural bodybuilding coaches on the planet his clients have won 125 pro cards 87 professional titles and 13 world championships in natural bodybuilding and i wanted to

get him on to ask what the difference is between getting beach lean and getting ultra shredded for a competition i would classify beechling as slightly six-pack abs versus you know just absolutely shredded um a lot of what gets you there is the same it's just the degree to which you do it you can be a little inconsistent and still get beach lean but you can't really be inconsistent and get completely shredded because every competitor you know when they start start their diet for a show they at one point reach beach lean and then you just

keep going so i would say the duration of the diet is probably the single biggest factor along with the degree to which you are diligent now i should say that cliff noted that he wouldn't necessarily recommend that you try to get this lien especially if your main goal is to improve your health and he agreed that getting truly shredded isn't even a sustainable goal for most people but i did find it interesting that even in these extreme cases of fat loss it still ultimately just boils down to the same fundamental principles that eric helms laid

out you just push them a bit further and for longer but one thing i was curious about was stubborn fat are there any tricks for losing that last bit of fat off body parts that just won't seem to let go i would say there's two things first off generally the more developed a muscle group is it will look leaner because if you have a given amount of fat in a particular area like if i hold more fat in my shoulders which some people do if i build more muscle in my shoulders that same amount of

body fat will be spread across a larger area so you will look leaner it's one of the reasons more muscular people tend to look leaner in general but beyond that stubborn body fat is largely going to be determined by genetics and gender and things like that so i would say that if everything leans out first except for your stubborn area if you continue to diet eventually they will come off of that stubborn area your body has to pull it from somewhere eventually right one thing that i've noticed with this is sometimes you might have someone

let's just say it's a guy who just can't get the lower abs to show like there's always a little bit of a little bit of lower back fat that won't come off and we can keep dieting them but at a certain point it almost seems like they just start really stringing out or they're i don't know if they're losing muscle but it's like they're just so zapped of energy how do you deal with that situation that's a tough one as a coach usually what will happen is once you start to tap into that that stubborn

body fat um you've typically reached the point of significant discomfort people who have gotten to that level for the first time they're probably going to get a little bit stringier than somebody who's never gotten to that level because at the risk of sounding you know engaging in hyperbole it's very traumatic to sometimes try to get that stubborn body fat off for the first time and so you are almost bound to lose the muscle mass you've probably seen this with competitors over the years or even with yourself then the next time you try to do it

again it's almost like you're mentally and physically prepared for what you're going to engage in and then you can get it off the second and third time without is being as traumatic either mentally or physically right right that's super well said okay great so after talking to cliff about some intelligent ways to get completely diced for a competition next i wanted to speak with someone who's more focused on sustainable approaches to fat loss so i got sports nutritionist so he lee on the line who did her master's thesis on the psychology of eating behavior she

explained a few of the biggest mental roadblocks people run into and some of her best tips for women well i think generally speaking men and women tend to make a lot of the same mistakes but what i see a lot happening a lot maybe i see it more in women because i work primarily with women but what i've seen is that they don't want to hear about a more moderate strategy that they can utilize for their plan they want to hear cut out these entire food groups you can't eat dairy you have to go keto

try intermittent fasting and as you know while none of these strategies are incorrect necessarily they're also not required in order to see fat loss progress and i made this mistake to myself for many many years where i focus more on what i thought was the perfect plan on paper but i didn't consider my current lifestyle and my current preferences and what would actually be feasible for me to consistently execute day after day after day so what happened was very common where you get very excited in the beginning and this is a very common psychology mistake

that people make where they rely too much on motivation in the beginning they underestimate how difficult some journey will actually be and then one weekend two weeks and three weeks in they quit and then they're on to the next thing right and i think we call it shiny object syndrome so they're always looking for the next fad diet the next cool thing that sounds interesting rather than oh well what tweaks can i make to my current lifestyle to nudge me in the right direction over time and throughout our conversations so he emphasized how important it

is to create repeatable habits so you don't need to be so reliant on self-control for every decision about food so there's always this idea that if you want something you have to just try harder right or if you fail on your goal it's because you didn't have enough self-control the research consistently shows that self-control is very very helpful in the initial formation of habits but it should not be utilized as a ongoing strategy for long-term behavior change and the key feature of a habit unlike self-control it does not require cognitive effort for the habit to

take place so if we go into your kitchen or your home environment your work environment wherever you spend a lot of time are there things we can change around to make maybe the higher calorie the more calorie dense foods more annoying to access right if i put it at the top of your pantry way in the back chances are your intake is going to drop substantially because you're not going to be bothered to go that extra effort we call this designing for laziness and i like to say humans are lazy by default and how can

we use that to our advantage another example um this and this is called a choice architecture intervention let's say you're at work on your desk there's a clear bowl of i don't know m ms or skittles or something and within arm's reach right so it's visible it's close it's very easy to access but if you were to let's say put the candy in an opaque container or put a lid on it or move it farther away so i have to stand up and walk over or simply put it in a drawer out of sight my

intake will drastically go down again without my really conscientiously realizing that it's happening and many of the points so he made were supported on my next call with dr lane norton who also has a competitive background but has focused more of his published work lately toward understanding why well over half of diets fail and what we can do to help people keep the weight off once they've lost it there's no one diet that pops out as hey the mediterranean diet was best or hey low carb was best or hey plant-based was best because if you

equate them for calories then all the diets do about the same and a lot of that is that dietary adherence is pretty terrible across the board no matter how you slice it the relapse statistics are still pretty bad the more people regain it than keep it off but despite the fact that weight maintenance is a challenge for many people lane has identified the five most common weight maintenance strategies used by people who were successful with long-term weight loss what we do see is these habits and behaviors and the first one and the most common one

is that these people practice some form of cognitive restraint so that can be in the form of calorie counting it can be in the form of i'm not eating past a certain hour or i'm not eating before a certain hour so time restricted eating points like with weight watchers or carb restriction or fat restriction there's there's any number of ways that you can restrict your dietary intake another one that may be a little bit surprising to people is people who lose weight keep it off tend to self-monitor quite regularly meaning they weigh themselves pretty often

i don't want to become dogmatic about that point i'm not saying you can't lose weight and keep it off if you're not weighing yourself regularly but what that does do is it provides feedback and i'm not talking about like a day-to-day fluctuation because people get too wrapped up in that but if over the course of weeks and months you see that scale going up then you can correct for that and then a third point is not surprising which is regular exercise probably the major reason is there's good evidence that exercise sensitizes you to satiety signals

and then some smaller points that bubble up as well as people tend to use structured programs when they have success at kind of the highest level you know it's like hiring a nutrition coach or a dietitian but even like people people make fun of things like weight watchers or jenny craig or a nutrisystem or whatever but those people on average do perform better because just kind of winging it with no plan doesn't usually work out very well and then something i thought was interesting in a recent study they found that the strongest characteristic in this

particular study that was associated with weight loss maintenance was what's called low recency basically do you value long-term data more than short-term data a very easy example of that would be well i really want to eat this donut right now because i know it'll make me feel good but if that doesn't fit you know your daily caloric requirement okay do i value feeling good right now more than i value wanting to get to my goal so those people with low recency would choose the long-term goal over the short term feeling lane also explained that even

though it will require some restraint you should be able to maintain your weight loss by eating more calories than you were eating while losing the weight so once you reach your goal weight you can start to increase your calories to a higher intake and gradually if you build the habits and behaviors we've been outlining it should start to feel less and less restrictive over time for me i struggled with dietary adherence when i first got into bodybuilding until i switched to a more flexible dieting approach and just the fact that i knew i could eat

what i wanted so long as it fit my macros i had no problems with adherence after that it feels easy i continue to do it to this day it doesn't give me hardly any stress but there are some people for them tracking macros is extremely stressful you know i've heard from some people who say you know i tried tracking macros i hated it i did low carb and that feels easy to me and so what i would say to people is find the method of restriction that feels the least restrictive for you as an individual

but also don't assume that what feels easy for you will also feel easy for somebody else because i've also made that mistake as well and last but not least i wanted to have an expert on supplements set the record straight about fat burners dr eric trexler has published a whole lot of papers on a variety of different supplements including caffeine creatine omega-3s and plenty more and in our chat he outlined the different types of fat burners that look good in theory and whether or not any of them are actually worth using you know there are

plenty of types of supplements out there that are marketed for fat loss so supplements that are supposed to enhance fat oxidation things like carnitine and cla stuff that does in fact increase energy expenditure caffeine capsaicin ephedrine yohimbine stuff like that you'll also see things that are marketed as kind of hunger reducers so most anything that's marketed as a thermogenic will also typically impact hunger but then you've got other stuff like ginger and 5 htp and then there's also stuff that's marketed as kind of nutrient blockers so things that modify or block the absorption of fat

or carbohydrate and so all of those on paper sound great but the problem is they all have some kind of flaw for things like caffeine you worry about if i try to use this consistently will i habituate to it there are some on that list that just have quality control issues like yohimbine some have side effects like yohimbine and ephedrine and there there of course are some nutrient blockers that work too well and cause really uh unfavorable gi distress and then for most of them the issue is that there's just a lack of really strong

conclusive evidence and most of the ones that have been really well studied you'll find that you could achieve what they do with much easier more affordable methods so let's let's put it all together now like someone comes to you and they're like i want to lose fat what supplements do i take are there any that you really would recommend to them my recommendations would be the same for whether they're doing a fat loss phase or not so i would still say like yeah there are some supplements that can help you during your fat loss phase

that they just don't cause fat loss right so things like creatine monohydrate whey protein if you're not getting enough protein through your food because high protein diets are fantastic for fat loss goals when we're on a weight loss diet sometimes it's hard we will restrict fat and it's hard to get essential fatty acids into the diet and so fish oil could be a really good a really good option there there might be some vitamins or minerals that that we're getting less of when we start reducing food intake so it's another good reason why you might

consider taking a multivitamin or even a vitamin d supplement as well and before we wrap it up i do want to direct you guys to a few things that i think you'll find helpful when it comes to your own fat loss plan first i've linked a few amazing resources that my guests have to offer down below whether it be a tracking app an ebook or some other content i also have an ebook called the ultimate guide to body recomposition which outlines exactly how to set up your diet whether your main goal is to lose fat

build muscle or do both equally at the same time and i'd encourage you guys to all go follow my guests on the respective platforms they all put out great science-based content so i'll have all that linked down below as well so don't forget to leave the video a thumbs up if you guys enjoyed it subscribe if you haven't already and i'll see you guys all here in the next one