Dieting 101: What you need to know
Definitions
Caloric surplus - Eating more calories than you are burning in a day. Leads to muscle and/or fat gain.
Maintenance calories - Eating the same amount of calories as you are burning in a day. Does not change body weight.
Caloric deficit - Eating fewer calories than you are burning in a day. Leads to fat and/or muscle loss.
A marathon, not a sprint
It's very tempting to try get the results you want as quickly as possible, and many fad diets claim to be able to help you drop weight in record time and transform your body. The reality is that dieting isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon and it takes time and planning to be successful. Aggressive dieting won't get you the results you want as it will increase the negative side effects of dieting and make it exponentially more difficult to sustain long enough for you to get the results that you want. We have already done an article on the basics of weight loss, but today we’re giving some actionable tips and try to debunk some common weight loss myths while we’re at it.
Calories in, calories out
A quick refresher: To change your body composition (how much muscle and fat you have) there needs to be an imbalance in your energy balance, your body needs a certain amount of calories each day to fuel all the processes that keep you alive as well as meet your daily activity levels. If calories in is equal to the calories out, then no weight change will occur (known as your maintenance calories or an isocaloric diet).
If your energy needs are exceeding your energy intake, (a calorie deficit) over time you will lose weight either in the form of fat or muscle and if the opposite is occurring and your energy intake is greater than your energy needs, you will gain weight (a calorie surplus). Keep in mind there are some important caveats to this process*
Dieting will always be more difficult than eating whatever you want, but it doesn’t need to suck.
*Weight change caveats
It can be easy to think of these concepts as a black and white state; you either need to be in a deficit to lose fat, or you need to be in a surplus to gain muscle but it’s not as simple as that. While it’s true no weight change will occur without a prolonged period of these, body composition changes can still occur within them.
As covered in an earlier article, you can still gain muscle and lose fat during a deficit, which doesn’t intuitively make sense but this isn’t violating the laws of thermodynamics; the amount of muscle gained never exceeds the amount of fat lost (and given that fat is more calorie dense than protein, 9kcal/g vs 4kcal/g this makes sense, the fat lost is being used as energy to drive muscle growth)
While you CAN gain muscle and lose fat at the same in a deficit, you won’t gain as much muscle as if you were in a surplus which is why specific ‘massing’ periods dedicated to being in a moderate caloric surplus for 3-6 months is optimal for muscle gain
The fat loss toolbox
The most important step to a successful diet is knowing what you’re putting in your body, and tracking what you eat is an incredibly powerful tool in your fat loss toolbox. If you are brand new to dieting and wanting to start with the basics, it’s important to figure out a baseline for your eating habits using a food diary. The sooner you write down what you ate the better, as it can be easy to misremember, or forget what you ate or drank when keeping track retrospectively.
When starting out, simply keeping a food diary to get an idea of your eating habits can be very useful, but to optimise your progress it’s important to start tracking your calories. Why is it important to count your calories rather than eyeballing your foods or doing intuitive eating*? Study after study has shown that we are consistently terrible at estimating the calorie contents of foods, often over or underestimating how much is actually in them. It is also very easy to incorrectly guess portion sizes, or have the wrong idea of how big a portion size is, as it can be easy to be getting far more calories in than you realise (Example being peanut butter, an overly large tablespoon can easily net you another 100 calories).
When to count calories
As this is the most accurate and objective way to help you calculate how many calories you’re actually getting, any time you are able to measure, or calculate the calorie intake of your food is ideal. Keeping track of the ingredients and using apps like myfitnesspal can be helpful tools for this
When to guestimate
If you are brand new to trying to examining your diet, if you don’t have any choice (i.e at a restaurant where they don’t show calories) or if it is a food you are very familiar with (i.e cooked chicken breast with veggies). It is often better to overestimate the amount of calories as you can never be fully sure, they may have been extra oil used to cook etc.
*Intuitive eating is a potential approach to weight loss, but this approach seems to only be effective in those who are already very in tune with their hunger cues, general energy needs and activity level. The reality is most people have been intuitively eating for their whole life and that’s what caused their weight gain in the first place, our own physiology tends to try skew us towards consuming the most palatable foods, which tend to be those higher in calories to begin with.
Four steps to diet success
Step 1 - Figure out your baseline
Before you’ve even started to change your diet it’s important to know what your starting point is, measure your weight under as similar conditions as possible either daily (i.e naked, first thing in the morning), or several times a week to figure out your average weight. This is your starting point.
Step 2 - What is your current intake
As accurately as you can, figure out what your diet currently looks like, calculate the calories in your day-to-day diet and compare you calorie intake with the number on the scale. If you take a two-week average of your body weight, is your body weight going up, down or staying the same? Which way it’s heading lets you know if you’re currently eating in a surplus, maintenance or deficit.
Step 3 - Calculate your deficit
The most important step, calculating what your calorie intake should be on a daily basis to lose weight. You can use the tools found here to calculate your current energy intake, and compare it to your finding from step 2, as the calculators are good for estimates but lifestyle habits can change your energy intake. Aim for between a 250-500 calorie deficit to begin with, erring on the lower side if you are uncertain, you can always adjust it later.
Step 4 - Calculate diet length
It’s important to have an end goal in mind, as well as creating your diet with a realistic time point.
For those wanting to lose a significant amount of body fat (>20% BF for men, 30% for women) then aiming to lose .5kg per week for up to 12 weeks, followed by 4 weeks of eating at maintenance is ideal. If you are not at your ideal body fat %, then simply repeat the cycle after your maintenance.
If you do not have a significant amount of body fat (<20% BF for men 30% for women) and are planning on doing a massing phase after then a shorter diet, known as a mini-cut, between 2-6 weeks is ideal, aiming to lose between ~-.5-1kg of body fat per week followed by 2-4 weeks of maintenance.
Step 5 - Consistency
While the number on the scale is a very useful tool for tracking your weight loss over time, diet consistency, or how consistently you are eating the amount of calories you are aiming for is far more important as there are several factors that can make the number on the scale unreliable.
Weight fluctuations
Hydration: Your general hydration can vary your weight day by day if your water intake is not consistent
Salt: Changes in sodium intake can cause your body to retain or excrete far more water depending on how much you are having. If intake remains consistent, then water retention from sodium will remain stable.
Stress: Dieting is a stressful process for the body, and causes an increase in cortisol which causes your body to retain water weight, which can make it seem like you’re not losing fat because the number on the scale isn’t budging. This can cause some people to go into an ever-greater deficit because they think they’re not losing fat which ironically causes more cortisol, and greater water retention. Commonly this water weight is dropped suddenly, often overnight, which can cause up to several kg changes in weight, seemingly out of the blue.
It’s important to note that these three factors are all transient and do NOT mean you aren’t losing body fat, however if you calculate your two-week average for your weight and it is not trending downwards, then you need to either
a) Adjust your calories (no more than a 250 calorie decrease)
b) Increase your energy expenditure (cardio)
c) Re-examine your diet to see if there are any ways that you are accidentally getting in more calories than you thought
Diets that work tend to share a lot of the same characteristics
They don't eliminate foods you like completely but tend to look for lower calorie alternatives
They build healthy habits and promote the majority of your calorie intake from nutrient dense foods (fruits, veggies, lean meats etc) and are most importantly sustainable long term
They don't cut calories too aggressively and promote a rate of weight loss about 0.5% of your body weight per week (around 0.5kg-1kg per week)
Achieve the majority of the calorie deficit through less calories from food, not exercise (although exercise is a very good thing to supplement your weight loss with, it shouldn't be the main driver)
Training and muscle loss during a diet
A common worry for weightlifters is fear of losing their hard-earned muscle when they do start dieting. Evidence is showing that while the fear of losing muscle during a cut isn't unfounded, it's unlikely to happen, at least to a significant amount if the right environment is created with the most important factor to minimise your risk of muscle loss being resistance training, with maintenance being the main goal. The longer the diet, and the more aggressive the deficit the greater the risk of negative side effects associated with dieting goes up.
Muscle loss has been shown to be minimal, or non-existence, during a diet if:
a) Regular resistance training is kept up (minimum 3x week), at a volume that is above your maintenance volume (MV), (usually training between MV and your minimum affective volume (MAV) is the sweet spot)
b) The deficit is moderate and does not exceed losing 1% of body mass lost per week
c) Maintenance phases are used if the diet is prolonged, taking ~4 weeks of maintenance after every 12 weeks of cutting can be an excellent buffer against muscle loss, as well as helping dissipate accumulated diet fatigue
Take away points
If you want to lose body fat, you need to be in a sustained caloric deficit (Eating less calories than you are burning in a day)
A diet needs to be sustainable to work - Losing weight takes time and trying to brute force your way through a diet will likely lead to burnout and a cycle of yo-yo dieting.
Track your progress - You need to set a baseline and track your weight over time, if you aren’t measuring then you have no objective way of seeing if you’re progressing
While your body has an incredibly complicated and multifaceted metabolism with many moving parts, as long as you are doing the key principles of weight loss correctly, you will lose weight over time