How to Lose Body Fat the Right Way

A 10-Point Checklist to Get You Started

Aug 07, 2024

a man holding his stomach with his hands — Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

In the previous article, I described why it’s important to eat consistently. ICYMI, the short of it is that, if you consistently undereat by a large degree—and not even sequentially, like day-to-day, but if you do it enough non-consecutively—your body will pull much of its energy requirements from body tissues.

Consider bodybuilders. They get on stage absolutely peeled, having maintained their muscle, muscle which they also spent years developing. It’s no easy feat. It takes consistency and patience. You have to diet slowly to get to that point. If you go too hard too fast, it’s bye-bye muscle. It took me a long time to understand this myself, and I had to diet down the wrong way in order for it to really sink in.

This gets to the kernel about some problems with prolonged fasting. We could all stop eating for three days and lose a few pounds, but most of that will be lean tissue, so we’d look worse at the end of it—a lot less muscle and a little bit less fat. Even if you have no desire to be a bodybuilder, we all want to burn the fat and keep the muscle. (I have oodles to say about fasting, but that’ll be another conversation.)

So, how to lose body fat the right way?

These are broad strokes, and I am way oversimplifying this process, but this is still a sound starting point.

Find your maintenance energy requirements. There are some crazy smart and hardworking people who dedicated their professional lives and careers to creating equations to estimate these numbers. Some popular equations: the Harris-Benedict; the Cunningham; the Katch-McArdle; the Schoefield. These calculate basal metabolic rates (BMRs)—your metabolic base, that is, how much energy you burn just as a living organism.
However, BMR is not your target. You want to use search for and use a calculator that starts with these calculations and then adds your typical daily activity, so look for a Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) calculator; again, a TDEE calculator starts with these BMR calculations and then multiplies an activity factor to it. The calculator will prompt you for an estimate. If you are sedentary, you might select for the lowest multiplier, something like 1.1. The activity factor can really make a difference, so be honest here.
Once you find your maintenance energy, you’ll have to make sure you’re eating at that level. If you’re new to tracking energy, you’ll probably need to track on a food-tracking app, like MyFitnessPal or Chronometer (which are both free—there are others that you can pay for). This is a skill, and it becomes second nature after a short time. Just go with it for a bit. You need to see how the foods you eat correlate to your overall energy intake.
If you’re starting, don’t go too crazy. If you feel comfortable with getting a little more detailed, consider getting a digital food scale, and start weighing your food. Weighing your food and understanding what it looks like and how that translates into calories, in my opinion, will educate you more than anything on how to be mindful of your foods, selections, quantities, and food energy densities.
You know your maintenance; you know your TDEE. You know how much you theoretically need to in order to maintain weight. Hopefully, you’ve got a solid baseline in place. This is your homebase, but you might need to clean it up a bit, so now comes food selection and building meals and a menu that works for you. You want to focus on balancing satiety and satisfaction with palatability with the energy you’ve got to work with. Ideally, you want to choose foods that give you the most satiety bang for your energy buck—unprocessed and minimally processed whole foods. Processed foods will blow through your calories like a swarm of dinosaurs running through sandcastles, leaving you hungry and unsatisfied, and worst of all, grumpy. Still, if you can and want to work in some processed foods, that’s perfectly fine. These should not make up the foundation, but they’re fine as the figurative icing.
Now, you’re ready for business. At this point, start reducing energy. You want to go somewhere between 15% and 30%. A 15% reduction may be too slow to see any meaningful progress to be worthwhile. A 30% reduction is a little aggressive. Anything more than that will start setting off alarm bells and signals in your brain that we’re approaching famine. Your appetite will jack up, and you’ll become food focused. My suggestion is to keep your energy reduction to about 20-25%. And you don’t need to do this consistently. You can have a 10% reduction one day, and a 30% reduction the next. Or you can keep it at 20%-ish. Also, come back to maintenance calories whenever you need to (Autoregulate) in order to reset some of those appetite signals. (These are called “refeeds”. Extended refeeds are called “diet breaks”.)
If it happens to take a couple of days of experimentation, that’s to be expected. It’s okay if you don’t nail it on the first day. There’s a learning curve here. Don’t be hard on yourself if you’re not hitting your targets consistently the first week. That just might mean you’re going a little too hard too fast. Scale it back a bit.
Make sure you get enough protein. The RDA1 sets protein as a minimum to cover body protein turnover as well as keep us out of a clinically problematic state; this target is what they refer to as “adequacy”. For adults, that’s 0.8 grams (g) per kilogram (kg) of bodyweight (bw). However, the sports literature2 nearly doubles the RDA as a recommendation for a minimum.
The sports literature also recommends going as high as 2.2 g/kg/bw, which is about a g/pound/bw, which, in my opinion, is a bit higher than you realistically need. If you’re very overweight, these numbers will also inflate protein targets. Likewise, if you’re very underweight already, your protein target will be skewed lower. A good rule of thumb is to find your ideal or goal bodyweight and use that as your starting point.
I’ve heard reputable experts recommend as low as 1.2 g/kg/bw as an absolute minimum, and most protein experts suggest a number that is in the middle of the range of the recommendations, which will be something like 80-90% optimal: about 1.6 g/kg/bw. These recs hold true for both men and women. A 150lbs. person, man or woman; would target about 110 grams of protein. A 200 lbs. person would target about 145 grams of protein.
Like your calories, these targets don’t necessarily need to be fixed, although I would lean towards being more consistent with your number as that will help you standardize things. Still, if you seem to oscillate day to day between your minimum and max target, that’s perfectly fine. In fact, it might be a good strategy to lower protein on some days so that you have some extra calories to work with. Just be sure to hit your minimum of 1.4 g/kg/bw.
Now you know your protein and calorie targets. Apart from those two numbers, feel free to divvy up your remaining calories however you’d like, either to fat or to carbs. My suggestion is to keep a balance of each, so that you’ll have a balanced (you know, a normal) mixed meal. A little bit of fat goes a long way for taste, and a little bit of carbs goes a long way for fiber, antioxidants, vitamins, minerals, and some sweetness. A mixed meal—one with all macronutrients—will slow digestion, keeping you sated and satisfied longer.
Also, the frequency of your meals doesn’t matter too much. One meal a day (OMAD) is not optimal and is a good way to start disordered eating as well as gastrointestinal discomfort—one large gorge per day, inundating the body with much more than it needs at a single feeding—so at least two meals is better, but three meals is better than two, and then four meals is marginally better than three. The key is to get to your energy/calorie and protein targets. How you get there is up to you. (I eat three squares and maybe a small snack.) And don’t worry about timing (that is, intermittent fasting; time-restricted eating/feeding; circadian eating); eat when you want, when you need to, when you’re hungry, and/or when your schedule permits.
Resistance train at least 2-3 days a week, which signals to your body that you need to keep your muscles intact despite being in a reduced energy state.3 You can do literally almost anything so long as you’re making your muscles work. It doesn’t take much to maintain muscles, nowhere near as much to get them to grow. One study showed that strength gains could be maintained on as little as 1/9th of the work it took to achieve them.4
Keep active, whatever it is. Go for walks; do some light cardio work. Activity seems to acutely dampen hunger, and it also seems to calibrate us to be more in tune with appetite signaling and hunger cues and, thus, lower overall energy intake.5 One study showed that this effect was even more potent on women than men.6
Still, don’t do anything overly long or strenuous. Don’t expect to be hitting PRs and PBs, either. You’re not training for performance during an energy deficit, a cut. You’re just working to hold onto what you have.
Also, being active keeps us out of the kitchen, with our noses in the fridge or the pantry, plotting the next meal. Activity distracts us. Moreover, exercise and physical activity don’t burn as much energy as we think or as we’d like to. The energy deficit mostly comes from a reduction in food.
Track something on your body, either your scale weight or a specific body site to measure, like your waistline. (Write them down on paper or an Excel spreadsheet.) Don’t track anything that freaks or stresses you out. You do not necessarily need to track it every day, but once a week is insufficient because you might measure something on an off-day, where some anomaly is manifesting itself, skewing the numbers (like if you had a big meal with lots of carbs and sodium even two days before).
However, expect fluctuations from day to day, so do take your measurements under similar conditions and do so maybe two to three times a week. Despite daily fluctuations, from one week to the next a trend should be emerging. Average the numbers to get a good sense of the trend number. Of course, if you weigh yourself every day, you’ll get a good sense of how much your weight will fluctuate. Still, you should be able to establish a range, a typical or expected high and low. Once you get outside of this range, you know that the real magic’s happening.
Lastly, which is the REALLY HARD PART:
Be patient.
This is a short-term intervention and not meant to be your eternal lifestyle. Still, you need to give yourself three to four weeks of consistency to really see how things are going. Going two days here and there isn’t going to result in anything meaningfully visible. You’re asking your body to convert stored energy in your body tissue into nothing (well, it becomes ATP, CO2, and H2O). On a really good day, you’re making this happen at a few grams at a time, maybe an ounce or two. Imagine taking 30 grams of butter and spreading it into a thin layer all over your body; how many times would you have to do that in order to create a visible layer? Also, fat is removed globally. Whatever tissues need energy, you could be pulling fractions of a milligram of fat from your cheeks (either set—LOL).

BONUS: When you come out of your deficit, your cut, DO NOT use that as a license to buffet hop for a weekend or to do an eating challenge at a single meal. A single day of overconsuming can wipe out a week of a moderate deficit. The result is that you spend most of your time dieting, but, over the course of a week, you’re effectively at energy balance. The result is that you spend most of your time feeling like you’re dieting but making sure you’re not. If you’re feeling an eating overshoot heading your way, not necessarily a binge or anything, but you know you’re starting to jones for an episode of intentional overeating, that’s a signal to come back up to maintenance energy, maybe even an ever-so-slight surplus.

Apart from all this, the only thing left to do is troubleshoot when things are not progressing as you expect. Some questions to ask: did you eat something that you forgot to track? Is your sleep off and stress elevated? These can mask weight loss. Be honest with yourself. It’ll help you get to your goal faster if you can find the factors that are hiding in your blind spots.

It’s easy to get inside our own heads when things aren’t going according to our expectations. Most likely, some forgotten or invisible factor has weaseled its way into our plan, and we can’t account for it because we haven’t identified it. Just know that it's there, and it’s rectifiable.

Finally, you don’t have to be 100% consistent 100% of the time. And if you stray, like eat more than you ever meant? It’s fine. No problem. The extra energy might actually help you. The key is consistency. If you do most of these things consistently more often than not, that will move you in the direction you want to go.

Be patient and mostly consistent, and not only will you get there, but you will get there sooner than you think.

And then you’ll be bored and need a new goal. LOL.

Next week, I’ll explain and describe some strategies to help you troubleshoot when you think you’re not making progress, progress stalled, or you feel like you’re drifting in the wrong direction.

The Flexitorium by Joseph Anthony

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