The most exciting part of any fat loss diet is the part where
the fat starts melting off your body and you were seeing
yourself physically transformed week after week.
And this part of the process happens during the progressive
phase, which is exactly what I'm going to be covering in today's
podcast. Phase one was the primer phase,
covering how to prepare for the diet ahead, and that'll be
LinkedIn the description of this podcast because we already
covered that in Part 1 of this series.
Phase two, which we're doing today, is the progressive phase,
and this is where we're going to calculate our calories and
macros, set up the diet, determine the timeline, and
start pursuing the physical transformation we are after.
And finally will be phase three, which we'll cover in Part 3 of
this series, the PROSPER phase. And this is designed to help you
come out of the diet properly and sustain the results you've
achieved, avoiding weight regain entirely.
For now, let's dive into phase two, the progressive phase, and
learn how to set up an optimal diet for maximal fat loss
results. The greatest things in life all
start with a challenge. You must accept that everything
is hard before it gets easy. Every every, every, everything
you want in life begins with a hard path.
So the first part to cover with the progressive phase is
determining the timeline. At the end of the day, every
person diving into a phallos phase, they want to have a light
at the end of the tunnel, right? If somebody has 100 plus pounds
to lose, this is a very difficult thing to do because
they could diet for a full year or more and actually continue to
get healthier and healthier as it goes.
If somebody has £50 or less, it is really important to set a
timeline. And this also doesn't mean that
somebody with more than that can't set a timeline because
they should. And as humans, psychologically
speaking, we want to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
We want to see a destination that we are going to.
There's nothing worse than getting some calories,
understanding you're going into a phallus phase and not knowing
exactly when it ends, or at least what the next step is,
because the end point can shift. So we might be determining this
timeline and saying it's 16 weeks, for example, and it might
be 18 and it could be 14. Things change.
The point is, is that we do want to try to create a goal for the
client as often as we can. We want a destination They are
going to a timeline that they know that is a finish line and
they're in a journey to pursue that.
Because when there isn't that aspect, it can be more difficult
to stay engaged and motivated to continue the diet.
A few more things this does is obviously give us this objective
measure, but that objective measure gives us the ability to
adjust the diet properly. It also sets us up for making
sure we're calculating the calorie deficit properly and
looking for a rate of loss that makes sense.
How much weight should we be losing per week to get to point
B by the end of blank month? Right?
We need to know a full timeline so that we can break it up and
then further calculate the calories.
This also opens up the calendar for potential diet breaks,
deloads, refeeds, social events, things like that.
Because if we know we're dieting through the holidays, for
example, we just have to factor in the different events coming
up to make sure that we are dieting appropriately and able
to participate in those without it setting us back.
And there's no reason why somebody can't do that.
But having that timeline allows us to understand this.
And then last but not least, it gives us all real expectations
because if somebody is expecting to get really lean and they
don't know when they might think they're going to get there
sooner than you are as the coach are actually telling them to.
And if you're somebody watching this that is self coaching
through a fat loss phase, then for you, it's setting your own
expectations in the process knowing how long this is really
going to take you. So you to get your hopes up for
a fast track fat loss if you have more weight to lose and it
should be taking a little bit longer to do it the right way.
Now that we have this timeline mapped out, we need to create a
deficit. We have to actually calculate
the calories. And in my opinion, from really
reading a ton of research and coaching thousands of people at
this point, an aggressive calorie deficit is going to work
best in the beginning. And there's a few reasons for
this. And this doesn't mean I disagree
with people that think you should go slow and steady,
right? We have this slow sustainable
process. What people don't understand
when they lack scientific research from a knowledge base
or the experience required to work with people like this, is
that your metabolism adapts really well.
It's very dynamic. And if you create a small 5%
deficit in the beginning, you're not going to see any weight
loss, which is very really frustrating because you might
see it in the diet. You feel it psychologically and
you know, physiologically you're a little bit hungrier because
you just cut calories, but not enough to where you're breaking
out of that maintenance range because your maintenance isn't a
dead set target. Your maintenance is a range.
And if we know it's a range and you don't breakthrough that
maintenance range, your body will not start dropping calories
because it instantly will adapt to the deficit you've created.
That 5% drop isn't a big enough gap to avoid adaptation.
Your body will step a little bit less, it'll move a little bit
less, talk a little bit less. It's going to train a little bit
less hard. You're eating less food, which
is also going to drop your thermic effect of food, right?
Metabolic adaptation is going to happen.
We know that. And it's going to happen a lot
easier and it's going to be more prominent in the results you
see, or better yet said the lack of results you see if you do
this tiny calorie drop in the beginning.
So what I recommend is a 10% minimum and 5% adjustments
should be saved for the adjustments down the road.
You can drop your calories by 5% after you've already started the
deficit and you hit a plateau months down the road.
That is totally fine. But in the initial phase, 10% is
the bare minimum you should go. 30% I would say is the maximum.
Above that it becomes very unsustainable, even though there
is research to support greater deficits than that.
And what I've seen work best for most people from an adherence
perspective and a results perspective is 15 to 25%.
So that means you initially create a deficit of 15 to 25%
from your maintenance calories drawn from carbs or fat, which
we'll get into here soon. And from there, you consistently
diet. And as plateaus or stalls
happen, you pull your calories by 5 to 10%.
These tiny micro adjustments or drops in calories to keep the
diet moving. And there's some good examples
of this. We have the Matador study which
showed A2 week deficit and two week maintenance.
But what they did and they adjusted for this is a 33%
calorie deficit. If we look at doctor Bill
Campbell's diet break study where they had five day deficit,
2 day refeed week after week that a 25% calorie deficit.
And they actually made-up for that in in meaning at the end of
the seven day average they were in a a 25% deficit, which really
means the five days of dieting was even greater than 25%.
But when you factor in the two days of maintenance during the
weekend, it equal to a 25% calorie deficit.
And then we have something called the Tempo Diet.
And what they did here is they actually had two different
dieting groups. They had a four month versus a
12 month diet group with post menopausal women and the four
month groups weight loss was significantly greater short and
long term and they dieted with a 65 to 75% deficit.
The other group was a 25 to 35% deficit.
It's pretty crazy because the the results showed long term
they sustained the weight loss better.
And this is likely because in what the scientists in the study
actually alluded to is that they had a greater motivation curve.
You have more motivation when you see results faster.
So these women saw more results and they saw them quicker and
that motivated them to keep going.
So that's a 65 plus percent deficit, which is massive and
very difficult to adhere to. So when I'm saying 15 to 25% in
this context, you realize it's actually pretty small.
So we want to have that semi aggressive initial drop for the
calories. Setting up your optimal macros
is the next step, and a really easy way to understand this is
if you're just trying to focus on adherence and preference.
Maybe this client is sedentary and just wants weight loss, but
they're not really so focused on performance or muscle or
anything like that. Just generally need to lose
weight. It's very neutral, you know,
Have enough protein, getting a calorie deficit?
Don't worry about carbs and fats, just stick to your
calories. If we're looking at performance
with, you know, higher activity, so we're looking at strength,
performance, sports, stuff like that, we're going to want to
have a higher carb diet and a lower fat diet.
If we're favoring muscle tissue and we're trying to have
physique transformation, it's going to be carbs favorite over
fat as well. So a higher carb diet, always
being a high protein diet and individual factors such as
hormones, gut health, stuff like that.
It's going to be individually dependent.
Everybody's going to be different.
Some of these situations are going to be better off on a high
carb, low fat and some of these are going to be better on a high
fat, low carb. But the main take away here I
would say is that anybody who is focused specifically on physique
changes, so looking at fat loss and muscle retention or growth
or performance, we need to make sure we have enough carbs and
diet does not mean fats don't help, does not mean fats need to
be low, especially not initially.
But when we are pulling calories down, we need to understand this
so that we don't take away from our carbs too much because that
will negatively impact our performance and our muscle
growth aspirations. So when we set up these daily
targets for fat loss, maintenance is again, again, we
take our maintenance calories, then we are going to pull 15 to
25% of those calories, create deficit.
If you don't know what your maintenance calories are, track
your diet for one to two weeks. Weigh yourself everyday for one
to two weeks and take the averages.
Or you can do it way easier than that and just use an online
macro calculator to find out what your total daily energy
expenditure and your maintenance caloric intake is.
And you can find that at taylorcoachingmethod.com.
You can hit the menu and we have a bunch of tools.
You can calculate that your one Rep Max, you can calculate that.
You can calculate your one on RAM, You can look at supplement
index. We have loads of stuff.
All that is in the description of this YouTube video.
So you can actually go calculate that very easily.
Then you will pull 25 to 15 to 25% of those calories create a
deficit. We're going to be looking at 1
to 1.5g per pound of body weight in protein for somebody who has
£20 or less to lose. If you have over 20 lbs, we can
lower that to 0.8 and upwards of 1.5 because this ultra high
protein intake is not dangerous, it's totally harmless.
It might actually help promote better muscle protein synthesis
while in deficit to maintain muscle tissue as well as support
a good metabolism leading to more fat loss.
And there's plenty of research showing individuals consuming
well over their body weight in protein and actually losing body
fat even though they're at maintenance or sometimes in a
surplus of calories because the thermic effect food is very high
with protein doesn't necessarily mean you need to.
And for some people that can be uncomfortable.
So I'm not saying everybody has to, but the point is you don't
have to worry about high protein and there is plenty of research
to say that a recomp goal might be more successful if you
consume more protein. Next we look at that we're
looking at 0.25 to 0.5 times your body weight as like the
minimal effective dose, the lighter you are.
In general, and I see this a lot with really smaller female
individuals. A female individuals is 115 to
125 lbs looking to lose 5 to 10 lbs.
We're probably leaning towards that .5g per pound because they
are a lighter individual. But everybody else, the lowest
you should go is 0.25. Your hormones are going to be
totally fine. The the hormonal negative
impacts going to be greater from the calorie deficit you're in or
the lower body fat levels you achieve if you take it very far.
So you're totally safe to do that.
But a good healthy range is going to be found in between
that 0.25 to 0.5. And then last but not least, all
your carb or calories left go to carbs.
So take the rest of your calories, divide those by 4.
That's going to give you your carbohydrates because
carbohydrates have 4 calories per gram.
Now that we have our macros figured out, should we just
track macros and play the flexible dieting game or should
we set up a meal plan? And the reality is it's totally
dependent on the individual. And most of the time, I think
you can find a balance between the two.
I often like to use a flexible meal plan or a structured
flexible dieting plan. And what this is, is we're
always going to have our calories and macros as our
baseline of what we should be paying attention to and what we
should be adjusting from. But there's plenty of
circumstances where we might create a meal plan to fit those
macros so that we can just easily prep, rinse and repeat,
and have a scheduled system around the foods we eat.
This often helps people have better energy, better digestion,
way better adherence to sticking to those calories and macros
throughout the week. Because they don't have to think
about it every day and play the macro Tetris game where
day-to-day they're trying to swap foods in and out and get
fancy. When you could just rinse and
repeat over and over again. And then when the weekend comes,
you can play that macro Tetris game and have a little bit of
flexibility. So which one should we be using?
The reality is, is that both can work really well and there's
research to support both of them.
A flexible dieting plan has actually been shown in research
to increase micronutrient variety.
And this is pretty common and, and expected.
If you think about it, if we're eating a, a vast, you know,
variety of foods and of course we're going to get different
micronutrients and different types of foods because we're
changing up the foods we eat. So we're getting different
colors and different greens and different meats and different
fruits and produce. And this is going to lead to a
lot of micronutrient diversity. However, we can set up a
flexible meal plan to where we do change up the fruits and
vegetables throughout the week, but we rinse and repeat them.
So maybe breakfast is the same set of blueberries every day and
dinner is always green beans, but lunch is Brussels sprouts
and we have an apple on the side of our snack.
And so we are getting the variety throughout the day and
then the next week, we can easily swap the blueberries for
raspberries and change it up this week.
So there's a good way to go about doing this where you can
have consistency and standardization to adjust from
while also getting that variety. And then of course, if we want
to have more of that, if it fits your macros approach on the
weekends, we're still within our calories.
We are going to still accomplish the goal of fat loss while not
losing all that progress just because we're constantly
changing things every single day, which we know leads to
inaccuracies within tracking. But a little bit of that is OK.
It's not going to outweigh the rest of the diet.
So ultimately the decision kind of boils down to what is best
for the client, how serious their goal is, and what stage of
the game they're in. For somebody brand new, it could
go either way. They might need a meal plan to
show them and teach them, give them some education and
knowledge around food awareness, what foods to eat, how to meal
prep properly, and then for somebody else brand new, that
might drive them crazy because they feel so restricted.
So we have to understand the individual we're talking about
here and just know that we have these options.
We can put them together, we can use them separately and we can
find the right approach for them.
And so when we summarize these two options to try to help you
figure out which one is best for you, Looking at the benefits of
meal plans, consistency and accuracy is going to be really
high. Troubleshooting dietary issues
is going to be really easy because if somebody has a gut
problem or anything like that, it's very easy to figure out
what the culprit is. If they're eating the same thing
day-to-day, we can remove one item and boom, we see the
improvement in their gut health. We're going to limit cravings.
There's actually some good research to show when we repeat
foods day after day, we're actually going to lower the
cravings we have, right? Because you do not crave things
that you constantly consume. And this even goes to the
flexibility side. Somebody who has the same set of
Oreos every single day begins to easily control their ability to
eat Oreos within the diet or to control their cravings for other
foods because they're allowing those things in.
But it's, it's really coming from the repetitive nature of
this or from the healthy foods itself that limits the cravings.
And then last but not least, this also controls our hunger
and our overeating patterns. And there's multiple studies
that show we can be over stimulated just from good smells
or new taste and triggers these hunger signals, which is hard to
avoid completely. But if we can repeat foods
throughout the week with a meal plan, then we are going to limit
our overeating episodes because we control hunger better and
it's going to limit overeating as a whole, which tends to lead
to a calorie surplus. And that obviously doesn't help
us with the deficit. The benefits of flexible dieting
is number one, education and autonomy.
If we just follow a meal plan, it's on a piece of paper as like
a list in a menu that we got to follow day-to-day.
We don't really learn anything. We're just it's monkey see,
monkey do. I want to educate clients on why
they should fit certain foods in, what foods we can swap and
still get the same nutrients or the same caloric value.
And you know, flexible dieting actually allows this variety to
happen. And it does teach people quite
often a lot more than they would learn if they were just doing a
meal plan. They're going to increase their
food selection. So again, as I mentioned before,
there's research that show this is going to increase our
micronutrient diversity throughout the diet.
And this also, and this is probably the biggest one, and
This is why even if you are following a meal plan, you
should definitely make sure that you have at least one day a week
where you're not social inclusion.
You can't follow a meal plan and also go out to eat with friends.
So being able to go, you know, have a social meal with friends
or family and not feel like you're trapped in this diet and
it's not allowing you to have social encounters is a very
negative place to be in. And dieting should be something
that improves your life because you're getting leaner and
healthier throughout the process.
So it's really important to make sure that if you are following a
meal plan, understand how to be flexible with your diet so that
you can have the opportunity to be social and enjoy social meals
and foods and settings and things like that.
As we wind down towards the end of this progressive phase
presentation, we, we need to look at diet adjustments, right?
So we have established the point of a progressive phase loose
fat. We have determined our calories,
we have determined the calorie deficit from those calories and
what are macro should be. We've learned about structured
flexibility so that we can toggle between a meal plan and
flexible dieting as needed or as we see fit.
For us individually as a person and what our lifestyle is like
now, we need to know how to adjust the diet, right?
How do we adjust as plateaus hit?
I, I alluded to this slightly before, but 5 to 10% drop in
calories is almost always going to be a safe bet.
If you are stuck at a plateau, take your total caloric intake.
Say you have 2000 calories in your diet.
We're going to pull 5 to 10% of those calories to create a
bigger deficit because you hit a plateau.
You've been dieting you, you hit a plateau, you're at 2000
calories. We're going to pull 100 to 200
calories from that to give us an extra 5, an extra 5 to 10% drop
in calories to pursue that deficit.
The reality is as you lose weight, you are lighter, you
have less mass. You probably are moving a little
bit less too, because your body adapts.
And if you have less mass and you're moving less than your
metabolism is going to catch up and you're no longer going to
lose weight. And as these plateaus arise, we
have to breakthrough them by just dropping calories further.
There's obviously a limit to how often we can do this or how far
we can push that because you can't just infinitely drop
calories until you have no calories left.
But five to 10% is an easy way to do it.
Take that total, drop it by 5 to 10%.
Pull those calories via carbs or fat.
Usually whatever you have the most of or whatever you can
adhere best to, for some people, don't touch their fats, just
pull it from carbs. And it's a really easy way to
toggle the diet. For some people it's a it's a
blend because they can't really decide.
And for some people, they're all about the results.
So if they're an athlete or if they're trying to build muscle
or maintain muscle and they're like pull whatever's going to be
most beneficial. A lot of times that means
pulling calories from fat so that you can save carbs and keep
training hard to maintain muscle and continue to get leaner.
Another thing that we can consider here is maintaining
calories, increasing protein, and dropping fats.
So very similar, dropping your calories by 5 to 10% via fats.
But let's say hunger's already an issue right now.
Well, we can safely increase our protein to replace that five to
10%. So let's say we drop our
calories by 200. Going back to that 2000 calorie
example, we drop our calories via fats by 200.
Well, now let's replace that 200 again to bring us back up to
2000 calories with protein because maybe we set our protein
at 1g per pound and we know it's totally safe to increase above
1g per pound and we're already hungry on this diet.
That's only going to promote more fat loss, more muscle
maintenance, and probably better adherence because you're just
increasing protein. And there's no mechanism in the
body that we are aware of that allows you to store protein as
body fat. And I do believe it's impossible
based on the amount of research done on people consuming 2 and
even 3G per pound. And Doctor Jose Antonio's labs,
you can look these things up. The free research that you can
go read it is wild, but it just goes to show that it is totally
safe to increase your protein if needed in these circumstances.
Another way that we could create a breakthrough, a plateau and
adjust the diet is just swapping foods or adding or add meal plan
for improved accuracy. So if somebody is on a flexible
diet and we know that they're probably not being accurate
because they each poultate too much or they're having a lot of
packaged foods, let's shift to a meal plan and just say, hey, for
the next one to two weeks, keep your calories where they're at.
We're not going to adjust them, but follow a meal plan that we
can create together so that we can keep the food the same
day-to-day just to standardize everything.
And nine times out of 10, this actually helps breakthrough that
deficit, that plateau, because it does create a deficit without
them realizing. They were a little bit above the
deficit they thought they were in, Meaning they're at
maintenance because they were eating a lot of packaged foods
or eating out or not accurately measuring things, or they were
unable to track them because of where they were sourced.
And that was actually taking them out of a deficit without
them realizing, right? And this is just a way of really
tightening the reins. Maybe we're like lowering the
amount of alcohol we're drinking in the diet or restaurants we're
visiting. And it, it's essentially just
creating more accuracy. All of this works.
You can use either of these options and it's really about
where you're at. 5 to 10% calorie drop works perfectly.
Pull it via carbs and fats. If you're already really hungry
on the diet and you're worried about adherence, replace those
calories again with just protein after dropping the fats or
carbs. Or if it makes sense to do so,
you can swap foods and really just add a meal plan to create
a, a higher level of accuracy and consistency within the diet.
Of course, we can also add cardio.
So if somebody is already pulled calories from the diet, they've
broken through a couple plateaus and they're stuck and they're
like, I, I need to pursue fat loss, but I can't afford to take
more calories because I'm already hungry.
I don't want to push that any further.
Or maybe in the beginning, you create that initial deficit in
the first plateau you hit, the person would just rather do
cardio because we often ask clients, hey, we got to break
through this plateau. Do you want us to pull calories
from food or do you want to burn more calories from cardio and
movement? And if they would rather keep
their food and do cardio, that's fine.
It's not always as accurate as pulling calories, but it can
have the same effect. So we might just be increasing
our step count. I would usually recommend doing
this by at least 10%, but upwards of 20%.
It could also mean that we are just adding some high intensity
cardio or low intensity cardio if we're in the initial phases
of the diet. There's nothing wrong with doing
high intensity cardio. As you progress through the
diet, diet fatigue accumulates. It's going to be harder to
recover from high intensity cardio and that's where low
intensity steady state cardio might be more effective.
But either way, we're just adding, you know, two to three
sessions of about 30 minutes into the week that's going to
help us breakthrough that plateau.
And if we are adding a step count on top of that, we're
probably going to go with one or two cardio sessions.
Again, it boils down to what the person's going to adhere to
best. So at the end of all of this,
the progressive phase is really just setting us up with a
realistic timeline to provide us with expectations of when we can
actually expect to get to the result.
What our calories should be, how much calories we should drop to
enter into this deficit itself, how to separate the calories
into the right macros for us based on our preference, our
lifestyle, stress, hormones, performance, all those kind of
things. And then really trying to
determine, should we go with a meal plan?
Should we be flexible with the diet?
Should we have a combination of those?
Or should we just have these like kind of as tools on our
tool belt? When we need to add cardio, we
add cardio. When we do need a meal plan,
we'll do a meal plan. When we want to be flexible and
go on vacation and still diet, we can do that too.
There's so many options. There's a million ways to skin a
cat. And with a fat loss phase, in
this progressive phase that we are talking about here, it's
really important that the person going through the diet
understands that these are all options and they can
intermingle. We can use them simultaneously
and we can more effectively get to them, to their goal because
of that. Once we've reached their goal at
the end of this progressive phase, they've lost the weight
they want to lose. We've got to transition into the
PROSPER phase. That's going to be covered in
the next video. And the prosper phase is really
just setting up more expectations and timelines, but
this time not for achieving the goal, but rather having a slow
drip and slow removal of some of these tracking habits, metrics,
all these things that we are intentionally doing with the
diet. Like what does this timeline
look like? How can we expect to pull these
things away while maintaining the goal that we achieved,
Right? And we're going to reverse
calories by increasing them up, develop some maintenance habits
that are really fundamental for a consistency long term, and
then determine the next goal or an exit strategy.
How do we teach this person to sustain it?
At what point do they know I'm good, I'm sustaining it, I'm
doing what I need to do, I can live like this and the diet is
over. And they feel confident about
that. And that's what the PROSPER
phase is all about, which will be covered in the next video of
this series.