If you ever meet me you probably already know my second biggest passion after programming is Bodybuilding. I used to be a fat kid weighting 105 kg, now I’m ripped.
Want to learn how you too can become fit with ease?
NSFW because I’ll show my progress photos.
Why you should avoid most blog’s and fitness trainers
Let’s look at some stuff you’d hear at gym or most blogs:
- You shouldn’t skip breakfast
- Eat low GI carbs
- Eat 5-6 meals a day when cutting
- Don’t eat after 6PM
- It’s cheating when you eat ice-cream, you should feel bad.
- Train in higher reps to get ‘definition’
- Lots of cardio.
What I did:
- Didn’t eat breakfast in 2 years
- Couldn’t care less about GI, GI doesn’t even apply if you eat mixed food, who the hells eat only carbs in a meal?
- I prefer 1-2 huge meals when cutting.
- I eat around 2000-2500 kcal before sleep.
- I had days when I eat 500ml of low fat ice-cream after training. Fat doesn’t make you fat but after training I prefer to refill glycogen.
- Train for strength, you need to spare muscles not ‘define’ them.
- Cardio? Do you mean sex and walking? that’s what I did. Cardio is not necessary unless you are already under 10% body fat.
You can imagine how fat I got by following that right? WRONG.
There are only few authors I’d recommend you follow if you are interested in dieting:
- Lyle McDonald - Great diet expert, research based.
- Martin Berkhan - Intermittent fasting advocate, my favourite way of cutting fat.
- Alan Aragorn - similar to lyle.
How to apply KISS to training?
I don’t like wasting time, if you are trying to loose fat you don’t need to do tons of cardio or spend hours on the gym ‘toning’.
I love simplicity:
- I prefer do to Intermittent fasting leangains style, it’s very easy to eat nothing than to eat little. You don’t need to do it but it’s easier to control your eating if you only eat 8h a day.
- Train hard but short, 3x45-50 min a week Reverse Pyramid Training as recommended by Martin.
- Start slow and be patient, you don’t want to start dieting by eating 1500 kcal, unless you are little girl. Are you?
Supplements
- Omega 3 - 2 g EPA, 1.5 g DHA per day
- Vitamins - most people have deficiencies, especially when you are in kcal deficit and training hard, if you believed vitamins are bad
- Calcium - 800 mg in the morning, 1200 mg in night
- BCAA - useful if you train fasted, not necessary otherwise. I prefer Scivation Xtend.
- Fat burners - waste of money. Watch your diet.
Eating
Eat what you like as long as you can hit macros calculated from following diet setup. I like ice-cream and chilli con carne, Chinese chicken with mushrooms etc.
Keep in mind that food choices doesn’t really matter for weight loss but they do for general health, so don’t just eat at McDonalds. I like to eat 80% least processed food and 20% whatever I like on the specific day.
If you decide to follow IF, I’d recommend you set-up your eating window at evening, this will make easier to eat with friends when you go out and enjoy life.
I recommend using MyFitnessPal to track kcal and macros. You can use this script to specify macro goals perfectly
Conclusion and my diet setup
I’m programmer and most of you are probably as well, so let’s share a diet algorithm I’m using for my cutting.
To avoid wasting time and doing manual calculations, I’d recommend you buy calca.io which is a text-based symbolic calculator I’m using.
Paste following in to calca.io and adjust stats section, you can get your TDEE estimate here
Diet setup to paste in calca.io
Key points for this setup:
- Start slow, no cardio, target for 0.5 kg of FAT loss in a week. You could loose weight way faster, but you don’t want to loose weight, you want to loose FAT. Keep your muscles and be patient.
- Only increase deficit when you stall for 2 weeks and not less. Weight loss is not linear, you might wake up one day and weight 1kg less. If you do increase deficit by 400 kcal (-100 kcal on rest days)
- Don’t go under 1400 kcal (Unless you are a girl, then you could probably go as low as 1100 kcal, but again start slowly.), add some walking instead.
Let me know if you have any questions.