In part one of the Get Ripped guide, I showed you how one method of weight loss have been used successfully for nearly 140 years.
In part two, I showed you why the reduced-carbohydrate diet is so effective.
Today, I’ll show you a simple step-by-step plan you can use to strip off all your unwanted bodyfat without starvation, without marathon training sessions and without losing your marbles.
So without further ado, here’s the…
The First Rule Of Fat Loss: Eat What You Were Designed To Eat
Can you lose weight by eating Twinkies, drinking vodka and smoking cigarettes? Sure, as long as you keep the calorie intake lower than what you need to maintain, you’ll lose weight.
But there’s a good chance you’ll burn off a ton of muscle, feel miserable and gain all the weight right back on that kind of diet.
If you eat the foods you were designed to eat, things are much easier.
Remember, obesity is a new problem. For millions of years, human beings ate what they were designed to eat. Only when processed carbohydrates were introduced into the traditional diet did obesity become an epidemic.
So what does it mean to eat what you were designed to eat?
It means avoiding “modern” foods like twinkies and pasta and sticking with “old-school” foods. And I’m talking oooold school.
As in the foods that humans ate for millions of years: Meat, Fish, Fowl, Eggs, Vegetables, Fruit, Nuts.
Now, this is not a new idea. This style of eating has been called, “Paleo”, “Caveman” among with a host of other nicknames. The basic idea is that human beings have spent millions of years eating this way and enjoyed perfect health because of this diet. But once processed carbohydrates entered our diet, things went downhill. Hence, many people now recommend a return to the way our ancestors ate.
To learn more about this style of eating, check out the following:
The Paleo Diet In A Nutshell (Video)
Now, here’s the really incredible part:
Just by eating the foods that you were meant to eat, you can actually lose weight without cardio, without actively trying to monitor the amount of food that you eat. Which means no calorie counting. Just eat until you get full and you will still lose weight.
Take a look at 54 year old Mark Sisson, who followed this style of eating while recovering from knee surgery (hence, no cardio).
High Fat Diet + No Cardio = Killer Abs?
Want to try this style of eating for yourself? Here’s a typical daily food log to get you started:
Breakfast: Omlette made with fresh veggies, dash of cheese and tomato slices.
Coffee.
Lunch: Huge Chef’s salad or Cobb Salad with full-fat dressing. (I like these two salads in particular because they contain lots of meat and fat.)
Snack: Hardboiled eggs.
Dinner: Steak, salad.
Snack: Piece of fruit or nuts.
With this style of eating, you will most likely naturally reduce your cabohydrate intake to 100 grams or less per day. Enough of a reduction to spur weight loss, but still enough carbs to keep you out of ketosis.
This style of eating can easily be maintained over the long haul. You’ll find that as time goes by you will no longer crave junk food. It sounds crazy but after a few weeks on this diet you may find yourself turning down candy bars in favor of a piece of ripe, juicy fruit.
Best of all, this method of eating doesn’t take much brainpower. If you can’t kill it, catch it (seafood), pick it or grow it, then you probably shouldn’t be eating it.
The Second Rule Of Fat Loss: Resistance Training Helps Keep The Muscle
It goes without saying that you want to lose fat – not muscle. The eating style above will help you drop the fat – but how can you make sure you hold on to all your hard-earned muscle?
Simple: Use it or lose it.
Use some form of resistance training 2-3 times per week. When trying to maintain muscle mass, it doesn’t matter if you choose bodyweight exercises or barbells, high reps or low reps. The key is making your muscles work.
Brad Pilon, author of Eat Stop Eat, wrote an interesting post about this very topic. He shows that the key to maintaining muscle mass is resistance training – not diet. He talks about why your muscles shrink when you leg is put in a cast – no matter how much protein you eat.
On the flip side, you can actually eat very small amounts of both protein and calories and still maintain your muscle mass as long as you engage in some form of resistance training.
The Third Rule of Fat Loss: Keep the scale moving in the right direction
Follow the first two rules of fat loss and you will probably lose weight every week without even trying.
Weigh yourself once a week (always on the same day) and do it first thing in the morning after make your first pit stop (empty your bowels/bladder).
If you haven’t lost any weight in a week, here are a few changes you can make:
#1) Clean up your eating. Usually, when the scale stops moving it’s because junk food is creeping back into your diet. Pizza night, cake and ice cream at birthday party – these minor dietary transgressions are fine when kept to a minimum.
But when the scale stops moving, this is the first place to check.
#2) If you’re already eating clean (less than one junk food meal per week) and scale still won’t budge, it’s time to add in some form of cardiovascular training.
Right now it’s popular to bash “long, slow cardio” but if you want to go for a 2-mile run, then that’s not a terrible way to get the heart pumping and burn off some additional calories. Other options include sprints and Crossfit style “metcon” (metabolic conditioning) workouts.
For example, once a week (on a non-resistance training day) you could do 10 rounds of the following:
5 pull-ups, 10 push-ups and 20 bodyweight squats for time. Next week, do this workout again and try to beat your previous time.
One cardio/sprint/metcon training session per week is all you’ll need to get the scale moving again. And you can always add one more session if trying to get super lean.
#3) Start skipping meals.
If your diet is clean, you’re taking part in resistance training 2-3 times per week plus using two cardio/sprint/metcon sessions per week and the scale is still not moving, then it’s time to start skipping meals.
I recommend you start by skipping breakfast.
Yes, you read that right. Skip what many people still believe to be the most important meal of the day – breakfast. No, I haven’t lost my mind.
Here’s the rationale: First of all, most people don’t do much physically demanding work all day. Most of us sit at desks or in classrooms for a big part of the day. So do you really need a big breakfast to power you up for a hours and hours of sitting? Obviously not.
Second, at this point in your fat loss journey it will be necessary to start cutting calories in order to get ultra lean. (By the way, don’t get freaked out. Most people will be able to get fairly lean just with a clean diet, resistance training and a few cardio sessions. In fact, I’d be willing to bet most people will be able to get below 12% body fat with this protocol and you will only have to start cutting calories if trying to get below 10%.)
To cut calories, you can start logging your diet and counting every calorie that passes your lips. I’ve done this before. It works, but it’s a pain in the butt. It’s much easier to simply skip a meal or a snack and obtain the caloric deficit in that manner.
Now, you might be thinking that skipping breakfast will cause all your muscle mass to shrink away. But remember, if you’re actively using resistance training, your muscle mass isn’t going anywhere.
And besides, giving your digestive system a short break once in a while is probably a good thing.
The Easy Way To Lose Fat
There are literally hundreds of different diet and exercise plans you can follow if you’re trying to lose weight. I’ve personally experimented with dozens of different plans.
But I’ve never found anything easier than this 3-step plan:
#1) Eat what you were meant to eat
#2) Add resistance training to preserve muscle
#3) To keep the scale moving, make sure you’re eating clean. If so, add some form of cardio activity. And if that still isn’t enough, start skipping breakfast.
That’s it. No calorie counting. No need to work out for hours and hours every day. Just a clear-cut path that allows you to burn off body fat every week until you reach your goal.
Got questions on how to put this plan to work for you? Leave ‘em in the comments section and I’ll do my bests to answer any and all questions.
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Great post. Including the one on wrist size and muscle mass potential, this is the best post yet. The skipping breakfast part probably made many diet gurus and dieticians spit up their tofu-but it’s true. It goes against the modern day diet grain, but intermittent fasting is a great way to decrease calories and it is, dare I say it, healthy. Anyway, good job.
Hey Matt,
Thanks for writing this series - I found it to be a great read.
Only thing that surprised me was the condoning of skipping meals because I’ve learned, from sources like Burn The Fat, that lack of food consumption slows down the body’s metabolism (because digesting food requires energy)?
Keep up the good work,
- Josh.
@Thomas. Thanks for the kind words.
@Josh: Tom Venuto (author of Burn The Fat) has recently softened his stance on skipping meals.
Check it out here:
http://leangains.blogspot.com/2008/07/tom-venuto-responds-to-criticism.html
what’s the article on wrist size and muscle mass? Can you post a link?
How do beans fit into this type of diet?
@Chad: That was an older article from one of my previous websites. I’ll probably end up reposting it here eventually.
@Glenn: Beans are “ok”. Not bad, not great, just ok. They’ve got some protein and some fiber but they’ve also got a good deal of carbs. And since the whole point of this diet is to reduce your carb intake, beans sort work against our intentions here.
But all-in-all, a few servings of beans per week probably won’t noticeably impede your weight loss efforts.
what do you think of oatmeal? i just eat it dry.
I love oatmeal. Especially in cookie form.
But the point of this method of eating is to focus on the foods that your ancestors ate. Ie: Eat foods that cavemen ate.
And since cavemen probably didn’t eat oatmeal, it’s not a part of this eating method. Remember, when you have individual food questions, just apply the following statement:
“If you can’t kill it, catch it (seafood), pick it or grow it, then you probably shouldn’t be eating it.”
Ryan-try oatmeal with whey protien powder (no milk) after your workout. It gives you the post workout carbs (not as fast as some would like, but lets not get too technical) and the protein.
I can’t stress how important eliminating or at least minimizing the amount of refined and processed foods will take your physique to the next level. I already cut my calories low enough to lose weight every week. My waist went from 37″ to 36″ this way in a month’s time. Now, since eliminating foods like bread and rice from my diet, I have lowered my body fat levels yet again and my waist is 35.5″ in just 2 weeks time whilst it is noticeably more firm!
Dear Friend
You have indeed written a nice article and it corroborates with some other stuff I read. My confusion is that I am a vegetarian (milk and occasional eggs) and I don’t have lots of options if I want to follow your food selection rule. Could you be kind enough to point me in the right direction ?
Hey Matt,
How about adding one more cardio session ? I already workout 3 times a week and do cardio the other days ( 4 days ) and my diet is pretty clean. I’ve come to a point where I don’t progress anymore. Would you say it’s bad to add one more cardio session ( First thing in the morning to one of the workout days) as it’s easier for me to do rather than skipping a meal.
@Haluk:
I don’t see how adding more cardio could be easier than just skipping a meal. Personally, if I was already working out 7 days a week like you, I would try a 24 hour fast once a week rather than adding more workouts. But that’s just me. If you want to add more cardio you can but at some point you get to the point of diminishing returns and you’ve got to be getting pretty close.
Matt,
Thanks for the reply. I know this is going to sound weird but I actually like cardio. I would do it even if I knew there is no health benefit at all. That’s why I prefer adding a cardio instead of skipping meal.
About 24 hour fast , do you mean not eating anything at all for 24 hours ? I understand the logic behind skipping a meal but wouldn’t fasting for 24 hours slow down the metabolism ?
Hi Matt!
I don’t even remember how I ended up on your site, but I LOVE YOUR ADVICE. I’m at my witts end with trying to lose weight. The way you described the caveman diet is simple. Even I can follow
My only question to you is, can I eat canned veggies (greens, corn, etc) and still achieve the same effect? Or does everything have to be raw?
Canned veggies are fine.
This article address everything that is wrong with ‘modern’ diet. However the the concept of ‘paleo diet’ is only a hypothesis because in reality nobody knows for sure the diet of a paleo man. All we can do at best is guess.
The closest example of a paleo man that we may know are tribal people who live in isolation from modern world either in amazon or africa or in some remote areas.
When you see these people on TV documentaries you will hardly find any obese man or women. In fact their men are mostly ripped (although not huge) without any hypertropy specific training. The reasons for this can be derived as follows:
- Low carb diet. Usually they are not farmers who grow grains. Any amount of carbs they eat may come from fruits available in the wild.
- High protein and fat. They eat everything of the animal, nothing is wasted including fat.
- Caloric cycling. Some days you eat more and some days less or even nothing. Not everyday you can get lucky in the hunt.
- No over eating because food is scare in the wild.
- Physical activity. Gathering of food requires quite an effort. So energy equation is balanced.
- Good rest. No electricty and no tv. Sleep after dark and rest well.
On the other hand modern life style is simply over indulgence in food that is high in both carbs and saturated fats. On top of that there is very little physical effort in all aspects of life except if you occupation involves physical work.
I’ll throw this out there for anybody to respond. I read the article, and it sounds pretty legitamite to me. But right now I’m trying to get really lean after the winter season of bulking. I’m currently 180 lbs (5′10″) and I’d like to get basically as lean as possible without losing too much muscle mass, maybe 170-175. I’ve never really been above 15% body fat and I’m currently about 10%. My goal is about 5% body fat, so I’ve started a diet of about 2000 calories a day, split 40/40/20, protein, carbs, and fats respectively. I lift heavy 4 days a week and run interval sprints twice a week and 5 miles twice a week. I feel hungry at night and parts of the day, but that’s to be expected, right? Should I be worried that I’m going to lose muscle with so few calories on an active diet? Or will the hard resistance training keep my muscle mass while cutting the fat (I use supplements to ensure I have at least 200 grams of protein a day)?
Hey Matt!!
Great post really great post !!!
i only want to ask you i am a skynny fat ecto with some stomach problems i think i suffer from gerd and also i think i have low stomach acid si if i follow you re diet where there are plenty of fats and i cannot digest them properly what do you think i should eat??
every carb i stuff in it makes me fat also if i try to loose fat my muscle are gone like i never was in the gym!!
with all that i have this damn stomach problems with trouble digesting proteins so i must eat verry small meals like 4 eggs, 1 whole and 3 whites with some coconut oil..that’s one meal think about it it is verry hard!!!
if i eat more i get really depressed and weak with n o energy…
what’s you re opinion??
tks verry much(i’m desperate)))