“Hi! This is Abel from Holland. I have a question with regards to my diet approach. I’ve been trying to get a sixpack for at least 1,5 years now, and it’s seems to have drained my willpower enough now that I cannot sustain my ‘diet’ for a week without fucking it up and binging. My tdee would be 2200 so Id try to eat at 1700 but I simply cannot sustain it. Ive tried keto, carnivore and Snake diet but Im done searching for the fast fat loss results and want some success in 6 months time… How would you approach this?”
You’re the second Dutch person to come to me with this kind of problem (what is it with you guys?)
My solution is always the same. If you’ve been dieting for a long time, and everything just becomes insanely hard, it’s because your metabolism has dropped AND your hunger hormones are all over the place.
Your body is panicking, and you need to calm it down.
How?
You have to do it gradually. Because what a lot of people do is they hear this advice, and then instantly jack up their carbs (and often sugar/junk food), and they store it all as fat, because their body is primed to do this after cutting for such a long time.
The goal isn’t to store, the goal is to de-stress.
Gradually increase total calories (some of which can come from carbs), and gradually decrease cardio. This will lower the stress hormones, increase testosterone, and stabilise both cravings AND hunger.
Specifically, I would increase your daily calorie intake by 200 the first week (25g of carbs, the rest is up to you), then another 100 the week after (another 25g of carbs). You don’t want to push the car increase too early. Then for the fourth week, potentially look at another 100 calories, only if necessary.
You must be disciplined here. No alcohol. No junk food. The goal is to recover, without binging and getting fat again.
Once this recovery process is complete, you can get back into a deficit AFTERWARDS. Do it now, and you’ll make it even worse.
Good luck.
“I’ve been doing a ~25-30% deficit, I noticed you said 10-15, is it unhealthy to do that big a deficit or is it just so people don’t feel like they’re starving themselves and resort to binging?”
10-15% is the figure I use for guys who want to get leaner in the most enjoyable way possible, which fits in nicely with my overall philosophy. If you tie this into your Intermittent Fasting eating structure and lifestyle, it makes for very easy fat loss, which makes it sustainable.
Unsustainable fat loss is pretty much THE big reason to the vast majority of the dieting population losing weight and regaining it all back (and much more, often).
Unless you are obese, I wouldn’t recommend going beyond 15% body fat, for this reason.
It has nothing to do with health (although indirectly it does), it’s because you don’t have good odds of sustaining the lifestyle changes long-term.
Unless you’re about to drop dead of a heart attack, focus on the long-term.
“Bro I STRUGGLE at pull ups that I avoid them. Should I start doing some everyday?”
Pull-ups are a very sought-after movement with men, and rightly so. Nothing displays raw physical relative (to bodyweight) strength, than pull-ups.
If you currently can’t do one, or can only do a few, then there’s TWO MASSIVE strategies that work every single damn time, without fail.
As he correctly guessed, one of them is to do them every day.
On an assisted machine.
You see, you COULD do them on a normal pull up bar, and only do the eccentric part of the movement (using a step to get yourself higher). But you are forever limited as to how many reps you can do, and logistically speaking, most people won’t get huge amount of volume (or practise) in.
The solution?
Use assisted machines, and start doing higher rep sets, and do them every day.
Then you can gradually decrease the assistance and before you know it, you’ll be a pull-up king.
The second strategy?
It is of course, to lose body fat. The less fat you have, the less fat you need to pull up with you. The resistance goes down, your relative strength goes up. This is where IF will be a life-saver for you.
Good luck on your pull-up journey!