Will this help me lose/gain weight?
Absolutely. Pridefit will help you reach your weight goals, but the "how" requires some explanation.
Regardless of if you're trying to gain weight or lose weight, everyone's goal should start exactly the same:
Let's start by learning about fat loss. In order to lose fat, we need to be burning more calories (calories out) each day than we consume (calories in). Many people misinterpret this statement as thinking that we need to exercise more in order to burn more calories than we eat, and this is generally unrealistic.
Even intense & extensive exercise routines only account for about 5-10% of our daily caloric expenditure per day, which means that we need to burn calories in other ways. One of the best ways to burn calories is to increase our basal metabolic rate (colloquially know as our metabolism) so that we passively burn more calories throughout the day._ The key to increasing our metabolism is to add more lean muscle mass to our frame - most effectively through weight training._
This all being said, people generally have better, more immediate results losing fat by focusing on decreasing the amount of calories theyâre consuming each day. Eating less (volume) or decreasing the amount of processed and calorically dense food we eat each day so that weâre consuming less calories than weâre burning, will be the most immediate way to burn fat.
Increasing our metabolism by adding more muscle to our frame through strength training is the best investment we can make in order to control our weight long term. If weâre looking for more immediate fat loss however, focusing on nutrition is going to be our best bet.
When we lose fat, we generally lose muscle mass as well. We can limit the amount of muscle mass we lose when in a caloric deficit by increasing our protein intake.
We donât get to choose where we lose fat. This is called âspot treatmentâ and it has been debunked in many research studies. We can do all the ab workouts in the world and our core will get stronger, but it wonât increase the likelihood of burning fat around your midsection faster. This is why we encourage full body workouts for people who are primarily concerned with reducing fat mass. It will burn the most calories in the workout, and encourage lean muscle growth all over your body for long term calorie burning.
Research shows that in order for a caloric deficit to be maintained it has to be enough of a deficit and not too much of a deficit. Again, if we arenât burning more calories than weâre consuming, we wonât lose weight. However, the research also shows that people who are in too much of a caloric deficit have a much higher likelihood of gaining back more weight after the diet.
Put simply, when weâre in too much of a deficit, our bodies take that as a signal that weâre starving. When your body gets the opportunity to eat again, it wonât just go back to your weight before, it might actually increase the number of fat cells you have in your body to protect against starvation in the future.
All this to say - the magic equation to fat loss can be summarized like this.
We must be eating less calories than we burn each day. Itâs important that your deficit is sustainable, yet moderately challenging.
We can prohibit the loss of lean muscle mass in the fat loss process by doing full body strength training and eating more protein.
The more lean muscle mass we have, the more calories we passively burn each day. The more calories we burn each day, the more we can eat without being in a caloric surplus (and adding fat mass/weight).
The most effective way to determine how many calories you burn each day (besides being measured in a lab) is to track your food and your weight for two weeks and approximate how many calories keeps you at homeostasis. We can also use online calorie expenditure calculators, but these are only going to give you a rough estimate of your calories burned each day with a lot of error.
I donât like to dwell too much on this kind of specificity unless youâve tried the following tactics and still havenât seen results. Here is how I suggest you reduce your calories without having to measure with a scale and an app:
- Decrease food volume
Use your plate to estimate a 20-30% reduction in total food. To me, this is the least painful option because it allows me to still eat the meals that I want, but just eat a small percentage less than I normally would.
- Increase non-calorically dense & high fiber foods
Vegetables, fruit, and protein are high in micronutrients, antioxidants, etc. but just as important, they keep you full for longer and aren't calorically dense. Generally, when we eat more of these foods, we eat less processed foods (that are calorically dense) simply because weâre not as hungry. If decreasing your food volume is incredibly painful to you, I suggest you focus more on increasing your vegetable, fruit, and protein intake. This increase in food can still decrease the amount of calories you consume each day by discouraging your appetite from craving processed foods.
- Grocery shop more, but the right way
The more you eat at home, the less likely you will be to overeat and eat foods that have more calories than you thought because someone else prepared it with fattier ingredients.
When you grocery shop, try to only bring home foods from the perimeter of the store. The occasional processed treat is fine, but the less processed food we have in the house, the more likely weâll be to eat less of it.
Reminder: what people consider "discipline" is actually a myth. Some of the âmost disciplinedâ people in the world have the same willpower as you or I. The difference is that they establish an environment where willpower isn't required. Set up your home environment so that willpower isnât required. Donât bring the processed foods in the house and youâll be less tempted by it. If you really want the ice cream cone, you can go and get it!
You should be using these broader tactics to reduce your daily calories first. If after three to four months youâre still gaining weight, then we may need to look into measuring our food more granularly so that we can find what part of your diet is contributing most to your caloric surplus.
Weâve learned how to be in a caloric deficit, now itâs time to learn about building muscle.
Building muscle is hard! In order to add lean muscle mass to our frame (which, again, should be everyone's goal), we have to create the perfect balance between these three factors:
Exercise Stimulus (Fitness)
Protein (Nutrition)
Quality Sleep (Recovery)
We have to tax our muscles so that the fibers break down and rebuild bigger and stronger. Without this external stimulus, our muscles will not grow. The more we break the muscle fibers down, the more they will grow and adapt. This adaptation means that we need to always be finding new exercises, weights, and intentions in order to continue breaking down these muscle fibers.
Once those muscles have been broken down, the process to rebuild those muscles bigger and stronger requires a lot of protein to be effective. If we have an adequate exercise stimulus and break down our muscles, but we donât consume adequate protein, the recovery and muscle growth process will be hindered. This isnât to say that exercise is a waste if we donât get enough protein each day, but itâs not going to be as good a use of time and energy without adequate daily protein. We should be aiming for 0.7g of protein per pound of bodyweight.
Giving our bodies enough time between workouts and getting consistent 7-9 hours of sleep is necessary to encourage the muscle building process. Over-training makes it so that our bodies donât have the time/energy to utilize our protein intake and rebuild our muscles. A lack of sleep and/or bad quality sleep prohibits the release of human growth hormone (HGH), which in turn limits the amount of muscle re-building that will happen in the body. Just like our protein intake, lacking quality recovery wonât make your exercise pointless, but it can lead to burnout, injury, and limited results.
To wrap this up, I want to touch on whether you can lose fat and gain muscle at the same time - a very common question I get!
The answer is sometimes, but Iâll say that it isnât something that you should expect. The best way for you to encourage "body recomposition" is by eating in a caloric deficit, strength training, eating enough protein, and recovering properly between workouts. The research is still mixed as to why and when this process happens, but it does seem to be more common for people who have a lot of fat mass to lose.
Little caveat: I understand why people ask this question, but itâs just another example of people looking for a shortcut in health where none exist. The sooner you can stop chasing shortcuts and resign yourself to the fact that your health is going to be a lifelong process, the less resentful (and more effective) youâll be.
The only shortcut we have in fitness and health is consistency. Small habits done over a long period of time get us the results we want.
Regardless of if you're trying to gain weight or lose weight, everyone's goal should start exactly the same:
How do we increase our lean muscle mass?
Let's start by learning about fat loss. In order to lose fat, we need to be burning more calories (calories out) each day than we consume (calories in). Many people misinterpret this statement as thinking that we need to exercise more in order to burn more calories than we eat, and this is generally unrealistic.
Even intense & extensive exercise routines only account for about 5-10% of our daily caloric expenditure per day, which means that we need to burn calories in other ways. One of the best ways to burn calories is to increase our basal metabolic rate (colloquially know as our metabolism) so that we passively burn more calories throughout the day._ The key to increasing our metabolism is to add more lean muscle mass to our frame - most effectively through weight training._
This all being said, people generally have better, more immediate results losing fat by focusing on decreasing the amount of calories theyâre consuming each day. Eating less (volume) or decreasing the amount of processed and calorically dense food we eat each day so that weâre consuming less calories than weâre burning, will be the most immediate way to burn fat.
Increasing our metabolism by adding more muscle to our frame through strength training is the best investment we can make in order to control our weight long term. If weâre looking for more immediate fat loss however, focusing on nutrition is going to be our best bet.
There are a couple of caveats about fat loss that I want to bring to your attention:
When we lose fat, we generally lose muscle mass as well. We can limit the amount of muscle mass we lose when in a caloric deficit by increasing our protein intake.
We donât get to choose where we lose fat. This is called âspot treatmentâ and it has been debunked in many research studies. We can do all the ab workouts in the world and our core will get stronger, but it wonât increase the likelihood of burning fat around your midsection faster. This is why we encourage full body workouts for people who are primarily concerned with reducing fat mass. It will burn the most calories in the workout, and encourage lean muscle growth all over your body for long term calorie burning.
Research shows that in order for a caloric deficit to be maintained it has to be enough of a deficit and not too much of a deficit. Again, if we arenât burning more calories than weâre consuming, we wonât lose weight. However, the research also shows that people who are in too much of a caloric deficit have a much higher likelihood of gaining back more weight after the diet.
Put simply, when weâre in too much of a deficit, our bodies take that as a signal that weâre starving. When your body gets the opportunity to eat again, it wonât just go back to your weight before, it might actually increase the number of fat cells you have in your body to protect against starvation in the future.
All this to say - the magic equation to fat loss can be summarized like this.
In order to promote fat loss:
We must be eating less calories than we burn each day. Itâs important that your deficit is sustainable, yet moderately challenging.
We can prohibit the loss of lean muscle mass in the fat loss process by doing full body strength training and eating more protein.
The more lean muscle mass we have, the more calories we passively burn each day. The more calories we burn each day, the more we can eat without being in a caloric surplus (and adding fat mass/weight).
How can we be in a caloric deficit without counting calories?
The most effective way to determine how many calories you burn each day (besides being measured in a lab) is to track your food and your weight for two weeks and approximate how many calories keeps you at homeostasis. We can also use online calorie expenditure calculators, but these are only going to give you a rough estimate of your calories burned each day with a lot of error.
I donât like to dwell too much on this kind of specificity unless youâve tried the following tactics and still havenât seen results. Here is how I suggest you reduce your calories without having to measure with a scale and an app:
- Decrease food volume
Use your plate to estimate a 20-30% reduction in total food. To me, this is the least painful option because it allows me to still eat the meals that I want, but just eat a small percentage less than I normally would.
- Increase non-calorically dense & high fiber foods
Vegetables, fruit, and protein are high in micronutrients, antioxidants, etc. but just as important, they keep you full for longer and aren't calorically dense. Generally, when we eat more of these foods, we eat less processed foods (that are calorically dense) simply because weâre not as hungry. If decreasing your food volume is incredibly painful to you, I suggest you focus more on increasing your vegetable, fruit, and protein intake. This increase in food can still decrease the amount of calories you consume each day by discouraging your appetite from craving processed foods.
- Grocery shop more, but the right way
The more you eat at home, the less likely you will be to overeat and eat foods that have more calories than you thought because someone else prepared it with fattier ingredients.
When you grocery shop, try to only bring home foods from the perimeter of the store. The occasional processed treat is fine, but the less processed food we have in the house, the more likely weâll be to eat less of it.
Reminder: what people consider "discipline" is actually a myth. Some of the âmost disciplinedâ people in the world have the same willpower as you or I. The difference is that they establish an environment where willpower isn't required. Set up your home environment so that willpower isnât required. Donât bring the processed foods in the house and youâll be less tempted by it. If you really want the ice cream cone, you can go and get it!
You should be using these broader tactics to reduce your daily calories first. If after three to four months youâre still gaining weight, then we may need to look into measuring our food more granularly so that we can find what part of your diet is contributing most to your caloric surplus.
How to gain muscle:
Weâve learned how to be in a caloric deficit, now itâs time to learn about building muscle.
Building muscle is hard! In order to add lean muscle mass to our frame (which, again, should be everyone's goal), we have to create the perfect balance between these three factors:
Exercise Stimulus (Fitness)
Protein (Nutrition)
Quality Sleep (Recovery)
Exercise stimulus:
We have to tax our muscles so that the fibers break down and rebuild bigger and stronger. Without this external stimulus, our muscles will not grow. The more we break the muscle fibers down, the more they will grow and adapt. This adaptation means that we need to always be finding new exercises, weights, and intentions in order to continue breaking down these muscle fibers.
Protein:
Once those muscles have been broken down, the process to rebuild those muscles bigger and stronger requires a lot of protein to be effective. If we have an adequate exercise stimulus and break down our muscles, but we donât consume adequate protein, the recovery and muscle growth process will be hindered. This isnât to say that exercise is a waste if we donât get enough protein each day, but itâs not going to be as good a use of time and energy without adequate daily protein. We should be aiming for 0.7g of protein per pound of bodyweight.
Recovery:
Giving our bodies enough time between workouts and getting consistent 7-9 hours of sleep is necessary to encourage the muscle building process. Over-training makes it so that our bodies donât have the time/energy to utilize our protein intake and rebuild our muscles. A lack of sleep and/or bad quality sleep prohibits the release of human growth hormone (HGH), which in turn limits the amount of muscle re-building that will happen in the body. Just like our protein intake, lacking quality recovery wonât make your exercise pointless, but it can lead to burnout, injury, and limited results.
To wrap this up, I want to touch on whether you can lose fat and gain muscle at the same time - a very common question I get!
The answer is sometimes, but Iâll say that it isnât something that you should expect. The best way for you to encourage "body recomposition" is by eating in a caloric deficit, strength training, eating enough protein, and recovering properly between workouts. The research is still mixed as to why and when this process happens, but it does seem to be more common for people who have a lot of fat mass to lose.
Little caveat: I understand why people ask this question, but itâs just another example of people looking for a shortcut in health where none exist. The sooner you can stop chasing shortcuts and resign yourself to the fact that your health is going to be a lifelong process, the less resentful (and more effective) youâll be.
The only shortcut we have in fitness and health is consistency. Small habits done over a long period of time get us the results we want.
Updated on: 17/10/2024
Thank you!