How To Safely Manage a Caloric Deficit for Fat Loss

There are lots of reasons why someone may want to lose fat that aren’t driven by diet culture. If fat loss is part of your journey, as it was part of mine, and will again in the weeks before my bodybuilding competitions, then I want to support you. I want to make sure you know how to do it safely and effectively to reach your goals.

Fat loss through caloric restriction is not without risk. It can disrupt your hormones. It can disrupt your sleep. It can disrupt your ability to focus. You can lose muscle. And it may change your metabolism.

Fat loss through the process of body recomposition does not lead to these adverse consequences. I’ll write about body recomposition at some point as it is greatly misunderstood, even amongst personal trainers.

Regardless of fat loss method, I don’t recommend you begin on this journey until you’ve focused on NEAT for at least 3 months. However, the longer you focus on NEAT, the better.

Now onto the stuff to know!

The Hardest Part for Some: Eat More Home-Cooked Meals

For some, not cooking is the biggest barrier to reaching their goals. But it’s necessary. Even if you eat at restaurants that bill themselves as healthy alternatives, many still use unnecessarily large amounts of added salt and fat.

This also means packing lunches and snacks for work. Very importantly, it also means not skipping breakfast. If you eat a good breakfast packed with protein, healthy fats and fibre, your hunger will be more manageable throughout the day. What does a good breakfast look like? For me, when I’m in a deficit, it means Red River cereal, fruit, 2% Greek yogurt, and three large cups of coffee with milk and stevia: two of those cups with collagen and one of those cups with Fibre 4 for my IBS-M.

You don’t have to cook all your meals, but it should be the vast majority.

Make the Math Easy

Work in metric. It makes the whole thing a lot easier because a 100 kcal per day deficit equals about 0.1 kg per week weight loss. It’s not an exact conversion but it’s close enough to make it super easy to figure out your deficits.

Needed Tools That Come with Risks

The below tools may be harmful for people with a history of disordered eating or are prone to compulsive thoughts and perfectionism. If you do not have the mental toolbox to challenge the distorted thinking that will come up, then I suggest now is not the time to start a fat loss journey through a caloric deficit.

You could always do this without that mental toolbox and instead do it on vibes and how your clothes fit, but then you risk losing too much too fast which could cause unwanted changes in your metabolism. Body recomposition is a much safer route if you do not have the necessary tools and supports.

Daily Weigh-ins

You need to know your average weight over time. Daily weigh-ins, after you’ve woken up and emptied your bladder and before you eat or drink, will be needed to get a true average and let you know if you are on the right path because body weight fluctuates from day to day. It is normal for these fluctuations to be over 1 kg (2.2 lbs) per day.

If you weigh yourself once a week or twice a week, you may catch yourself on a day that you are holding water which could lead you to think you’re not making progress, which then could lead to an additional cut in calories, which could lead to changes to your metabolism.

Tip: If you’re worried about the psychological effects of daily weigh-ins, some smart scales, such as all Withings scales, will hide your weight while you’re on the scale. Pick a day each week to check your average weight in the Withings app.

Calore Counter – Cronometer

Counting calories suck. We can all agree on that. Unfortunately, it is part of the process for successful fat loss when using caloric deficits. But Cronometer Gold makes it easier.

Cronometer has the largest database of food, including popular restaurant chains, and uses the most accurate sources for nutrient contents of whole foods. If the barcode scanner doesn’t recognize a food, you can add it and Cronometer will update its database. It also calculates the thermic effect of foods and allows you to customize pretty much every aspect of your energy and nutrient needs. Email me at jules at julessherred.com if you want $5.00 off a year’s subscription.

Kitchen Scale

While Cronometer allows you to track calories by guestimating the size of whole foods, that is not ideal. Many people underestimate the size of portions, causing them to go over on their caloric budgets. Then there are people like me who overestimate and end up in deficits that are not safe.

While weighing food is a huge pain in the ass, you don’t have to do it every meal if you’ve embraced the joys of batch cooking. All you need to do is create a custom recipe in Cronometer with the appropriate serving numbers. You don’t need to weigh each portion before storing if they look relatively equal. This is because, regardless of if your goal is to be in a deficit, at maintenance, or in a surplus, your weekly caloric average is more important than the day-to-day ins and outs. The averages of those meals will work itself out in the wash.

Fitness Trackers – Fitbit

A fitness tracker is a great tool to help you figure out your caloric needs while you’re in the data gathering prep period. Fitbit is the best in my experiences because it also tracks your NEAT, while the majority do not.

For many people, it over-calculates caloric burn. For some people, like me, it undercounts. That is why the previous tools are also needed. Once you have enough data from Fitbit and your scale to figure out how many calories you burn on average during the week, you can create those custom needs in Cronometer. I cannot recommend the Pixel watch enough.

How to math this math will need to be its own post.

Before You Begin, You Need a Prep Period

At least one month before you begin, you need to start tracking what you eat. You need to see where your calories are coming from and to figure out what will be your easy food swaps without the need to restrict foods. Be honest during this period. Weigh things. In Canada, you can find nutritional information for all major restaurant chains on their websites.

As already mentioned, Cronometer can help you guestimate portions, but then you risk being over or under your deficit goals. If you are under, you may think you’re failing and give up. If you are over, then you risk unsafe amounts of fat loss. Not doing a prep period and not being honest about what you’re eating is one of the reasons many people are unsuccessful when doing an unrestricted calories in/out approach.

How Much of a Deficit Do You Need?

The smaller the better, really, because immediate results and ease will keep you going and you’ll have long-term success. For this example, I’m going to use someone who weighs 100 kgs (220 lbs) for an easy math demonstration.

A good guideline to follow is no more than one per cent of current body weight. So, if you weigh 100 kg (220 lbs), that would be a deficit of 1000 kcals per week. But 0.5 to 0.75 per cent of bodyweight is far more manageable. Start at 250 kcals then slowly increase that deficit until you reach one per cent of bodyweight, if you want to really push things. Stop before hitting one per cent of bodyweight if your performance starts to suffer. This includes job and life performance – loss in concentration, trouble sleeping, etc.

For most people, I like to recommend no more than 500 kcals per week because it’s easy to accomplish without huge changes to how you eat. Plus, A loss at the rate of 0.5 kg (1.1 lbs) per week will mentally feel like nothing and you’ll quickly see results when looking in the mirror. Ideally, a low and slow approach of a 250 kcal per week deficit sets someone up for the best chance of success.

For How Long Should You Be in a Deficit?

This depends on your starting weight. But a good guideline to follow is no more than 10 per cent of starting body weight at a time or for no more than 13 weeks at a time, whatever comes first. After that, you’re at greater risk for metabolic adaptations that may be too difficult to overcome. You also risk it becoming psychologically difficult. Remember, this is all about easy, sustainable wins.

Protein. Protein. Protein.

When planning what you eat, it is important to prioritize protein to maintain and build muscle.

For both fat loss and muscle growth, protein is the most important macro. How much you need depends on many factors, all of which are broken down here. Meeting your protein needs is much easier when you break up your daily meals into five sittings, which could look like:

• Breakfast: A whole grain cereal and Greek yogurt with some fruit.
• Morning snack: A light snack with 5-10 grams of protein totally helps. You can get this with some fruit and a granola bar.
• Lunch: Try to get around 30-50 grams of protein here.
• Late Afternoon: A fruit smoothie with whey isolate protein powder. Please don’t punish yourself by drinking that stuff with only water.
• Dinner: Another 30-50 grams of protein here.
• Dessert: Can add another 5-10 grams of protein depending on what you go for.

All of this will easily give you 140 – 170 grams of protein in a way that is easily ingestible and digestible.

Beware of the False Weight Loss and False Plateaus

When you begin, you’re likely to lose a lot of weight fast: more than 1 kg per week. In the first couple of weeks, most of this comes from water loss because you’ve reduced carbs. If after three weeks, you are still losing more than a 1 kg per week, then you’re likely in too much of a deficit and you should increase your calories.

If you are also doing strength training, you may experience false plateaus as your body begins to gain muscle. Muscle the size of a fist weighs more than fat of the same volume. So, you can lose four fists of fat and gain two of muscle, which will make you smaller while the number on the scale stays the same. This is body recomposition. Remember, the goal is to lose fat, not weight. If you are getting smaller, then you’re on the right track!

Then What?

When you are a couple weeks out from your goal, it’s time to slowly increase calories. You will still lose fat. I was steadily increasing my calories when I went from 15% body fat to just under 10%. After a longer than safe deficit period, I was lucky that my metabolism did not slow down, and it continued to be the furnace it was before I gained weight because of a medication I was on.

To find your new maintenance needs, increase calories by 150 kcals every two weeks until your weight stabilizes. If you find after your last increase you’ve gained weight, then decrease by 50 kcals every two weeks until your weekly averages are unchanged.

If you haven’t reached your big goal, live at maintenance for at least two months before you enter another deficit. Also, don’t go into a slight surplus to gain muscle for the same period. You need the break. You also need to learn how to live at maintenance. Hardly anyone talks about how this looks, which leads people to think they need to eat the way they did while in a deficit forever. Next post will be about living at maintenance.

Cutting Through the Noise of Failure Rates

Everyone likes to cite one specific study to say that dieting never works because you’ll just gain it back and more. The problem is, they haven’t read beyond a headline.

The meta-analysis everyone cites is based on people who would be classified as medically obese and who lost over 36 kg (80 lbs); not those who want to lose 18 kg (40 lbs). Now, if you do fall into the medically obese category or if you want to lose more than 18 kg, I’m not saying it’s hopeless because there’s more! This cited study had subjects who were at huge deficits for prolonged periods, without breaks, and they never received support to learn how to eat at maintenance.

One of the key conclusions was that this weight regain is most likely the result of the fact that the subjects didn’t have the needed support and education to know how to eat at maintenance. It also concluded that prolonged deficits likely contributed to failure because of metabolic adaptations.

With shorter deficit periods with maintenance period breaks, smaller deficits, plus education and support to learn how to eat at maintenance, which includes fun foods, the likelihood of success is far more likely.

I hope this helps! If you have any questions, please leave a comment below or email me!