^ Suss link is suss.

It’s been years since I’ve had a good look at my abs, and right now I’m going full steam ahead to see them again.

I’ve cut and bulked a few times over the last 4 years. Ultimately it comes down to calories in vs calories out, however every little thing you do (both the conscious things you do like increase exercise/decrease calorie consumption; and the unconscious things you do like increase epinephrine/norepinephrine levels or decrease T3 levels) stacks into that equation in ways that are hard to predict.

There’s a lot of discussion in the fitness world about meal timing. Members here like Tony (CrazyOldMan) have a lot of good things to say about grazing (as Tony puts it, he has one meal per day, from which he occasionally takes breaks to exercise or sleep), and that worked well for me as a general way to eat to maintain body composition years ago. You do need to be eating the right types of food, though (grazing on burgers, chips and coke hasn’t worked well for anyone), in order for your appetite and energy needs to properly sync up.

On the other side of the coin, well-regarded bodybuilding nutrition experts such as Lyle McDonald and Alan Aragon can throw citations at you which indicate no metabolic advantage to lots of small meals per day over getting all your calories in a single sitting (the two most diametrically opposed styles of eating), provided total calories consumed are the same.

I’ve found that grazing doesn’t work so well for me when I’m actually trying to change body composition. When I want to gain weight, I need to build an appetite in order to eat enough, which is curbed by grazing; when I want to lose fat, I need to consume less than my appetite calls for, and so grazing will not be the comfortable, energising dietary habit that it’s promoted as. My first real cut was an unpleasant experience all day, every day, as I attempted to reduce the calorie input from every meal I ate while still eating 6 times a day. Portion control works well for a lot of people. For me, it just meant feeling under-fed every time I ate. I’ve found intermittent fasting (which is the cool, sexy, totez-healthy-sounding way of saying “skipping meals”), though perhaps not the most efficient or metabolically sensible method, allows me to remove the calories from my diet that I need to remove, while letting me actually feel full when I eat. I’m the kind of person who never feels adequately full after breakfast anyway (there have been countless times when I’ve eaten enough at breakfast where any more would make me spew, and literally 10min later my stomach is begging for more), so knocking 500kcal/day out of my diet by simply not eating breakfast isn’t much of a sacrifice to me.

I’m not saying you should do intermittent fasting. There do appear to be health benefits from occasional fasting (and it seems, from what I’ve seen, that several days in a row without food has more pronounced health benefits than simply reducing calories on a daily basis), but fasting for health or spiritual reasons does not equate to fasting being the best thing for fat loss. What I am saying is that you should find an eating structure you can adhere to daily, which allows you to eat a hypocaloric diet. The more nutritionally sound and metabolically advantageous, the better, but only insofar as you can actually be consistent with it.

Some basic tips:

– Consume sugar in the form of raw fruit and unflavoured milk (milk naturally contains sugar, although it isn’t sweet, because the sugar in it does not contain fructose).
– If unflavoured water or milk isn’t appealing, you’re not thirsty.
– Processed food typically (but not always) has added sugar, because it’s a cheap and tasty filler. If possible, go for fresh and raw ingredients, or buy food that has no added sugar.
– “Low fat” typically means “we took the fat out and replaced it with sugar.”
– Packaged food can be labeled “light” so long as it is light in some capacity: colour, flavour, texture, etc. It bears no reflection on the calorie content of the food.
– I’m not saying you can’t have too many vegetables, I’m just saying you should try.
– Meat is not the enemy. Dietary fat is not the enemy. Carbohydrates (especially unprocessed, complex carbohydrates) are not the enemy. Ultimately, it all comes down to calories in vs calories out.

With regards to exercise, anything that increases your daily physical activity will be of benefit. You’ll always see me recommending strength training over cardio for fat loss, however, because it’s not all about how many calories you can get rid of. That’s part of the equation, but another big part of the equation is letting your body know what it needs to KEEP. Cardio uses your muscles to a certain extent (you can’t move without them), but strength training really cements the need to maintain muscle mass. This means that if you have consistent strength training in your program, as your body goes “Oh crap, I don’t have enough energy coming in, I’d better get rid of something!” it will turn more to fat as its alternative source of energy than muscle mass. Your body should primarily turn to fat for energy in the event of a calorie deficit anyway, but this just skews things more in favour of that. So make sure strength training takes a priority in your training, and then do extra cardio if need be for something that burns some extra calories and is fairly easy to recover from.