New rules to lose body fat

OUR SOCIETY IS QUICK TO explain body size with a word that most of us don’t

understand—metabolism.
You’ve probably heard statements like, “I have a slow metabolism so it’s hard for me to lose
weight,” or “I have a naturally fast metabolism so I burn off anything I eat.” No two people will lose
body fat at the same rate for an extended period of time. Some will have an easier time losing body
fat and preparing for a bodybuilding competition; others will grind it out week after week and see
very minimal changes. But no matter what kind of natural resting metabolism you have, you can
dramatically affect it through your diet, exercise, and other lifestyle choices.
The dieting bodybuilder will soon learn that what he or she eats, when he or she chows it down,
how much is eaten, and the total calories consumed will all have a profound effect on the ability to
burn fat at an advanced rate—the ultimate goal. The successful bodybuilder is in control of the
metabolism because of a control of diet. In the dieting section of this book you will learn to use your
diet to manipulate how fast you transform your physique.
The more aware you are of the effect of food and exercise on the landscape of your body, the
greater ability you will have to make the necessary changes from week to week to elevate your
metabolism to new levels, even when dieting. Undergoing a bodybuilding diet is a slow, grueling
process that when done correctly will shed body fat and bring your metabolism to peak levels.

How Dieting Affects Metabolic Rate

Eating fewer calories than your body needs is the first step to losing weight. Everyone knows that.
However, if it’s not done correctly, calorie restriction can cause the body to do exactly what you
don’t want it to do—store fat. That’s something you certainly cannot have when you are preparing
your physique to be judged on stage.
As a bodybuilder, it is essential to maintain lean muscle mass and avoid muscle loss. This is a
crucial balancing act that you must master in order to bring your best physique to the competition. The
danger in dieting is that your body is capable of burning calories through catabolizing other tissues,
even your muscle tissue. For a dieting bodybuilder, retaining muscle is not only important to enabling
you to build your best-looking physique, but it’s paramount to increasing metabolism, strength, and
energy levels throughout the process of getting lean. And, frankly, that goes for anyone who is trying
to build a lean, healthy body. Finding that balance will be the key to success. These rules will help
guide you.

Rule 1. Find Your Body Type

The first step in creating the proper nutrition plan for you is determining how many calories your
body needs to maintain muscle while burning body fat. And you need to determine the optimum
combination of the macronutrients protein, carbohydrate, and fat.
The number of fat cells we are genetically dealt play a significant role in how much fat we carry on
our bodies, and this varies greatly from person to person. Although anyone can lose or gain weight
with the right plan, genetics can make one bodybuilder’s journey to get lean easier, and another’s
much more difficult. That’s why it’s important for a bodybuilder transitioning into a contest prep diet
to know his or her body type.
Humans typically fall into one of three body types, or somatotypes: ectomorph, mesomorph, and
endomorph. Determining yours will allow you to understand how efficiently your body processes
carbohydrates, a key component to losing body fat. In addition, this will allow you to determine the
optimum way to structure your diet in terms of protein, carbohydrate, and fat; meal frequency; meal
spacing; and cardio training. Find your body type below.

MAN IN THE MIRROR: WHICH SOMATOTYPE ARE YOU
?

Ectomorph
 An ectomorphic somatotype is naturally thin with skinny limbs with stringy muscles. Think of a
person whose body type resembles that of an endurance athlete. These are the people whose body is
thyroid dominant—meaning they have a fast metabolism and a higher carbohydrate tolerance.
Growing up I found myself in this category but knew nothing about it. For me it would have been
easier to eat more carbohydrates, but instead I found myself consuming all things protein.
Characteristics:

 •Small frame and bone structure
•Thin
•Long and stringy muscles
•Flat chest
•Thin shoulders with little width
•Difficult to gain weight
•Fast metabolism
Usually ectomorphs find it very difficult to gain weight because of their fast metabolisms. Ectomorphs
can usually lose body fat easily with small changes to diet though, making it extra difficult to hold on
to valuable lean muscle mass.
Mesomorph

The mesomorphic body is naturally muscular. The people with an athletic frame find it easier to build
muscle because they tend to be testosterone and growth-hormone dominant—meaning they tend to
hold on to lean muscle although they gain fat more easily than ectomorphs.

Characteristics:
•Naturally muscular
•Athletic
•Strong
•Well-defined muscles
•Rectangular-shaped physique
•Easy to gain muscle
•Easier to gain body fat than ectomorphs

The mesomorph body type is a great platform for a bodybuilder or physique competitor. Mesomorphs
naturally have larger muscle that can easily be built upon.

Endomorph
 A endomorphic somatotype is naturally broad and thick. The main characteristics are being insulin
dominant, having a slow metabolic rate, and low carbohydrate tolerance. Their body structure is one
of a wider waist and larger bone structure. They are heavily muscled yet carry extra body fat around
the midsection.

Characteristics:
•Soft round body
•Shorter “stocky” build
•Round physique
•Thick arms and legs
•Difficult to lose body fat •Slow metabolism
Because of the endomorph’s low carbohydrate tolerance and insulin-dominant characteristics, they
often find it very difficult to lose body fat, especially in the central region (abdominal and lower
back).

The Body Type Hybrid
Have you figured out your basic body type? Good. Now, keep this in mind: Your body type may
change as you get further along in the dieting process. There will be periods of time when you may
feel like you could classify your body type as something different. A person’s lifestyle can alter what
may have been their natural body type and create a hybrid body type.
That’s what happened to me. I grew up as a true ectomorph, but through strength training I
increased my muscle mass, so my body resembles more of an ecto-mesomorph today. This hybrid
body type presents some challenges and opportunities when it comes to my diet.
During the early stages of my contest preparation, I consume much lower levels of carbohydrates
than when I’m further along in the dieting process. I do this to speed my way to becoming lean
because I’m closer to the true mesomorph body type at that point. I’ll eat closer to the way I do during
“off-season” from competition prep. I consume fewer but larger meals spaced further apart. Later on,
when I’m in the heat of competition training, my body’s true genetic makeup peaks, and I find myself
transformed into more of an ecto-mesomorph (athletic and muscular, yet still on the thin side). As
such, I’ll alter my diet toward smaller, more frequent meals, and more carbohydrates—nearly double
the carbs I was originally eating.
You may be like me. Or you may find that midway through your contest preparation your body has
shifted into endo-mesomorph mode (someone who is heavily muscled and carries extra body fat
around the midsection).
This commingling of body types is a natural course of your journey. Where I became a hybrid of an
ectomorph and mesomorph through my eating and exercise habits, someone can also be a natural
ectomorph who due to years of inactivity and poor food choices might have developed poor insulin
sensitivity and carbohydrate tolerance resulting in a mixture of an ectomorph and a mesomorph.

Rule 2. Know Yourself
Two endomorphs can have significantly different fat cells. This makes a competition between two
bodybuilders of the same weight all that more interesting because both of these athletes have most
likely taken entirely different diet and cardio exercise paths to prepare for their competition.
Although knowing your body type is important, so is understanding how your body metabolizes
food. You can gain that understanding by looking at your past history of weight loss and weight gain.
Just because your body is shaped more like an endomorph, doesn’t mean you should eat like an
 endomorph. Get to know how your body responds to various stages

Rule 3. Manage Your Carbs

Probably the most effective law of getting lean is controlling your carbohydrate intake. Do it right,
and you will lose body fat faster, spare your hard-earned muscle, and control your energy levels—the
hat trick of bodybuilding prep. In order to do this, it helps to understand how your body processes
carbohydrates. While limiting calories is the first step toward losing body fat, it only will come with
a decrease in carbohydrates.
Through the digestion process, carbohydrates are converted into glucose. How long this takes
depends on the complexity of the carbohydrates consumed. High-glycemic carbs (simple carbs) are
metabolized quickly; low-glycemic carbs (complex carbs) are metabolized slowly. When you eat too
many of either type of carbohydrate or even a small bit of high-glycemic carbs, your blood sugar rises
rapidly. This leads to insulin being released, so that the level of insulin in the body spikes above
normal levels. Excess insulin causes glucose that isn’t used by your body for energy to be stored as
body fat. If you dramatically reduce your carbohydrate intake, your blood sugar levels will drop
considerably, causing fatigue, hunger, cravings, low energy, and a crashing feeling. Since your body
is retrieving or storing energy meal by meal, carbohydrate management is critically important for the
bodybuilder.

In this program, I’ll show you how to plan your meals to properly manage your carbohydrate intake
throughout the dieting process and to increase your body’s metabolic rate.

Rule 4. Give Yourself Enough Time
The perfect diet doesn’t exist. What works for one person may not work for another. As a
bodybuilder you will be constantly tweaking your diet from week to week to get lean and stage ready;
you will be a work in progress. To be successful, the best thing you can do is start earlier, rather than
later. Many bodybuilders rush to get their bodies ready for “game day,” failing to give themselves
enough time, specifically enough weeks, to be prepared and lean enough early on. By planning ahead
to allow adequate time to lose weight, you will be dieting safely and that will lead to having your
best physique ready on competition day.
As a general guide, a safe amount of time for any bodybuilder is 16 to 24 weeks. Your body type
will determine your optimum time frame, but remember, the more time you have the better, because
sufficient time allows room for error and for setbacks. Here are the optimal time frames for each
body type:
Ectomorph: 10–16 weeks
Mesomorph: 16–22 weeks
Endomorph: 22–28 weeks

Most bodybuilders associate dieting with minimal carbohydrates, tons of cardio, and low energy.
These elements may indeed come into play. The key here is to give yourself more than enough time to
transform your body in the early stages. As your body approaches the final weeks of the dieting
process—if you prepared early enough—you will be able to gradually increase carbohydrate intake,
allowing your metabolic rate to increase. As any avid iron pumper will tell you, more food means
more strength and energy during training, which is crucial right before competition.

How Much Fat Should You Expect to Lose?
Most men should count on losing 1 to 1.5 pounds of body weight per week during the dieting
process. A longer dieting program provides you with the opportunity to increase calories later in the
contest preparation, leading to more muscle fullness and increased body-fat loss.
I learned this trick as an amateur bodybuilder by reading old issues of Natural Bodybuilding and
Fitness magazine and comparing my physique to pictures of WNBF pros. I noticed that those pros
would give themselves several more weeks of preparation time than the 12 weeks that most
bodybuilders (including me at the time) allotted for dieting.
If you are currently 15 to 20 pounds away from your anticipated competition weight, you may want
to start to clean up your diet before giving yourself a certain number of allocated weeks of contest
preparation. The goal for many competitive professional natural bodybuilders is to stay within 10 to
15 pounds of their contest weight in the off-season. For those of you sitting outside that range, a
bodybuilding competition is not out of the question, you just need to give yourself more time to be
ready. I’d love to tell you that you can consistently lose 2 to 3 pounds a week during the dieting
process, but you won’t. Make time your friend in the bodybuilding process

.Rule 5. Track Calories to Lower Body-Fat Percentage

A bodybuilder’s end goal is to take body-fat percentage to the lowest possible level, while
maintaining muscle mass. Tracking your overall calorie intake and your consumption of the proper
amounts of macronutrients is a critical step toward reducing your body fat.
Before you can monitor your food intake, you need determine your caloric baseline, that is, the
approximate amount of energy (calories) you require to maintain your current weight, assuming you
do no exercise. To find that number you must know your current body-fat percentage (BFP) and lean
body mass (LBM). Your BFP is a good measure of your fitness, and it’s determined by dividing your
total body weight by the total weight of the fat on your frame. Lean body mass (or weight) is the
weight of your bones, muscles, and organs—everything that isn’t fat. There are various ways to figureout these values.Body-fat percentage is difficult to determine because it requires some technology. Underwater
weighing, in which the volume of water displaced by your body is subtracted from the weight of the
displaced water, is one of the most accurate. A newer method is a DEXA (dual-energy X-ray
absorptiometry) scan, which measures body composition and bone-mineral density. Both are
expensive procedures. More affordable and accessible are the body-fat measurements offered at
many gyms using body-fat scales, or calipers, that measure the folds of fat at several points on your
body. These are not highly accurate but can give you a usable ballpark figure. If you don’t have
calipers and you’re itching to know your body-fat percentage right now, here’s a simple, low-tech
(albeit not very accurate) test:
you need to consume per day to maintain your current weight if you do no exercise. You will use your
caloric baseline to help figure out how many calories to trim from your diet, taking into consideration
your activity level, to lose weight.

DETERMINING CALORIC BASELINE BY YOUR LEAN BODY MASS

Current Body Fat Daily Calorie Intake
6–12 percent 17 calories per pound of LBM
12.1–15 percent 16 calories per pound of LBM
15.1–19 percent 15 calories per pound of LBM
19.1–22 percent 14 calories per pound of LBM
22.1 percent or above 13 calories per pound of LBM

As the chart above shows, a man with a body fat percentage of 15 would determine his caloric
baseline by multiplying 16 calories per pound of lean body mass.
A 180-pound man with 15 percent body fat, as we calculated earlier, has a LBM of 153 pounds. So
he would multiply 16 calories by 153 to get a daily caloric baseline of 2,448 calories.
Don’t be confused: The figure 2,448 is not the man’s daily calorie consumption if he has a desire to
either gain or lose weight. Instead it is the base number of calories required to maintain that 180-
pound weight. If the man wishes to drop 1 pound of body weight per week, this individual would
have to create a daily caloric deficit of 500 calories either through diet, calorie burn through
exercise, or some combination of both. Why 500? Because 500 calories x 7 days = 3,500 calories, or
1 pound of body weight. To lose more than 1 pound per week, he will need to create a bigger daily
calorie deficit.

Determining Daily Caloric Intake for Your Diet

Remember, a caloric baseline of 2,700 calories is not the number of calories that this mesomorph
will eat daily if he wants to lose weight. To lose weight, he will have to create a calorie deficit
below his caloric baseline. The easiest way to create a calorie deficit is through a combination of
calorie restriction and calorie burning via cardio exercise.
For a dieting bodybuilder the ultimate goal is to lose 1.5 pounds per week. As a general rule, you
can expect 80 percent of that weight to come from calorie restriction and 20 percent from exercise—
1.2 pounds from dieting; 0.3 pound from cardiovascular workout. (A typical cardio session will burn
about 350 calories.) Since cardio is very catabolic, you want to lose most of your weight from dieting
to spare the expense of your muscle.
Caloric Intake Equation:
Caloric baseline total – 600 = caloric intake
In order to lose the 1.2 pounds of body fat per week (our 80 percent goal), we would create a caloric
deficit of 600 calories. Using our calorie baseline, we would get 2,700 – 600 = 2,100 calories as a
starting point for our daily calorie goal. This number would be monitored and adjusted as necessary
during the dieting phases. The overall goal during the diet is to increase the quantity of food as the
bodybuilder becomes further entrenched in the contest preparation process, but this is where that 180-
pound mesomorph needs to start in order to reduce his body-fat percentage.
This may sound like a lot to calculate and to monitor, but it’s really not. Once you begin, it will
become second nature. Also, remember that you will be tweaking your calorie intake according to
how your body feels, looks in the mirror, how your weight moves, and how your energy levels are
affected. Your body will change, some weeks in small amounts, and significantly over time; it’s your
job as bodybuilder to evaluate this every step of the way. Your progress will hinge on your ability to
be consistent and honest through the entire process. The next chapter will help you relearn how to eat.
It will show you how to build your daily calorie goal using the macronutrients protein, fat, and
carbohydrates according to your body type.