Chapter 5 – Avoid juggling fat loss with lean gains
If you’re looking to gain lean weight in addition to losing fat, then only aim to achieve one of these goals over a given period of time. You should avoid attempting to juggle both these goals simultaneously as they are conflicting in nature.
Fat loss will compromise lean gains and lean gains will compromise fat loss. These two objectives are more or less mutually exclusive and contradictory. This means an attempt to achieve one will not be conducive to achieving the other, at least not at the same time. Much better advice would be to spend a pre-ordained amount of time shedding excess fat before switching to a program designed to help you make lean gains.
Good practice is to spend about ten weeks looking to lose anywhere between 6 and 10lbs of fat weight, then another ten weeks adding 6-10lbs in lean weight. After twenty weeks, the scales may say you’re back where you started, but in reality, you’ve moved your weight around to a much lower and healthier fat-lean weight ratio. You may weigh the same as when you first started, but as intimated previously, you should not let the prevaricating influence of the scales deceive you! You will find yourself much leaner, stronger and healthier.
When weighing up conflicting objectives such as gaining lean weight and losing fat, it’s very important to realise that the body cannot be in two antithetical chemical states at the same time. At any given time, the body will either be in a positive nitrogen balance (anabolic) or a negative nitrogen balance (catabolic). Lean weight can only be added when the body is in an anabolic state, but a calorie deficit is what’s needed overall for fat loss and it is this calorie deficit which prevents the body from being anabolic for much of the time.
It follows then that since a calorie deficit is what’s required to lose fat, trying to gain lean weight and lose fat at the same time is largely futile. A far more effective strategy is to spend ten weeks in a small calorie deficit losing fat weight only whilst maintaining lean weight, and then another ten weeks in a small calorie surplus gaining lean weight only whilst maintaining the same low body fat levels you achieved at the end of the first ten week period.
Inspirational quote: It’s never too late to be who you might have been….. George Eliot
