What's up, guys?
Sean Nalewanyj at www.SeanNal.com and in this video today we’re talking about how to lose
the last layer of fat.
So maybe the last five or ten pounds that always seem to be the hardest to get rid of.
A lot of people out there will say that they were able to go from, maybe, twenty-eight
percent of bodyfat down to fifteen percent of bodyfat with relative ease but now they’ve
hit a fatloss plateau and they just can't get leaner no matter what they do.
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So, here’s the reality: when it comes to losing the last five to ten pounds of fat
there really are no special secrets involved.
The basic principles are still the same.
It’s just harder to actually execute them.
Just like muscle growth becomes naturally harder over time the more overall mass you’ve
put on.
The same thing holds true for fatloss, okay.
The leaner you get, the harder it becomes to lean down further and further.
And once you’ve hit around fifteen percent bodyfat or so as a male and maybe twenty-two
percent or so for a female, for each percentage point you try to drop lower than that it’s
going to get increasingly tougher.
Our bodies are evolutionarily wired to carry a certain amount of bodyfat just for basic
health purposes.
And so the further and further you try to push the envelope the more your body is going
to fight back and the tougher it’s going to be for you.
Because it’s just responding automatically to the environment and it has no idea what
you’re actually trying to do here in terms of achieving a lean looking body.
But when it all comes down to it fatloss is still primarily just a matter of maintaining
an ongoing calorie deficit.
That’s what stimulates your body to break down its fat stores for use as energy.
So, if you're trying to lose that last layer of fat but you’ve hit a fatloss plateau
it’s just means that you're no longer in a calorie deficit.
The same number of calories that gets you from thirty percent bodyfat down to twenty-two
percent bodyfat is not going to be the same number that it will take to get from twenty-two
percent down to fifteen percent, or fifteen percent down to twelve and eleven and so on.
And you're going to need to adjust further which means either slightly reducing your
calorie intake or increasing your activity level.
So maybe an extra cardio session or just some additional movement throughout the day or
a combination of both of those.
It’s mostly just a matter of discipline and being willing to really dial things in
terms of your training and primarily your nutrition.
So many people will come to me and say that they can't lose the last five to ten pounds
even though they're tracking their calorie closely and they're training hard and training
consistently.
But in most cases if you really sit down with somebody and you audit their diet step-by-step,
seven days a week, you'll usually see that somewhere in there certain errors are being
made.
Either they're not tracking their intake as accurately as they thought or extra meals
and snacks and things like that just happen to work their way in and they aren’t being
accounted for.
And those errors add up enough throughout the course of the week to where calorie intake
and calorie expenditure end up about equal and so no extra bodyfat gets lost.
It’s not because your metabolism is damaged and your body is just magically stop responding,
usually in most cases it’s just that you need to be much more diligent with everything
in general.
When you're trying to lose that last bit of fat hunger is going to be more of an issue,
your energy is going to go down, training performance will also go down, but these are
things that you just have to plow through, basically, and stick to your plan regardless
of them.
So another question to ask yourself is: is it really worth it for you, in the first place,
to get leaner than you are right now.
When it comes to losing the last layer of fat, that’s going to mean different things
to different people.
If, for example, losing the last five to ten pounds means going from, say, seventeen percent
bodyfat as a male down to thirteen percent then I’d say that’s a perfectly reasonable
goal to have.
Because thirteen percent is still within a realistic, healthy, sustainable range.
And going from seventeen percent to thirteen percent will make a pretty noticeable difference
to your physique in terms of overall muscle definition and leanness.
On the other hand, if losing that last layer of fat means you're trying to go from thirteen
percent bodyfat down to ten percent bodyfat, in that case you might want to really evaluate
if that’s even necessary in the first place.
If it’s for a temporary thing like certain event, photo shoot, vacation or whatever,
then that’s fine.
But if we’re talking about a bodyfat percentage that you're going to maintain year round,
a true ten percent is actually quite low.
And that’s actually, probably, the lowest percentage I’d recommend any guy to try
to permanently sustain.
Anything below that, unless you are a genetic outlier or you're on drugs, usually isn’t
going to be healthy or sustainable in most cases.
You're going to be on relatively low calories and you're going to have to track things much
more closely on a permanent basis and you won’t be in an optimal place in terms of
energy, training performance, libido and things like that.
For most guys, I think about twelve to fifteen percent bodyfat is a much more realistic year
round percentage.
And that’s still actually quite lean because most people way underestimate their true percentage
to begin with.
Twelve percent bodyfat is pretty lean for most guys.
You'll be leaner than ninety-five percent plus of the population if you're at that level,
probably more like ninety-eight percent.
I got my bodyfat tested a couple years ago and it came in at fourteen percent, and that
put me leaner than ninety-seven percent of guys at my age according to their stats.
Even at fourteen percent.
So, yeah, I wouldn’t suggest just aimlessly trying to get leaner and leaner because you're
trying to look like some Instagram fitness model or whatever.
Really sit down and look at it and honestly decide for yourself if it’s worth the effort.
Because, again, the leaner you get the harder and harder it becomes, not just to get there
but also to maintain it.
There's a very big difference in terms of maintaining fourteen percent bodyfat versus
ten percent.
Not just in terms of how you'll feel but the additional dietary and lifestyle freedom that
comes with just keeping an extra few percent of bodyfat.
Now, if you have decided that it is worth it for you to get leaner, or like I’d mentioned
before if you're sixteen percent now and you just want to get to, maybe twelve or thirteen
percent, again, it’s really just a matter of continuing to create a calorie deficit
and really just dial things in more closely.
If your bodyweight is stagnant then you need to reduce your calories until it starts dropping.
Shaving off a hundred to a hundred-fifty calories from your intake per day is a good starting
point.
Or you can also increase your activity level as well.
Once you have that in place you need to track it closely.
You can't just be estimating things anymore.
You can't be sneaking in an extra table spoon of peanut butter or eating big cheat meals
and not accounting for them, or adding in little snacks here and there and not tracking
them.
If you're currently on a fatloss plateau and things aren’t moving that’s the time when
you really have to be diligent with your diet and be really honest with yourself about exactly
what it is that you're consuming and what your true calorie intake actually is.
Hunger is also likely going to be more of an issue for you as you're trying to get rid
of those last five to ten pounds, so you really want to start to employing more strategies
to control it.
And I’ll link a post I did in the description box below that outlines twelve tips you can
use to reduce hunger while on a diet.
I don’t want to go ahead and cover all of those in this video otherwise it’ll end
up just being way too long.
But basic things like increasing your vegetable intake, eating more fiber, really focusing
on maximizing your food volume relative to calories by eating less calorie dense foods,
making sure you're getting enough protein, drinking enough water, things like that.
Incorporating a weekly re-feed day, that can also help out as well.
That’s going to be where you eat at your calorie maintenance level once a week with
the increasing calories mainly coming from carbs.
That’s just a way to boost your leptin levels back up temporarily and give you a nice physical
and mental break to look forward to each week.
And also if you’ve been dieting for a prolong period then beyond re-feed days what you can
also use is a full one to two week diet break, that will also give you some of the extra
energy you might need to recharge and to plow through that last phase of fatloss.
And a diet break is essentially just an extended re-feed where you eat at your calorie maintenance
level for a full one to two weeks before going back into a deficit.
And you can do that for every, roughly, one to three months of consistent dieting.
And one other thing to experiment with is different daily layout for you meals in terms
of the frequency and the timing.
As long as the total calories are the same for the entire day, it won’t make any actual
difference to your fat burning results whether you eat, say, six small meals a day or four
medium size meals, or two large meals or some other variation of that.
Some people do better on different layout in terms of controlling their appetite.
You can try eating more calories earlier on in the day and fewer later on or vice versa.
Intermittent fasting is another option that some people do well on.
So if hunger is an issue for you in that final phase of fatloss, you'll want to try playing
around to find the specific meal frequency that best suits you in terms of controlling
your appetite.
For myself, that usually means pushing a higher percentage of calories until later on in the
day but everybody is a bit different, so you have to find what works best for you.
So, just a few ideas there for you but at the end of the day fatloss, again, comes down
to maintaining a calorie deficit.
And as you get leaner and you're trying to lose that last bit of fat, maintaining that
deficit just becomes more challenging sing you're going to have to be more diligent with
your dietary tracking and because hunger and energy and thing like that are going to become
more of an issue for you.
So, it really just comes down to basic discipline and hard work if you decided that getting
leaner is worth it to you at this stage.
So thanks for watching, guys.
I hope this advice was helpful.
If you want to to eliminate all the guesswork and grab a complete step-by-step plan that
shows you exactly how to train, eat and supplement to reach your desired level of leanness as
efficiently as possible, as well as had a transition into a proper muscle building phase
after your cut is over, then you can check out my complete step-by-step Body Transformation
Blueprint by clicking here or by visiting www.BTBluePrint.com, the link for that is
in the description box.
Make sure to follow me on Facebook and Instagram if you aren’t already.
The links for that are also below.
And the official website is over at www.SeanNal.com.
Thanks for watching, guys.
And I’ll see you in the next video.