Table of Contents

Fat Loss, Muscle Gain, or Maintenance: What diet type should I choose?

Fat Loss

The Fat Loss diet plan sets you up to lose fat slowly and steadily over your chosen diet duration. The plan isn’t just optimized for fat loss, as it’s also designed in such as way as to try to preserve as much of your muscle as possible, so at at the end of your diet, you are leaner, healthier, and maybe even stronger!

Muscle Gain

Muscle Gain feeds you the specific nutrients your body needs to gain muscle. This means that you’ll be gaining a bit of weight during this diet, and perhaps just a bit of that will be fat, too. This is both OK and necessary, as weight gain is by far the most effective process for muscle gain, and the fat you gain will come off very quickly when you do your next Fat Loss phase. If you’ve never done an intentional Muscle Gain phase and you want to be more muscular and perform better, we HIGHLY recommend it!

Maintenance

The maintenance plan serves three main purposes:

First, it’s a diet guide that keeps you around the same bodyweight while fueling great workouts and improving your health. For this purpose, you can run the maintenance phase any time.

Second, maintenance eating can help your body recover its hormonal and psychological settling points after a strict Fat Loss diet. Maintaining right after a fat loss diet can ensure that you don’t just regain the weight, and can help you keep the lost fat off in a healthy, sustainable way.

Lastly, the maintenance phase can be used to give your body a break after a long stretch of Muscle Gain dieting, and let some of the muscle take hold a bit better, so that when you do your next Fat Loss diet, you keep most of your new muscle instead of losing a good deal of it.

The maintenance phase should last a minimum of 2/3 as many weeks as your fat loss diet took, but the longer or harsher your diet, the longer it needs to be (8 – 12 weeks is common). If you attempt to come out of maintenance too soon and transition into another dieting phase, you will ultimately end up having to reduce your calories even further than before just to initiate weight loss, because your metabolism/hormones have yet to normalize to their pre-diet levels. Similarly, if you add non-diet food too quickly, you will quickly start to regain the weight you just lost, because, coming out of a diet, your body is primed for (fat) storage. This is not ideal, and ultimately leads to no good yo-yo dieting.

As such, the maintenance diet is invaluable, and must be taken seriously. In our opinion, it’s just as critical to your success than the diet phase itself.

Find more information here.

Which body type should I choose?

Choose the body type that looks the most like you do NOW - not how you WANT to look. The diet will work very well no matter which body type you choose, but it will work just a bit better if you choose the one closest to how you look.

If you have a rough idea of your body fat percentage you can use the tables below to help choose the closest body type.

Female

Body Type Body Fat %
1 < 20%
2 20%-27%
3 27%-35%
4 > 35%

Male

Body Type Body Fat %
1 < 15%
2 15%-22%
3 22%-30%
4 > 30%

Setting up your diet: Choosing Diet Goals

We recommend choosing a very moderate goal when it’s for the first time. We recommend a duration of 6-9 weeks for your first diet. We HIGHLY recommend you aim for the recommended goal OR EVEN SOMETHING EASIER, since it’s very easy to make the diet tougher after you succeed and much harder to re-start an easier diet if you fail a crazy hard one!

Restrictions on diet goals

We limit the maximum allowed length of all fat loss and muscle gain diets to 16 weeks or less.

We limit the maximum allowed weekly weight loss rate to 1% of body weight per week to be well within safe bounds (e.g. Our heaviest allowed user (158.7kg) is limited to 1.6kg / week, while the literature allows up to 2.5kg / week).

References

Setting up your diet: Lifestyle and Schedule

Workout shake FAQs

Am I always supposed to have a workout shake with training?

If you’d like to use a workout shake for the workouts on this day, please select ‘yes.’ You never HAVE TO use use a workout shake, as you’ll get great results without one. Shakes are most effective if your workouts are very long or very hard, so please consider that. If you choose to use workout shakes, please note that they add up on top of your selected meal number. Thus if you selected 4 meals per day but added a workout shake, the shake will appear as another meal in addition to the other 4 meals, not replacing any of them.

How much water do I need to use to mix my protein and carbs in my workout shake?

As much as you need to make the drink easy and pleasant to drink. If you’re more interested in the advanced math for high level performance, here it is:

Calculation:

  1. Total grams of workout carbs + total grams of protein = A
  2. A divided by “0.08” = B (number of milliliters)
  3. B multiplied by “0.034” = number of ounces.

EXAMPLE:

  1. 25g carbs plus 25g protein = 50 grams.
  2. 50 grams divided by 0.08 = 625 milliliters
  3. 625 milliliters multiplied by 0.034 = 21 ounces of water to mix into your shake

Setting up your diet: Building Meals

How do I determine a training intensity for my workouts?

Workout Intensity Description
Light Though you might be training hard when you are actually training, you spend most of your session (counted by time literally spent in various activities) warming up or resting for the next attempt, such as training for heavy sets of 3 reps, for example. If you’re working continuously the whole time, the work is no harder than a brisk walk. Most weightlifting, powerlifting, and fitness sport workouts fall into this category.
Moderate If you’re weight training, you spend about half of the time actually lifting and about half either warming up or resting between attempts. Hard bodybuilding training is a great example. If you’re doing continuous exercise, it’s a pretty good pace, but not at your limit. Something like a 5k run pace. If you HAD to push it harder, you could, but it would take a lot. If you’re not sure if your training is quite hard enough to choose this option, choose ‘Light’ instead to be on the safe side.
Hard When training, you spend the majority of the time actually working and not resting or warming up. It’s go go go. And you’re not just going through the motions… you’re being pushed close to your limits the majority of your time. After such training, you feel totally spent. You’re often drenching your clothes completely with sweat and you can barely breathe during and after workouts of this difficulty. If you’re not sure if your training is quite hard enough to choose this option, choose ‘Moderate’ instead to be on the safe side.

How many workouts should I do per day?

Select how many workouts you’ll be doing on this day of the week. If it’s a rest day, choose zero. Don’t feel pressured to try to work out more than usual on this diet plan. Just fit the diet around your current workout schedule. Please note that these have to be dedicated weight training or sport training workouts. Fat loss cardio sessions or recreation activities, no matter how demanding, do not count as workouts in this case.

How many meals per day do I eat?

Please choose the number of meals you’d like to eat on this day of the week. 4, 5, or 6 meals per day are all effective strategies and the difference in your results from choosing any one of them will be very minimal. The most important factor in which one you pick should be convenience and sustainability. For example, if you know you’re going to have trouble getting a lot of meals in per day, by all means, choose 4 meals and not any more!

How do I select the appropriate activity level?

Activity Level Description
Mildly Active Your job isn’t physical. Your job consists mostly of sitting while working. You drive to and from work, and you while you might have some physical hobbies, they aren’t the kinds that take hours and leave you sweating and drained after.
Moderately Active Your job involves quite a bit of moving around (walking, lifting) and you might have some physically active hobbies. You spend the majority of your day moving around and while you do spend some of it sitting, there’s more moving than sitting for sure. If you’re not sure if you’re quite active enough to choose this option, choose ‘Mildly Active’ instead to be on the safe side.
Heavily Active You’re either up and about all day at work, have hours of physical hobbies or transport (walk or bike to work, walk pets), or a good deal of both. If you look back on your typical day, you’re moving around almost all the time. If you’re not sure if you’re quite active enough to choose this option, choose ‘Moderately Active’ instead to be on the safe side.
Very Heavily Active You’re on your feet and moving around almost all of your waking hours, but you’re not just moving around… you’re doing hard, physical work. This means you have both a very physical job and a highly active home or recreation life. An example is doing construction during the day, training clients at a gym in the evening, and playing roughhousing games with your kids before bedtime. Only choose this day type if you’re so physically busy that you often have trouble sitting down for meals during the day. If you’re not sure if you’re quite active enough to choose this option, choose ‘Heavily Active’ instead to be on the safe side.