Caloric deficit

And I just want to be clear.

that calorie deficit is important for fat loss.

And sometimes we do need to eat less because you have to eat less calories to get into a deficit if you're in maintenance right now or you're in a surplus and gaining fat.

But that doesn't necessarily mean you have to eat less food.

But if we're really trying to see results and we are finding ourselves not week over week doing a lot of the same things, instead of dropping calories, we'd want to get very honest about our execution when it comes to exercise.

This also means the type of workouts you're doing.

not from the sense that you can't change the type of workout that you're doing, but from the perspective that anytime we're changing something in our execution, especially with the spotlight being on exercise, that may influence the results we're trying to see and may influence your ability to get your body in a calorie deficit based upon the actual exercise that you're doing.

When you're changing your exercise, you're changing your calorie intake, you're changing your macronutrient needs.

And then literally in one meal, your deficit from the week, you eat back.

Randall didn't say it, but if you're not in a calorie deficit, you're not going to lose weight.

That is how people lose weight.

Yeah, for sure.

So if you're not in a deficit, all the stuff you're doing, it doesn't matter.

You've got to be in a calorie deficit.

But weekends is where people just free for all.

Spaz out.

So here's how I define spot reduction based on what the actual most recent literature shows.

Spot reduction is the potential to lose fat preferentially from a specific region when you combine localized resistance training for that area, which increases blood flow and fat breakdown in the fat tissue sitting right next to the working muscle, with cardio performed afterward to actually burn off those liberated fatty acids all while you're still holding a consistent calorie deficit.

The myth is that one exercise can do the entire job of eliciting spot reduction.

My definition is a sequence of things working together, direct training to mobilize the fat, cardio to oxidize it, and a calorie deficit underneath the whole thing to make sure you're still in a state of net fat loss.

Every one of those pieces has to be present.

Take any single one of those away, and the effect falls apart, which is exactly why the isolated approaches people tried for decades never worked.

The main way your body triggers this is through hormones called catecholamines, specifically adrenaline and noradrenaline, or epinephrine and norepinephrine, as they're also known.

These are your fight-or-flight hormones, and one of their jobs is to signal to your fat cells to release stored fat for fuel.

But his calories stayed lower.

It was a calorie deficit for him for that short-term window.

So he had been eating more, he came into a calorie deficit, and then he lost the weight.

Now please hear me out.

I am not telling you that you should go on a Twinkie diet [laughs] while you eat less food.

Number one, I'm going to link some reverse diet episodes in the show notes because often I do have clients who eat pretty clean, but they're not eating enough.

They're eating under their total daily energy intake.

And so what's happening is they're already at such a low intake, so like they're basically already living in a calorie deficit, that I can't take them any lower, that I have to basically reverse diet them, slowly bring their intake up to what their maintenance would be, and then you can do short-term calorie deficits down the road once you're starting from a stronger metabolism.