Getting Started

What should an Absolute Beginner do

So how do you get started changing your body composition? You need a basic diet plan, a basic resistance training plan, and ensure you are hitting some basic level of activity. This plan assumes you are eating a normal American diet, have no pre-existing health issues, have never lifted weights before, and have more than 30% bodyfat as a man, or 40% as a woman. Here we go:

What to Eat

Protein. You want to increase your daily protein intake up to [(body weight in pounds) x .8] grams. This is a lot. Good sources of protein include fat free dairy products, lean meats, tofu, peas, egg whites, and pumpkin seeds. You want high quality protein. High quality protein is protein with a ratio of essential amino acids well suited for human use¹. Protein is super useful for building and maintaining muscle mass. A high protein diet² helps bias the weight you lose to fat, often to a 100:1 ratio of fat to muscle.

Low Palatability³ Foods. It’s easy for me to accidently eat three slices of pizza or a tray of cookies. Those foods don’t fill me up and they taste good. They’re also very Calorie dense, which makes them high palatability. I can get more full from a bowl of fruit, sugar free jello, or a salad while eating 1/10 or fewer the Calories. Getting full and hitting your protein in as few Calories as possible is the name of the game⁴.

Fiber. Fiber gets a special shout out as the king of low palatability. It’s good for your digestion, fills you up, barely has any Calories. If you’re not one of the lucky people who think fibrous veggies taste good, you need to figure out a preparation for them. Personally I use very low Calorie BBQ sauce.

Artificial Sweetener. If fiber is the king of low palatability artificial sweetener is the queen. It makes the BBQ sauce I eat tasty at all. It gives us diet coke. It makes coffee so much better. If you’re used to real sugar, switching will be weird for two weeks and then it’ll be fine, and you’ll have potentially cut hundreds of Calories out of your daily diet.

There’s a reason body builders eat plain Chicken, Broccoli, and Rice. It is low palatability so they can get their bodyfat down to insanely low levels, but still getting their protein needs met. You want foods that fill you up easily.

Avoid drinking Calories as much as you can. Drink water, black coffee, diet soda, and protein shakes if needed. Avoid desert or snacks.

How To Train

You don’t need to train very much to see improvements at the beginning. You have 10 major muscle groups⁵ you can meaningfully grow if you want to change you body composition, but doing 10 exercises a session is a bad idea. The solution to this is compound movements. Compound movements are movements that involve more than one joint, either the knees and the hips, or elbows and shoulders. They’re useful because they can train several muscle groups at once. Muscles can be broken down into three groups: pushing, pulling, and legs.

Push

Pushing or pressing is the first type of movement. The muscles involved are the triceps, pecs, and the front shoulders. Good examples of pushing compound exercises are the Barbell Bench Press, Dumbbell Bench press, or a humble pushup in its many variations.

Pull

Pulling is the second type of movement. The muscles involved are the forearms, the biceps, the back, and the back of the shoulders. Good examples of pulling movements are pull ups and rows. There are barbell rows, bent over dumbbell rows, cable rows, and incline rows.

Legs

Leg exercises are the last kind of movement. They involve the quads, glutes, hamstrings, and the calves. Good examples of leg movements are barbell squats, leg press, split squats, and lunges.

You take an exercise for each of these muscle groups, and twice a week do 2-3 sets of 5-8 reps. Focus on technique and using a weight that makes the movement very hard, but doable. Write down how many reps you do for each set, then next time you do that movement try and do one more rep on each set. Muscle aching is fine, be careful around joint pain.

Activity

Activity is weird. Literally every science based weight loss coaching program suggests doing some cardio, typically walking some number of steps. When studied, weight lifting plus increased physical activity out perform weightlifting alone for weight loss⁶. But because your body compensates for increased expenditure, it’s hard to burn more than 100-200 Calories extra per day from walking/running/biking/swimming. So what’s going on?

I don’t know. I think people should do it, since it seems to help when the other two parts are involved. It does have several benefits. The biggest one I know of is it helps sustainability. If you’re eating 2000 Calories and burning 2500 Calories per day, you’ll lose a pound per week, be hungry, and suffer diet fatigue⁷. If you’re eating 2200 Calories per day and burning 2700 Calories per day, you’ll lose the same amount of tissue, but you’ll accumulate less fatigue. You’ll be in what’s called a High Flux State⁸. Apparently eating more improves you mood, independent of the Calorie balance.

Any activity you want can qualify. Dancing, swimming, running, sports, or even just going for a walk. It turns out that going for a walk is the most fatigue efficient, if you do any activity until you’re tired and want to rest, for most people walking will have burnt more Calories by the time you’re resting. But any fun activity should take priority, it’s your life after all.

Bringing it all Together

The change in your diet is how you’re losing weight. You cut out the high palatable foods, stop drinking Calories, eat lots of protein, and your daily Calorie intake should drop by 250-500.

You want to lift weights because that will preserve your muscle and maybe grow more muscle. Just two times a week for someone new to the muscle game will be enough to show serious benefits. That means that if you’re losing one pound a week, lifting weights turns that from 50% muscle and 50% fat into close to 100% fat. This doubles your effective rate of fat loss.

Then you want to be active. Go for a walk for an hour every day, listen to a podcast or talk to a friend. This might help you burn an extra fifth of a pound a week, but more likely it is just improving the functioning of other systems and making the whole process less miserable⁹.

If you do all this right, you should start to lose around a pound per week¹⁰. Good luck.

1. Wikipedia has some good info on this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_quality

2. Combined with resistance training I’ll mention later. You need both.

3. So many internet arguments about palatability. It doesn’t just mean food that tastes bad. It means food that you are inclined to eat more of. Something sufficiently low Calorie density can be the tastiest thing in the world, but you can’t fit 200 Calories of it in your stomach. The functional definition of palatability I use is “how likely are you to eat more, after you’ve eaten 100 Calories of the food” (and again after the second 100 Calories, etc).

4. You do need some fat in your diet or you’ll die. Most people will eat that much, even on a strict diet, because fat is delicious. But if you’re one of those people who will hyper optimize the game I just described, make sure you get some fat in your diet.

5. Pecs, triceps, biceps, back, quads, hamstrings, calves, shoulders, glutes, and forearms.

6. Dietary interventions are required, the exercise alone won’t do it.

7. Be in a bad mood constantly, often with brain fog and other side effects.

8. Another way to potentially induce a High Flux State is to wear a weighted vest while dieting. Aim for a weight that’s higher than you’ve already on this diet but not much more. I did that back in January and my diet fatigue was barely there. The only problem is you’re walking around with a weighted vest all the time.

9. Separate from the joy of the walk. Sitting on the couch and binging Better Call Saul might also make things better, but not all the ways that walking helps.

10. But remember, your scale lies to you.