Let’s face the facts, any diet must cause an energy imbalance for someone to be able to lose weight. In other words, there must be a caloric deficit present. Other conditions are detailed in the article “Fundamental Conditions for any Fat Loss Diet Attempt”
In this post, I talk about creating a caloric deficit in your diet without needing to know what a calorie is.
The theory is simple: know what you’re eating right now, reduce from there, note changes and adjust.
Step 1: Chart your food intake for 30 days
Purpose: Find out what you are eating
Despite not needing to count calories we still need to roughly know how much we’re eating.
There are two good reasons as to why you can’t just reduce food intake and rely on hunger signals.
Firstly, hunger is just too complicated. There are too many determinants to human hunger from changing hormones throughout the day, to seeing that McDonald’s ads and wanting to chow down that Big Mac.
Second, sometimes we just make subconscious choices about what we eat. Eating that box of popcorn while watching that movie isn’t something that most people truly consider.
This doesn’t have to be complicated:
Even a some simple scribblings on a sheet of paper would do. The key here is to DO IT CONSISTENTLY FOR 30 DAYS.
Step 2: Cut out some foods that would be easy to cut out.
Some examples from the above:
- Replace Coke with Diet Coke
- Have an orange instead of orange juice
I am sure that most people eat more variety than what is presented in the picture above. But here is the main point: Cut out or replace foods which do not leave you feeling deprived.
This is the case with the coke, and most people don’t really mind making the switch to diet coke. That action alone reduces calories by 100+ a day.
This is going to vary individually. Some people may probably not mind eating 1 less slice of toast, while another may want to remove the butter on the toast. Be flexible about it and just reduce whatever requires the less conscious effort.
Step 3: Adjust accordingly
Wait 3 weeks (4 weeks if you’re a woman). This is important, because weight is such a bad indicator of fat loss progress.
For example, drinking 1L of water makes you weight 1kg heavier.
Eating a high sodium meal (compared to what you would normally eat) cause water retention (some people like myself can retain probably 2+kg due to this) which takes anywhere from 2-5 days of normal eating to drop.
On the topic of water retention, so many women can testify to the fact that water retention is a pain in the ass across the menstrual cycle.
If you want some insight onto how to track your body composition to gauge if fat loss is going well, look up this article on “Measuring Body Composition” part 1 and part 2.
If not, wait those 4 weeks and if weight has dropped, you know that you’re in caloric deficit. Keep it up!
If up want faster progress, then simply reduce the food intake more or increase activity levels.
Big Caveat: Never reduce calories too fast or too great, you are setting yourself up for some serious muscle loss and to simply feel like crap all the time. If you do want to lose fat as fast as humanly possible, grab a copy of Lyle MacDonald’s ‘Rapid Fat Loss Handbook‘, which details the scientific and safest way to crash diet.
Related posts:
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- How to Count Calories This is part 2 of the “3 part calorie counting...
- Diet Self-Sabotage 3: The Lack of Flexibility This is part 3 of the Self-Sabotage in Fat Loss...
- Diet Self-Sabotage 2: Patience, Perception and Randomness is Dieting This is the second post in the series, “Self-Sabotage in...
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