Cutting Fat: How Much? How Fast?
It amazes me when people think they are going to go from 15+% body fat to shredded in a couple of months. Seriously? That isn't going to happen without some potentially serious health consequences and probably a significant amount of muscle loss.
The first rule of cutting fat should always be preserving muscle. What good does it do to lose weight if you look and feel worse? So how much should you plan on losing and how fast should you plan on losing it? Read on to find out.
A good general rule of thumb is that you should never try to lose more than 1% of your body weight per week. I generally extend that to say no more than 2lbs per week. So, if you are a 200lb guy and you have 15% body fat then you are carrying roughly 30lbs of fat. If you wanted to get down to 6% body fat (which is pretty shredded) then you would have to lose 19lbs of body fat. Given a best case scenario, it should then take you at least 10weeks. The only problems: our bodies aren't that linear, and you lose more than just fat when you lose weight.
So, what would prevent someone in my example from getting from 15% body fat down to 6% body fat in 10 weeks. Well, for starters fat isn't the only thing he would lose over the course of a cut. He would also lose water and probably some muscle too. That would put a little damper on our linear progression that achieved a 9% body fat loss over 10 weeks.
Your Metabolism Slows When You Maintain Caloric Deficit
Another factor is metabolism. When you first start cutting fat, your metabolism is cranking away (assuming you are not on a low carb diet or something similar). But the longer you spend on a caloric deficit, the slower your metabolism gets; your body adapts to living off of a lower caloric intake. So, the longer you are on a cut, the harder it can be to lose weight.
Now back to the initial question, how long would it take for our guy to go from 15% body fat down to 6%? The answer is that it varies. But in general, I would expect it to take at least twice as long as our best case scenario and the total amount of weight lost would certainly exceed the 19lbs of fat he was targeting to lose.
As a real world example, I was probably around 15-17% body fat when I started cutting last year. I lost on average about 1.5lbs/month and I ended up at about 8% body fat after 25weeks.
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