How do you lean out without sacrificing months of hard-earned gains? It’s a tough ask, but is more than achievable with the necessary knowledge and a good plan. Welcome to The Cutting Guide.
This guide is for you if:
- You do want to lose fat
- You do want to maintain strength, size, and performance
- You don’t want to overcomplicate things or follow an unsustainable plan
- You don’t want to be miserable
You can do it and it is possible, no matter what your lifestyle is right now, no matter how much work gets in the way or whatever other excuse you have. Do it correctly and you’ll look like this guy (insert image of Greek god).
Below is everything I’ve learned about cutting, using every source on the internet and beyond so that you don’t have to. ENJOY.
Everything You Need to Know Before Starting a Cut
What is a Cut?
For those of you who are new to the gym and fitness in general, a cut is another term for your dieting phase. It’s basically losing weight, but with the added complication that you need to maintain as much muscle as possible, requiring a couple of extra tweaks and a bit more involvement than your standard diet.
To summarise, the main goals of a cut are:
- Lose weight
- Maintain as much muscle as possible
There are of course many other things to think about, but these are the main two. It follows that, to lose weight while maintaining muscle, we have to lose fat.
The Moving Parts of a Cut
Calories
Calories are units of energy (technically ‘kilocalories’, but that doesn’t really matter). You may see ‘kcal’ for short.
Here’s how your body consumes calories:
- Eating: The food you eat contains calories
- Drinking: Some drinks contain calories
Here’s how your body burns calories:
- Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR): Your body burns calories at rest to keep you alive.
- Exercise: Your body burns calories during physical activity, eg weightlifting or cardio.
- Non-Exercise Movement: Your body burns calories during everyday activities, eg walking, cooking, cleaning. (Also called NEAT or Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis)
- Digesting Food: Your body burns calories digesting, absorbing, and metabolising the food you eat.
When the total calories burned exceeds calories consumed, you lose weight. This corresponds to cutting goal #1.
When we add up all of the calories that we burn in a regular day, we get our total daily energy expenditure (TDEE). You may have heard this term before, knowing your TDEE is the cornerstone of a successful cut.
Macronutrients
Also known as ‘macros’.
I’m sure you’ve heard every fitness youtuber and their dog bang on about macros, and for a good reason. Our cutting goals #2 is to maintain as much muscle as possible. A large determiner of this is our macro ratio.
Protein
Protein facilitates muscle growth and repair, ensuring the effort you put into the gym translates to muscle. On a cut, hitting your protein goal is essential to maintaining muscle.
Each gram of protein has 4 calories.
Carbohydrates
Carbs supply us with energy which is essential for both workouts and every day living. The last thing we want to be is fatigued and low energy. The keto diet exists and can work when done properly, but it’s outside the scope of this guide. So for the purposes of this, carbs (within reason) are your friend.
Each gram of carbohydrate has 4 calories.
Fat
Fat supports hormone production which is important to keep testosterone at normal levels. It also allows us to absorb fat fat-soluble vitamins.
Each gram of fat has 9 calories.
Training
This guide is focussed on the nutritional side of cutting, but it’s important to mention training. You absolutely still need to train while on a cut, otherwise you’re going to lose all of your muscle. The muscle needs stimulus so the body knows we still need them. Train for hypertrophy like you would if you were trying to gain muscle. Wondering how to train for hypertrophy? Check out How to Train for Hypertrophy: The Smart Way to Build Muscle Fast.
- Do train how you would usually train. Don’t reduce the weight on exercises straight away just because ‘you’re on a cut’.
- Do be super consistent. Missing loads of sessions is only going to result in you losing muscle. Equally, don’t beat yourself up you can’t make the odd session, just don’t make it a habit.
- Don’t worry if you don’t feel as strong in the gym. This shouldn’t happen straight away, maybe after a month or so. Find a weight where you can maintain the same rep ranges and focus on technique, still training to the same intensity.
- Don’t overtrain. Rest and recovery are important in a cut because your body has less fuel compared to a bulk. Overtraining is only going to fatigue you and prevent optimal sessions in the gym.
How to Cut to Lose Fat and Maintain Muscle
This section contains your actionable steps. How to set up, execute, and conclude your cut so that your results are optimal.
Timing
The first question you should be asking yourself is: ‘Should I cut?’
When is the right time to cut?
Start a cut when your goal is to reduce body fat for health or aesthetic reasons. This may be:
- After a bulk or weight gain phase to shed excess fat
- When starting training after being overweight or obese
How long should you cut for?
- Aim for a cutting phase of 8–12 weeks, depending on your goals.
- Cutting for too long can lead to hunger, fatigue, and a loss of energy during workouts.
- After cutting for this amount of time, if you think you need to cut more, it’s smart to stay at maintenance for a couple of weeks to allow your body to reset. More on this in the ‘Transitioning out of a cut’ section below.
How to Set Up Your Cut
Pre-requisite purchases:
- Bathroom scales to weigh yourself
- Kitchen scales to weigh your food
Calories
We want to lose weight, so we need to consume fewer calories than our TDEE. Calculate your TDEE using this site. You’ll need to know your height and current weight.
The site will also give you a suggested calorie intake for cutting which is a 500kcal deficit from your maintenance calories. You should lose 0.45kg / 1lb per week using this method. Feel free to use this, or alternatively, the method below will give you a more tailored calorie deficit.
For most people (not obese), I’d recommend aiming to lose 0.5% of your body weight per week.
- Calculate 0.5% of your body weight
- 1lb = 3,500 kcals and 1kg = 7,700 kcals (approximately). Work out how many calories 0.5% of your body weight equates to. This is your weekly deficit.
- Divide this by 7 to get your daily deficit.
Worked example
- 80kg / 176lbs individual
- 0.5% of bodyweight gives a target weight loss of 0.4kg / 0.88lbs per week
- 1kg = 7,700 kcals, so 0.4kg = 3,080 kcals weekly calorie deficit (1lb = 3,500 kcals, so 0.88lbs = 3,080 kcals weekly calorie deficit)
- Dividing by 7 gives 440 daily calorie deficit
As mentioned, a sensible length for a cut is 8-12 weeks. Use this to work out how much weight you can expect to lose. This will only be an approximation as your TDEE will decrease when you lose weight. This means you’ll be in less of a deficit the more weight you lose.
It’s also worth stressing that the figure of 0.5% of your body weight per week is more appropriate for individuals in decent shape, maybe just finished a bulking phase and looking to lose excess fat, but have muscle mass that they want to maintain. It may sound like slow progress, but try and be patient – the main priority should be maintaining muscle while losing weight, rather than losing weight quickly. If you would prefer to lose weight quicker, you can increase your deficit to 1% of your body weight. Just remember that a larger deficit risks losing more muscle.
For reference, a 1% loss per week for the individual in the worked example would equate to an 880kcal deficit. Pretty hefty.
Macros
Getting the right ratio of macronutrients is essential for effective cutting:
Protein:
- Aim for 0.8-1.2g per pound of body weight (~ 1.8 – 2.6g per kg). It’s best to get into the top half of this range as much as possible to ensure you are never left short. Protein is also filling which is super useful in a deficit.
- Sources: Meat, fish, eggs, tofu, Greek yoghurt.
I recommend having a couple of go-to meals that are high in protein, and are easily made/stored. Having these in your mind will make it much easier to increase your protein intake when needed. See the Tracking section below for how to work this out.
Fats:
- Aim for 0.25-0.35g per pound of body weight (~ 0.55 – 0.77g per kg). Treat the lower end of this range as an absolute minimum.
- It’s a tricky line to tread: too much fat and you don’t have enough room in your calories for adequate carbs, too little and you risk sub-optimal hormone production
- Avoid fat from fried or processed foods as a rule of thumb
- Sources: Avocado, nuts, olive oil.
Carbs:
- Fill the remaining calories with carbs
- We know protein has 4kcals and fat has 9kcals per gram – work out your total calorie intake from protein and fat and subtract this from your total calorie intake. This gives you your calories from carbs, divide this by 4 to find your carb goal in grams
- Your calories from carbs should make up more than 40% of your total calories to support your training
- Sources: Rice, oats, potatoes, sweet potatoes, whole grains.
Tracking Your Cutting Phase
How are you going to know if you’re making progress if you don’t track anything? It’s so easy to know roughly what you’re eating and roughly what you’re lifting and roughly what you weigh. The results will come when you know your goals, know your progress, and know what you need to do day by day.
The three main areas to track during a cut are nutrition, training, and weight.
Why track while in a cut?
- Knowing your calorie and macro intake every day is the most effective way at making sure you’re hitting your calorie and macro goals. This leads to consistent progress.
- Knowing the weights you lift on your main exercises gives you something to aim for every session. This ensures your workouts have a good level of intensity, helping you to maintain muscle.
- Knowing how much you weigh is important for a number of reasons
- Seeing progress on the scales helps motivation
- Weighing yourself every morning gets you into the frame mind for the rest of the day
- If your weight is increasing or has plateaued for a while, you can adjust your calories accordingly
How to track while in a cut
- The app ‘MyFitnessPal’ is a great tool to track your calories and macros. Scan the barcode and enter the weight of the food you’re eating, MyFitnessPal will calculate your total calories and macros. MFP Top Tips:
- When making a meal, put your plate or bowl on the kitchen scales, add an item, log item and weight in MFP, press 0, repeat. I find this easier than weighing each item individually and then adding to your bowl.
- MFP remembers and suggests foods that you’ve inputted previously, so if you’re eating the exact same meal as yesterday, you can add it in one swipe. Foods you’ve added in the past will appear in your suggested searches, saving you from scanning the same foods every day.
- The app ‘Strong’ is great for tracking your weights on different exercises in the gym. It’s really easy to use, and also helps to track other things such as PRs and rest in between sets.
- Track your weight in your phone notes for accessibility, or alternatively, use excel. Excel has the added benefit of being able to graph your progress easily.
Obviously, other apps exist, these are just my personal favourites.
It’s important to remember to take care of your mental health when dieting. We all have different relationships with our weight, so while discipline and goals are good, unless you’re training for Mr/Mrs Olympia, there’s no need to get obsessed over this stuff. Do your best and enjoy the process.
How to Transition Out of a Cut
Finished your cut and achieved your weight loss goals? Congratulations! But it’s not over yet…
The most common thing to do after a cut is to have a huge blowout and put some/all of the weight back on. We need to be super careful and only increase our calories to our new maintenance.
- Recalculate your new maintenance calories
- Track your weight and adjust your calories over time to find the right number for you to maintain weight
- Do this until you’re comfortable enough to relax your tracking and still maintain weight – it’s a good idea to check your weight once per week at a minimum here to check your weight isn’t creeping up.
- Do this for at least 3 weeks to allow your body to reset before setting a new goal. You should still be training hard throughout this time.
Now what? You need to decide whether you’re happy maintaining, want to lose a bit more weight (in which case you’d do the same thing all over again), or whether you want to put on a bit of size and make some gains now that you’re leaner.
Want to bulk while staying as lean as possible? Check out How to Bulk Properly: Build Muscle Fast Without Getting Fat
FAQs
Can I eat junk food while cutting?
Yes. But keep it to a minimum and ideally within your calorie and macro range. The best tool here is prior planning, if you know you’re going out in the evening, eat less in the day to give you some extra calories to work with.
If you do this too much, it will start to negatively affect your progress. Even if junk food is within your calories and macros, it will still impact your hormones and energy. Stick to healthy food (ideally single ingredient) as much as possible.
Wrapping It Up
There really is no better feeling than looking at yourself in the mirror, seeing the product of your hard work, and being proud of yourself. So take the advice in here, make a plan, work out the numbers, and stick to it. 12 weeks and we’ll have you looking like these guys. (Insert more pictures of Greek gods).
Best of luck.
Notes
Further Reading
A great vid on getting lean and not blowing back up by the Goat.
