Lose the Fat.
Keep the Muscle.

You train hard. You eat clean. You're paying a coach every month — and you're still not recomping—exchanging fat for muscle.

The most common reason the results don't match the effort is not eating enough. And I don't mean junk calories. I mean the good clean muscle creating fat burning foods. Simply put hunger is a sign you aren't eating enough often enough. When you get your food intake dialed in, effort and results line up.

Losing fat without losing muscle takes a fine tuned diet approach. You have to feed the lean body weight with enough protein to protect your metabolism. And eat enough complex carbohydrates to protect the muscle from being burned for energy. A typical low-cal diet will cause as much as 75% muscle loss.

Feeding the body the right amount of protein and carbs and keeping the fat sugar and alcohol intake as low as possible is the ONLY way to lose fat and preserve muscle.

Yes. Your body can add muscle and lose fat at the same time — but only if your diet is set up correctly for your LBM (metabolism), job, lifestyle and exercise/activities. Random eating gets random results, specific eating gets specific results.

A perfect diet will successfully build muscle and burn fat. What's a perfect diet? The right kind of food, at the right time in the right amount.

The answer isn't really what should you eat but how much of what should you eat. You need enough protein to repair muscle. And enough carbs for the muscles to burn for energy so they don't burn themselves up. Muscle can easily be broken down and converted to blood sugar.

And that's why low cal diets can cause massive muscle loss. And it's why the current thinking on protein intake is to consume massive amounts as a protection against muscle loss. It's not wrong but protein is way more expensive than bread or rice as a source of energy.

How much? That depends on your LBM, your job, and what you do in the gym — not a one-size template.

Enough protein to repair and protect lean mass — spread through the day. That's the starting point. The current trend is massive amounts of protein to build muscles and prevent muscle loss. It's not wrong, it just begs the question what does the body do with excessive protein intake.

Well the protein not used for LBM replacement is turned to fat. And this is why it can be difficult to reach a low body fat %.

Do you know a calorie is actually a measurement of the energy required to raise a gram of water one degree. Counting calories is completely backwards from the way diets should be created.

You start with the body comp test to determine your muscle (LBM) that helps set the protein needs. Any protein not used for repair will be stored as fat. Then you determine how much energy you expend every day in your job, a toll taker doesn't expend as much energy as a construction worker. Then you calculate how much protein fat and carbs are used during your workouts. The intensity level (heart rate) has a lot of bearing on this number.

When you have both of those numbers you can determine the calories you need. But you don't need to know the calories because you've already determined how much protein and complex carbs you need. By then you already have your daily prescription — without counting calories.

Recomp is slang for recomposition. And recomping the body is exchanging fat for muscle or vice versa. Adding ten pounds of muscle and losing ten pounds of fat leaves you at the same body weight but a completely different body composition.

The alternative is losing fat and muscle at the same time and that often results in a person being a smaller softer version of their fat self. They didn't add and subtract, they just subtracted.