Posted by Click aquí para leer este artículo en español
We have already talked about how modern society pushes us to impatience and to expect to have everything “here and now”. Possibly the main reason why many people don’t have the weight or the body composition they would like to have is due to the fact that healthy and sustainable fat loss is a long and tedious process.
We also showed in our post about the second universal law, the reasons why a slow and sustainable fat loss is preferrable and almost always healthier than a quick weight loss.
However, there actually is a way to lose weight pretty fast and also to ensure that a significant part of it will be fat. In case you are wondering, we don’t know any formula to achieve a weight loss where all of it is fat 😉
This option we are talking about is called PSMF: protein sparing modified fast. It is a very low calorie diet (around 1.000 Cal/day) and very high in protein, so you can spare as much muscle as possible. It is a keto diet (you can find detailed explanations about keto diets in this post), and hence, its objective is making you use your own fat as fuel instead of using glycogen; you will be in Ketosis. I first read about this protocol in Lyle McDonald’s book “The Ketogenic Diet” (super interested if you are into diets in general or specifically into ketogenic diets), and read about it again in this awesome article by our admired Marcos Vázquez in Fitness Revolucionario.
Before you continure reading, this diet might be for you if…
- You are at the beginning of a diet where you need to lose a lot of weight and you want to have a quick initial loss to boost your motivation.
- You’ve reached a plateau in your current diet and want to speed it up a little bit.
- You would like to lose a few kilos before a competition.
- You’ve been dieting for quite a while and you would like to lose those last four or five kilos as fast as possible.
This diet is NOT for you if…
- You have any existing issue with your kidneys. You will eat a lot of protein and your kidneys will have extra work. No big deal if your kidneys are healthyu, but if they aren’t, this diet may not be the best idea.
- If your will power is not at its peak. You will feel quite weak, low energy and moody at the end of the day due to the carb restriction.
- If you need to train hard. Since you will be out of carbs, you will lack the energy for ball busting workouts.
- If you need a diet you can maintain for a long time. This approach is not something you can keep for weeks or months. This is a “shock plan”. We do not recommend to keep this one longer than one week. Something you could do if you find this really works for you, would be to cycle it. For example, you could do it Monday to Thursday and then go back to a moderate deficit from Friday to Sunday. Watch out, if you do PSMF from Monday to Thursday and in the weekend you get into a three-day feast of pasta and ice cream, this is not going to work. Most likely you will find yourself at the starting point (if not worse) by Sunday night.
In my case, I let myself go a little bit during the summer and I put on about 4 kilos (from 67,5 to 71,5). When I came back from holidays, I took a moderate deficit approach that worked quite well for me (will give you more details in another post), and I tried PSMF for one week. This was the result (the four PSMF days are highlighted on blue background). In the left axis you can see the caloric intake and in the righ axis you can see my weight:
Mi objective here was getting to my target weight (65kg). I started with a moderate deficit (-300 Cal) on August 30th. In that moment my weight was 71,4 Kg. When I started PSMF, on October 25th, I was at 67,6 kg, which means that I had lost 3,8 kg in 8 weeks (a bit less than half a kilo per week, which is mostly OK). After 4 days of PSMF diet, my weight was 65,2 kg, 2,4 less than on Monday morning, which means that my weight loss pace was roughly 5 times faster.
What happened after that? How much did I bounce back after I went back to “normal eating”? From that day, except on Friday, when we went to celebrate my friend Nuria’s birthday at a great Italian restaurant (cabs feast!!) I increased progressively my intake towards my maintenance calories (red line) and although initally it increased a bit, it has stabilized around those 65 kg (64,7 this morning).
Aside from the diet that you can see below, it is key that you move a little bit to foster fat loss as much as you can, since your body will be using primarily your stored fat for fuel. In my case I trained lightly (20-25 minutes) everyday and took an average of 11,000 steps.
This is what I eat; it is in Spanish but if you want me to translate it for you, just leave me a comment 😉
If you want to give it a go, you can use this one. Just bear in mind that the key here is the protein target, which needs to be between 2 and 3 grams per kilo of bodyweigh and day. Once you have that figured out, the rest is pretty easyt.
If you want to give it a go, leave us a comment or send us a message!