How to Setup a Nutrition Lifestyle for Success
and Losing Fat
One of the most important parts to attaining ottermode is the types and amount of food you consume while on the plan. I am writing this article for those who may need to lose a few pounds in order to get to their ideal physique. If you think you need to gain weight on your frame, I will have another article coming for you.
The key to ottermode is having a sufficient amount of muscle on your frame, while at the same time being lean enough to see the full definition of all the muscle you do have. The key to ottermode is to be as close to 10% body fat as possible. You can see what that looks like by looking at the chart below:
The key to being lean, while still having a substantial amount of muscle mass, is to decrease you calories at a rate that is sustainable. Too many people cut their calories by a massive amount everyday in hopes to make the journey quicker. This may work for a week or two, but the key to getting in great shape is the time spent on the diet, and making sure it is something one can incorporate into their lifestyle.
For these reasons, I don’t suggest to lose more than .5% - 1% of your total body weight per week. What this means is for someone who weights 175lbs, and looking to loose 15lbs to get to a lean mean 160lbs, they shouldn’t lose more than .875lbs - 1.75lbs per week. So for their 15 pound weight loss timeline, it will take between 9-17 weeks to loose that weight.
This may seem like a long time, but we have to remember that we are the products of our habits. Breaking habits is hard, and honestly the idea of losing the weight and being at your goal body for the rest of your life (in only a few months) is quite attractive.
So how does one setup their diet to lose this amount of weight per week? First we have to understand a few basics. A pound of fat is 3500 calories. To lose this weight we need our bodies to burn more calories than we are consuming. There are a couple ways to do this.
First, we could just do more activity in order to lose all that weight. This would be something like running, biking, walking, or anything else that gets your heart pumping, the sweat going, and breathing harder. But, there is a problem here.
For a 175lb man to burn 3500 calories with purely running, they would need to run a whooping 4 and a half hours! This would be about 27 miles at a 10 minute mile pace. Now, with our goal of being to loose ~1lb a week, we could just spread out these 27 miles of running across the whole week, averaging about 4 miles a day. This is totally doable, but there are some other key assumptions we need to take into account.
First, after all this running, we need to make sure we don’t eat any more than we were before. This throws many people into a spin. Because if we eat more after running (which is likely, running makes me ravenous) we start to negate all the effects of that run for our calorie deficit. Merely having a little cliff bar after each run would decrease the amount of fat we are burning by half. This would mean we are doing the same amount of running, having a little snack after, and only losing half a pound a week.
But there is another part of the fat loss equation we can manipulate to lose weight. The amount we eat.
If for example, instead of running, we just ate 3500 less calories each week to lose a pound per week (remember a pound of fat is 3500 calories). That works out to 500 less calories everyday of food eaten.
In the example of the 175lb man, he will burn roughly 2,200 calories a day, just with normal activities and no exercise. So this means he will need to eat 1,700 calories everyday, even with no exercise to get to this 1lb per week fat loss goal. That may seem like a drastic change, but believe me, there are many ways to have nourishing meals for 1,700 calories a day.
An example day I might follow is this:
Breakfast: black coffee, sparkling water, etc. (otterfast remember!)
Lunch at 1pm: chipotle bowl (rice, double steak, guac, corn, salsa, lettuce), 750 calories
Dinner at 7pm: Large meal of chicken and rice, 700 calories
Desert at 9pm: Snickers ice cream bar, 250 calories
This totals up to 1,700 calories, and still seems like quite a nourishing day of food. It works for me because it scratches my itch of guac on my chipotle bowl, and I love ending my day with a snickers (it really is my favorite candy bar).
With that said: for you to find how much you need to eat to maintain a pound per week of fat loss, do the following:
Head to https://www.calculator.net/bmr-calculator.html, and plug in your age, height, and weight.
It will give you a BMR number (this stands for “Basal Metabolic Rate”, this is a fancy term for how many calories you would burn if you laid in bed all day and did nothing.)
Based on how much you exercise, it will give you a breakdown below of how many calories you burn. Select the number that most closely aligns with your exercise habits.
Subtract 500 calories from this number
This is the number of calories you need to consume in order to lose a pound of fat per week.
This is the most basic way of understanding fat loss, and once you have this number you can really begin optimizing your diet. Things like intermittent fasting, nutrient timing, and the type of foods you eat will affect how easy it is to hit this calorie goal.
I will have articles to come on how to optimize your diet to make this goal as easy as possible to hit, make sure to subscribe to see those first.
-Tyler
P.S. If you found this article to be helpful, make sure to get a free subscription to the substack and follow my twitter : @ottermode_