If you’re reading this article then you want to drop some body fat. I bet you’ve read dozens of articles with generally helpful, non-specific advice. This article is going to be different. I want to teach you how to use some basic tools to create your own unique 20 pound weight loss plan. I will also be showing you exactly how I created my own weight loss program, losing 21 pounds in 11 weeks. Keep reading to see the specifics of my fitness plan, nutritional intake, and all the tools I used to drop significant body fat.
I must confess, part of the reason I’m writing this article is to create a blueprint for the future. I’ve lost 20-30 pounds a few times before, but that’s been several years ago, and my memory isn’t as good as a detailed plan. In this article I will be covering all the relevant details of my weight loss journey, and showing you where and why I had success. I will also be pointing out a few areas where I made some mistakes so you can do even better in your battle with weight gain.
If you’ve read any of my other articles about fat loss then you know I often write free fitness programs for all types of athletes including: lifters, functional fitness athletes, and bodybuilders. This article will be no different, as I primarily categorize myself as a functional fitness athlete, with a bias towards strength training. Here is a quick overview of what we’ll cover in the article.
20 Pound Weight Loss Plan Overview
- Long term habits are crucial to success
- Generating precise weight, body fat, and nutrition metrics was key for my success
- You must include some type of weight lifting
- Some athletes will do better with high volume cardio and others will not
- Your plan doesn’t have to look like mine to be successful
- Try not to be “perfect” as being consistently good is a better goal for success
I often write about weight loss, and I like to cover the research on this important topic. In my studies I’ve found that weight loss research on natural bodybuilders is the most applicable. As a group, they are very good at losing body fat while retaining muscle mass. In this next section we’ll review some key pieces of research on successful weight loss programs.
Weight Loss Research for Hard Training Athletes
If I have one complaint about most fat loss articles, it’s their misquotation of research papers. Many of these writers are just churning out content, and have no practical experience in the gym. As such, they don’t read research with any kind of background experience.
If you actually read the research these article are highlighting, you’ll find that many of the participants are elderly, morbidly obese, or folks in very poor health. While this is a laudable research area, the specific weight loss advice I would give to them is much different than the advice I would give to someone who trains hard and wants to improve their body composition. This brings us to the top questions we need answered if we are going to learn how to lose weight as an athlete.
Common Weight Loss Questions
- How much do I need to eat?
- What is the optimal weight loss rate?
- What should my macro nutrient splits look like?
- Do I need to follow a specialty diet plan like keto, or intermittent fasting?
- What (if any) supplements should I take?
How Much Do I need to Eat?
This is the big question everyone has on their minds. The correct, if somewhat flippant answer, is less than you are now, but of course we can narrow that down slightly.
I highly recommend you read this article and download the spreadsheet that will calculate your macros, and overall energy requirements for weight loss. As you’ll see later on, this is only a starting point. You may find, as I did, that a slightly different macro split will work best for you.
An average male athlete will burn around 2000 calories on a non gym day, maintaining normal bodily functions, and moving around. The average female burns fewer calories, around 1700 calories per day.
On a gym day, most female athletes will burn around 275 calories during the class, and men will be closer to 350 calories. This isn’t very much, but remember, calories are just units of energy. Your goal isn’t to burn them. Your goal is to lose body fat!
You will see more relevant details when you read the article and download the spreadsheet, but this is a good starting point in our understanding of overall energy needs. The most important part of this whole equation is to create a sustainable caloric deficit through lifestyle changes.
You can create this deficit, as I did, with a lot of physical activity, or you can workout less, and eat less. It doesn’t matter how you do it, as long as you’re eating a healthy diet.
What is the Optimal Weight Loss Rate?
This is one area where researchers have begun to change their tune as more and more studies are published. Generally, for strength athletes, a lower rate of weight loss is more beneficial.
This research review on natural bodybuilders found that the vast majority of bodybuilding studies recommend a weight loss rate between .5 and 1% of your body weight per week.
However, this study compared 1% to 0.5% weight loss rates, and they found that a compromise of .7% promoted greater retention of lean body mass. This study on natural bodybuilders found that those who placed the best actually lost weight at a rate of .45% per week. It’s clear that you can actually lose too much weight, too quickly, if you crash diet.
Based on this recent research, I think it’s safe to say that .5-.7% of your body mass should be lost each week. This will maintain your muscle mass, and more importantly, it won’t require a huge caloric deficit. Yay for not starving!
What Should Our Macronutrient Splits Look Like?
This is by far the least concrete advice I will be giving you. This, like overall energy intake, is incredibly variable. It’s based on your activity level, daily exercise routine, and your genetics. I found that during my diet I generally followed these recommendations, and I naturally settled on a fairly consistent split.
Protein Requirements for Weight Loss
This is the big one everyone likes to talk about, and it is incredibly important to get this right. Protein, and it’s component amino acids, are the building blocks for muscle tissue in your body. Eating a high protein diet is a great way to maintain your muscle mass, especially during the weight loss process
This is one area where research has been remarkably consistent. In this research review, they found that the best range in protein ingestion for natural bodybuilders is 1.8g – 2.7g of protein per kilogram of bodyweight. In American Freedom Units that’s .81g – 1.22g per pound of bodyweight.
It looks like the gym bro’s and the magazines were right. The tried and true one gram of protein per pound of bodyweight is right in this range. There is some research that recommends a slightly higher intake, to help promote satiety and hunger suppression on strict diets, but anything in this range should work well for most athletes.
Carbohydrate Requirements for Weight Loss
This is somewhat of a dirty word for folks. Back in the day, all gym goers were paleo or low carb. Now everyone is trying to do the ketogenic diet, which is essentially an extremely low carb diet, at less than 50g of carbs per day.
The thing about diets is that they all work, as long as you can stick to them, and they create a caloric deficit. Ketogenic diets will work, and it has been tried on strength athletes, with some positive results. That doesn’t mean I would recommend it for most folks, as it’s a hard diet to stick to. In my opinion they are a bit of a fad diet.
The best rule of thumb, for carbohydrate intake, is to ingest just enough to fuel your workouts, and that’s about it. During any weight loss diet, much of the deficit in calories will come from reduction in carb intake.
I found that my carbs matched my lean protein intake, gram for gram. I achieved this by creating healthy meals, filled with low-calorie foods. You can find a list of healthy foods and recipes in this article.
For fat loss, you need to ingest around 30% of your overall caloric intake in carbohydrate. Again, I highly recommend you check out this article and download the calculator so it will calculate all this for you.
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Dietary Fat Intake for Weight Loss
Healthy fats are more important on a diet than you might think. You need a certain amount of dietary fat to maintain normal hormone levels. If I have one gripe with the bodybuilding industry, it is the chicken and rice style diet, with very low fat.
On the surface it makes sense. Fat is the most calorically dense macronutrient. It has double the number of calories (9 cal/g) compared to proteins and carbs (4 cal/g). If we cut fat, we can create a calorie deficit very quickly right? Wrong!
You can do this for a while, but you’ll soon understand why you need fat in your diet. Remember fats are used to create hormones like testosterone and others. Both men and women need hormones to help regulate all bodily functions. Fats can help keep you sane during the diet!
Once you’ve set your protein and carb intake, the rest of your calories will come from fat. In the calculator, this is set to 25% of your energy intake. This will leave you with enough fat to stay healthy and sane while you drop body fat.
Do I Need to Follow a Specialty Diet Like Intermittent Fasting or Keto?
As I alluded to above, you can follow a specialty diet if you like, but if you are otherwise healthy, you don’t need to do so. Ketogenic diets will work, but honestly following those very high fat macros splits will be hard to do. Try ordering something at a restaurant with 80% fat content, I’ll wait.
The other elephant in the room is intermittent fasting (IF). With this diet you are given a window of time during the day where you can eat your food, and the rest of the time you only have non caloric fluids. Generally speaking you will fast for 16 hours and eat in an 8 hour window.
This research study compared two groups of athletes, one which fasted for 16 hours and ate for 8 hours, the other control group ate the same amount of total calories spread out throughout the day, in a normal fashion. Both groups completed the same resistance training program as well.
Amazingly the IF group lost 3.54 lbs of pure fat compared to the traditional group, which lost .68 lbs of fat. Remember there was no caloric deficit here, just a different eating schedule.
The researchers did note that testosterone and IGF-1, both well studied anabolic hormones, decreased significantly in IF group, but not in the traditional group. Both groups maintained the same muscle mass and strength values so this should be interpreted with caution.
Personally I think extending your over night fast is the best way to help you feel less hungry while on a diet. It doesn’t have to be 16 hours initially as you can start with a 12 hour fast and increase if you like. I’ve tried IF in the past and I found it easy to follow, but received no tangible fat loss from it. Your mileage may vary.
I can tell you I didn’t follow any speciality diet, and I rarely if ever experienced any hunger pangs. I had decent energy in the gym, but I attribute that to my aerobic capacity increase, which we’ll talk about later.
What (If Any) Supplements Should I Take for A 2o Pound Weight Loss Plan
My general rule of thumb on supplements is don’t take them. The vast majority of athletes need to focus on the basics before they get into the details of supplements, which realistically are only going to give you a few percent increase in performance.
I will make a deal with you. If you can go two weeks and average above 8 hours of sleep a night, while hitting your macro nutrient splits, then you can start worrying about supplements.
If you have trouble hitting your protein recommendations, you can go for a protein supplement which can be a big help. I also think the research is clear on the benefits of creatine and caffeine. Once we get into the case study portion of this article, I will highlight some supplements that I took, that I feel are worthwhile.
Now that we’ve covered the current research on fat loss for hard training athletes, we will move on to what exactly I did to create my own 20 pound weight loss plan.
If you want a great premium program with all the details you need in the gym, then check this out.
My 20 Pound Weight Loss Plan
In this section I’m going to include all the detail I have on my own 20 pound weight loss plan. I used several apps, and tools to track my nutrition, training, and overall recovery. I will review all of those tools and discuss which ones were most important, and which ones you can skip further on.
I will break this section down into three primary areas. The first section will be the functional fitness weight loss plan I followed. The second section will be my nutrition, and the last section will be my cardio program.
Before we do that, I want to point out the outline of my program. I generally worked out 6 times per week, with 3-5 of those days being two workouts per day. I tracked my food intake, and weighed some of my meals from time to time. I also weighed myself everyday, and measured my body fat via tape measure on a weekly basis. You can see my process outlined below.
Weigh ins on a daily basis are important, as you can gain or lose a lot of bodyweight in a day, purely through water weight. Daily fluctuations are easy to see, and you can determine the general trend over a week, with more data points. If you just weigh yourself once a week, then you might think you’re having a hard time losing fat, when really your body is better hydrated than normal!
Program Overview
I think it’s important to point out that I did nothing perfectly during my 20 pound weight loss plan. I actually ate too little quite often, and I probably did more cardio than was really necessary. However I would classify my overall performance as good enough to get the job done.
I was able to lose 20 pounds of weight. I started at 20.4% body fat and dropped to 13.5% by week 11 of my 20 pound weight loss plan. I maintained or slightly increased my strength as my previous heaviest set of 5 deadlifts (within the last few years) was 385 for 5 reps. On week eleven, I pulled 400 pounds for 5 reps fairly easily. I also did almost no max effort deadlifting.
Most importantly my aerobic conditioning increased dramatically, thanks to the ludicrous amounts of cycling on Zwift that I was doing. According to my Garmin Epix 2, I increase my VO2 max from 44 to 53 in 11 weeks. I’ll have further details on how I did this later on. The good news is you don’t have to spend that amount of time doing cardio, unless you’re strange like me. Now let’s get to my weight training and functional fitness program.
My Strength and Functional Fitness Program
This was quite easy for me as I’ve already written a very detailed functional fitness program for athletes trying to lose weight. I just followed my own advice! That program is 12 weeks in length and has tons of great information on how to execute it correctly. Here is a sample week of the program. If you want all the details go to the link above.
The most important thing I can tell you is that I didn’t follow this program verbatim. Some days I wasn’t feeling the way the WOD was written, so I would change it. When I made the changes, I would often modify the rep scheme or the movement, but keep the same movement patterns. If you want more info on how to scale programs correctly check out this article on the topic.
I would rarely modify the the two lifts, and followed that part of the program strictly. I also completely neglected the cardio, as written. I planned on doing cycling for my cardio, as most research shows that it has the least interference with strength and muscle gains. I found the researchers were correct on this one.
If you want another great program that you can use on your weight loss journey, check out my most popular program below.
My Cardio and Aerobic Training Program
My Cardio and Aerobic Training Program consisted almost purely of cycling on Zwift. If you don’t know what Zwift is then I highly recommend checking out this article, where cover all the details. Broadly speaking it’s an online interactive video game that you hook your bicycle too. It allows you to race and ride with others online.
It’s become massively popular for good reason. It’s a ton of fun. You can do everything from riding around the various worlds on your own, or you can do specific workouts, and group rides. I found that my favorite activity was racing other Zwifters. Here’s a quick video showing you what it’s like.
I’m a competitive person and I enjoy new challenges. Let me say that when I first started I was pretty bad. None of the Tour de France teams were thinking of calling me up to the big leagues. I’m now proud to say that I’m slightly above average, which is pretty good for a guy who can deadlift 400×5. Incidentally, the teams still aren’t calling me.
The most important part of this cardio program was that it made an otherwise dull task fun. I found I spent a lot of time on the bike. I generally logged around 100 miles a week, cycling between 4-5 days, on top of my lifting. Doing this much cardio also allowed me a bit of junk food here and there, without derailing my weight loss.
If you read my article on concurrent training then you’ll know that it’s a good idea to split up your cardio from your weight training by at least 4 hours. I found that I would do a race (max effort cardio) on days that were upper body heavy. On lower body strength days, I would either skip cycling, or do a very easy zone 2 ride for anywhere between 60-90 minutes.
If you’re not familiar with the benefits of zone 2 aerobic exercise then you should check the video out below. It’s super important, and it’s one area where many non endurance athletes need to improve. Next let’s talk about my nutrition.
My Fat Loss Nutrition Program
In my unsuccessful diet attempts in the past, I have often failed because my diet wasn’t very consistent. I used two tools to help out my consistency this time. I logged my food on the My Fitness Pal app, and I used this cheap scale from Amazon (Affiliate link) to weigh a decent amount of my food.
I know weighing your food seems odd to many folks, and I don’t think everyone should do it, but it certainly helped me. I found that my portion size estimates were way off. Often in the wrong way. I was giving myself less protein than I thought! Check out my ultimate nutrition guide for more info.
I want to point to something critical here. I don’t think the information that I was entering into the app was particularly accurate. I think it was precise and consistent. The difference is that the app says that I’m running a big caloric deficit. This information doesn’t quite match my actual weight loss rate.
Remember the research recommends a weight loss rate of .5% – 1% of overall body mass per week. On average I lost .91% of my body mass each week. This was an aggressive but sustainable weight loss rate. I had good energy levels, and I wasn’t particularly hungry. Check out these charts below for some more info.
My 20 Pound Weight Loss Plan Nutrition Metrics
You’ll see there was some variation on my overall calorie intake and macronutrient split. I can tell you that across all 11 weeks I averaged 176 grams of protein, 178 grams of carbs, and 67 grams of fat each day. This works out to an overall caloric intake of 1962 calories. This is about right for a mid 30’s male, who’s 5’9.
Based on my Garmin Epix 2, I burnt an average of 979 active calories each day. This yielded an average caloric deficit of 1147 calories. On paper this is much too large of a caloric deficit. I should be starving, and losing lean muscle mass like crazy.
Well this is the part of the article where I say look to the actual outputs, and listen to your body. My weight loss rate was within the ideal range. I felt good, and experienced no significant drops in muscle mass or strength. This is why I say that these measurements were most likely precise, but not laboratory accurate.
I was probably in a smaller deficit than my data would have me believe, and consequently, was following a healthy weight loss rate. It doesn’t matter because I consistently logged my info, and it yielded the results I wanted. Before we move on, I do want to quickly touch on some of the protein and vitamin supplements that I found useful.
Supplements I Used for My 20 Pound Weight Loss Plan
If you haven’t caught on by now, I’m not a huge supplement guy. I think they can be helpful, but many athletes look to them as some kind of miracle quick fix, that will make their diet a breeze. I’ve never seen any evidence to support this, and as a result, I normally use them to supplement my daily protein intake.
One of my favorite protein supplements was this Elite Core Power Protein Drink (42g) I purchased from Amazon. I like the vanilla flavor, and I actually used it as milk for my daily bowl of cereal. My next most common protein supplements were two different protein bars. I like the Quest Hero Peanut Butter and Chocolate bar, as well as these BSN Bars, both Amazon affiliate links.
Otherwise I generally took a multivitamin from GNC that supports metabolism and energy. It’s more or less a regular multivitamin with 140mg of caffeine per dose. On the plus side it will turn your pee nuclear yellow, so there’s that to look forward to!
Because eating enough protein to hold on to muscle mass is so important, I think there is some merit to these types of supplements. Do you have to take these supplements? Absolutely not, but they certainly were convenient for me. In the next section we’ll cover the specific apps, and tools I used to help with my 20 pound weight loss plan. Before we get to the next section, don’t forget to join our email list here.
Apps, Tools, and Training Aides for Fat Loss
This section is meant to be helpful, but by no means should you go out and download all the things I mention here. If these tools seem useful then give them a shot, but don’t feel like you have to drop big bucks to lose weight. You don’t. You just need a reasonable program, that you can do consistently.
My most important tool was my Garmin Epix 2 fitness watch, and the Garmin Connect account it comes with. This tool tracks everything, and I mean everything. It will track any type of fitness activity you want. It tracks caloric expenditure, and much more.
Software Tools for Weight Loss
The most valuable part of the Garmin software was the recovery metrics. It tracks things like heart rate variability, sleep scores, and stress scores. This provided valuable input on days where I was questioning whether I should go for an easy ride, or race. I didn’t always follow it’s recommendations, but it was a great sanity check.
My next most used tool was My Fitness Pal. This provided an easy means of seeing how much food I was eating. It helped me to get my macros where there should be. It probably isn’t 100% accurate, but as long as you consistently track your food the same way, it works well. Even researchers use it for their studies, so it’s good enough for you and me. I used the free version.
My next most important software tool was my Zwift Account and my Zwift Hub which allows me to connect my bike to the game. This one is really optional. The account is $15 USD per month, and the Zwift Hub is $499.
You also need to have a bike that you can hook up to the hub. It’s beneficial to use a heart rate monitor like this Garmin HRM. This leads me to the hardware tools I used for my 20 pound weight loss plan.
Hardware Tools for Your Weight Loss Program
I’m not going to list every barbell, dumbbell, and motivational poster I saw in this section. I’m going to cover the pieces of gear that I felt were helpful, that you might not otherwise use.
As I mentioned previously I used this cheap scale to weigh my food, and I think it’s definitely a great buy at less than $15, as of this writing. You’ll find that you probably don’t know how much something weighs with any degree of accuracy. I didn’t weigh everything, but I often used it as a sanity check after the first few weeks.
Towards the end of my diet, my wife purchased a Garmin Smart Scale for me and I found this to be a great addition to my health metrics, as it automatically imports my data to the Garmin App. If you have other Garmin fitness trackers, I think it’s a good addition. There’s also nothing wrong with a regular scale either.
Lastly, I used this basic Garmin Heart Rate Monitor. If you plan on racing in Zwift, many races require a monitor, to keep people from cheating. It can also give you more metrics like your lactate threshold, and a few other nerdy things that some folks might like. This has been a pretty long article, so let’s wrap this up.
Final Thoughts
I want to be clear. I’m not telling anyone to follow this program, as I built it specifically for me. It would also be a good idea to get a physical and some blood work done before your own weight loss plan, just to make sure you’re ready to go.
My weight loss goals, going in to this diet were to lose body fat, while increasing my aerobic fitness. I use Beyond the Whiteboard for tracking my lifts, WODs, and other gym metrics year round, and it consistently tells me my conditioning is too low for my strength levels.
I used this diet to fix that, which is why I did a lot of cycling cardio. I don’t think anyone needs to do that much cardio, unless you want to increase your aerobic fitness.
I was worried that my low-calorie diet and high amount of cardio would impact my strength. I’m happy to report that I don’t think it impacted it noticeably. I can also report that my WOD performance increased, as I set a new PR on the benchmark WOD Badger just a few days ago.
For your own fitness program I think you should check around this website and find a program that looks appealing. Next track your food intake and try to hit the macros the calculator gives you. Adjust these macros as the diet continues based on how you feel.
Try to increase your movement throughout the day. Take the stairs more often, and park further away in the parking lot. This incidental daily movement can help you burn more calories and keep you more active.
Don’t stress about the specific numbers in your apps, as long as you are losing weight in a healthy way. I hope this helps, and if you have any comments or questions put them in the comments section below, and I’ll get you an answer. Now get out there and get training.
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So is this the new and improved version 2.0 and replaces the original version? Or are both versions still good?
This is the original. The 12 week Hybrid program is the latest and greatest.
Oops, I commented on the wrong one. So is the new hybrid one a replacement for this old one as in discard it and don’t use it anymore and just use the hybrid?
No this is really just a tweak to some of the programming goals. The overall training principles are the same. Ether will work, provided you do!