How to Get Fit

I’m not a dietician or doctor. Follow the information in this article at your own risk.

Fitness requires good body composition. For the vast majority of people, improving their body composition means increasing their muscle mass by lifting weights while losing fat with a proper diet.

Most people have too much fat and not enough muscle. They don’t know how to train, or how and what to eat. They don’t know much about the nutrients they consume. They eat blindly and based on feelings. That’s bad.

Fat loss is about caloric restriction. That’s all there is to it. If you want to lose fat, figure out your daily caloric maintenance first. To learn how, watch this video or use an online calculator. Your daily caloric maintenance is the amount of energy your body burns automatically on a typical day. Eating at caloric maintenance means your body composition won’t change, all else being equal. Eat below caloric maintenance to lose fat.

Say your caloric maintenance is 2,000 kcals per day. If you eat 1,500 kcals per day, you will lose roughly 1 pound of fat per week. That’s because a pound of fat has about 3,500 kcals, and a daily deficit of 500 kcals maintained over seven days adds up to 3,500 kcals.

Get a kitchen scale (I use this one) and track your calories using an app like Cronometer. It’s free and easy to use. (They’re not paying me to say this.) You just scan barcodes of your foods and drinks, weigh everything you consume, and log it in the app. It then tracks the calories and nutrients for you. Be honest with yourself and hold yourself accountable. Log every single thing you consume, including the teaspoon of olive oil that goes in your salad and the splash of cream you put in your coffee.

Redetermine your caloric maintenance from time to time and adjust accordingly. It decreases as you lose fat.

Track your nutrients. Again, Cronometer tracks them for you. There are three macronutrients: fat, protein, and carbohydrates (carbs). Most people vastly overconsume fat and underconsume protein.

Fat is essential for your cells and hormones but you don’t need much of it: aim for about 25% of your daily maintenance calories. At 9 kcals per gram, that comes out to about 55 grams of fat per day at a caloric-maintenance level of 2,000 kcals ((2,000/9) * 25%). People regularly eat hundreds of grams of fat a day – far more than they need.

As for protein, a good rule of thumb is to consume your target lean body weight in grams. This amount ensures that you get enough protein to repair and build muscle. For example, if your goal weight is 150 pounds lean, consume an average of 150 grams of protein a day. At 4 kcals per gram, that comes out to 600 kcals of protein. Reaching your daily protein goal should be relatively easy, especially if you eat protein-dense foods like chicken breast or tuna. You shouldn’t need to drink any protein shakes; overconsuming protein will not hasten muscle growth.

Then, fill the rest of your caloric allowance with carbs, which also come at 4 kcals per gram. Carbs are not your enemy; sugar is not your enemy. On the contrary, sugar is a great source of energy.

Consider once more a caloric maintenance of 2,000 kcals. Let’s say you currently weigh 160 pounds; your goal weight is 150 pounds lean. Consume 1,500 kcals a day and you will reach your goal in 10 weeks with no guesswork. Consume a daily average of 55 grams of fat, 150 grams of protein, and 100 grams of carbs. At the end of the 10-week period, redetermine your caloric maintenance, then eat at your new maintenance level every day to maintain your weight. You don’t need to slowly approach your new maintenance level – instead, jump straight to it once you’ve reached your goal or you will continue to be in a deficit and therefore lose weight.

If you tried this approach and didn’t lose weight, it doesn’t mean you have a ‘slow metabolism’ or that tracking calories doesn’t work. (You wouldn’t believe the kinds of excuses people come up with to remain overweight.) It means you didn’t track calories correctly. That’s okay, don’t beat yourself up over it. Tracking calories accurately is a skill that takes time to practice and master. Mealprepping makes the process easier by letting you copy/paste tracking results from one day to the next.

If you’re already lean and only concerned with putting on muscle, you still need to start by figuring out your caloric maintenance. Then, eat only slightly above that. About 5% above maintenance may be all you need – do NOT force feed yourself, commonly referred to as ‘bulking’. You have a huge advantage not having to lose any fat, and force feeding yourself will just cause you to gain fat, which will take a long time to shed later on. Bulking does not hasten muscle growth.

Cronometer also tracks the micronutrients you consume (vitamins, minerals, etc). That way, you’ll know if you need to take supplements.

To put on muscle, you need to lift heavy weights. You won’t get ‘bulky’ – growing muscle is a slow but crucial process. Bigger muscles slightly increase your caloric maintenance because you burn more calories at rest. Being stronger helps you avoid injuries in daily life and has many other health benefits. Conversely, having poor body composition is detrimental to your health. Some people say being overweight is worse than smoking!

I don’t recommend doing cardio to burn calories. It’s extremely difficult to out-exercise a bad diet. Optimize your diet first. The occasional walk or run can complement your fitness goals, but keep in mind that your body has a strictly limited ability to recover from the stress of lifting weights.

Don’t make too many changes to your daily routine at once. Don’t make big changes either. It’ll just get too hard and you’ll quit. Make small, easily maintainable changes that aren’t even that noticeable. For example, if you drink regular sugar soda, replace it with diet, ie zero-calorie equivalents. There’s Diet Coke and Coke Zero, Diet Sprite, etc. That alone can save hundreds of calories a day. Over time, replace diet soda with water altogether. If you typically snack during the day, replace 10% of your snacks with some low-calorie vegetables like carrots or celery. Then increase the percentage over time. If you eat yogurt, get one that’s low fat or no fat. Since fat has the most calories per gram out of all macronutrients, meaning it has the highest calorie density, reducing fat consumption is the most effective way to reduce your caloric intake.

Again, don’t make all of these changes at once, just try one of them at a time and see if it sticks. You’ll be surprised how easy dieting can be when you do it in small increments. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

For a proper weightlifting regimen, work up to this routine, but don’t try to implement it all at once. Go to the gym, ideally with a trainer, and get in the habit of moving. If that means a single set of bicep curls a week, that’s a good start.

Don’t eat or train based on feelings. Track your results, objectively, in the gym and in the kitchen. You track progress in the gym by logging each rep and set and comparing numbers over time. If you lift more over time, aka ‘progressive overload’, then you’ve made progress, regardless of how you feel during or after a workout. The ‘burn’ during a workout or the soreness afterwards are not indicators of progress. Numbers are. As you become stronger, your muscles get bigger – it’s that simple. In the kitchen, you track progress by stepping on a scale, looking in the mirror, and measuring your body composition.

The tracking of your diet and workouts places a lifestyle otherwise based on feelings and whims under objective control. Treat your caloric maintenance like money: you have a daily budget and you don’t get to spend more than that. Spending money based on feelings ends poorly. Same goes for eating based on feelings.

People usually have a decent body composition in their youth. Then they wake up in their forties and look and feel like crap. They are incredulous that an average daily caloric surplus of 10 kcals could result in obesity. But how could it be otherwise? Overspending by $10 a day for 20 years racks up a debt of $73,000. Likewise, overeating by 10 kcals a day for 20 years results in a total excess of 73,000 kcals. That’s over 20 pounds of fat. And people regularly overconsume by far more than just 10 kcals per day. It’s very easy to overconsume calories – just a handful of almonds is easily 100 kcals.

As your body composition improves, you become not just healthier but objectively more beautiful. Bodybuilding is art. When things get tough and you want to quit, look at pictures of your favorite bodybuilders for inspiration. This will give you the fuel to continue your fitness journey.