Professional bodybuilder and fitness trainer Paul Revelia regularly shares fat loss tips on his YouTube channel, informed by his own experience preparing for a competitive physique, and in a new video he explains the “do nothing” approach to reducing body fat that he uses with some of his clients.
“Weight loss is more complicated than ‘move more, eat less,'” he says. “Yes, all weight loss is due to a caloric deficit, but what is a caloric deficit?”
He goes on to explain that knowing your basal metabolic rate (BMR) can be an incredibly useful tool if your goal is to lose fat. BMR is the number of calories your body naturally burns through its normal functions each day, outside of any additional exercise. BMR calculators are available online, and once you have that number, it’s easier to figure out what kind of realistic calorie deficit to put in your diet so that you can essentially lose weight without needing to increase your physical activity.
“Your basal metabolic rate will actually decrease when you’re losing body fat because your body doesn’t need as much energy to run,” Revelia says. “It’s like driving a car on the highway and having a trailer attached to it. . . . If you drop the thousand-pound trailer, your car will be efficient and require less fuel to run.”
He also points out that as you continue to maintain your calorie deficit and your BMR drops, you may find that you feel more tired and your body will burn fewer calories to try to conserve energy. This is called mitochondrial efficiency when the body becomes more efficient with daily movement.
When you hit that hurdle, a common tactic is to add more cardio to your routine and cut some extra calories, but Revelia believes you’ll see diminishing returns here. His advice is instead to introduce a “dietary pause”: while your BMR drops, temporarily increase the number of calories you eat and increase your energy expenditure through exercise.
“As much as most people want to go straight to the goal … the results I see for people who take these diet breaks are life-changing,” he says, “because when we reach our goal weight, we don’t have SO long to I’ve been on such a heavy diet that we’re practically broke… My athletes get to their starting weight and can actually stay there with calories close to what they were before they started the diet.”
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