In my decades of training and coaching functional fitness athletes, I’ve rarely come across more nonsense than when athletes start talking about diets. This is often the result of silly fad diets and misunderstood research. Eating for weight loss isn’t complicated, and most research shows that eating a low fat diet can be a great method to drop body fat. This article is going to cover some excellent research on fat loss. It’ll provide you with a better idea of how you should eat to maintain peak performance while dieting. Keep reading for more.
Before we get into the scientific reasons why a low fat diet can be advantageous for functional fitness athletes, we need to cover some ground rules. First, I’m not saying that any certain diet won’t work. I’m not a dietician. I’m a coach who’s certifications and experience skew towards what you do in the gym, not what you do in the kitchen.
If you have specific diet questions, or require a specialized diet due to medical conditions, you should speak to a registered dietician. My goal with this article is to layout some sane, research based diet tips to help functional fitness athletes lose weight, without sacrificing muscle. For those impatient readers, here are the 7 surprising reasons you should consider a low fat diet for optimum weight loss.
7 Surprising Reasons You Should Consider A Low Fat Diet for Optimum Weight Loss
- Most bodybuilders eat between 15-20% of their diet in fat while losing weight.
- Eating one gram less of fat allows you to eat two grams of carbs or protein.
- Low fat diets don’t impact hormonal production as much as previously thought.
- Some research indicates that lower fat intakes can be healthier in the long run.
- Decreased fat intake allows for increased protein intake which increases satiety.
- Decreased fat intake allows for increased carb intake which increases performance.
- Low fat diet foods are more readily available than high fat diet foods.
Any diet that puts in you a caloric deficit can work. Full stop. This is a well researched fact. You can create a deficit in any number of ways. You can fast for most of the day. You can cut out certain macro nutrients, like carbs, proteins, or fat. You can also try and offset any calories you eat with extremely high volumes of exercise. Most of these methods are not good for athletes, as they have specific dietary needs to maintain their performance.
The real question you need to ask yourself is what is the best diet for someone who likes lifting, metcons, and WODs? This is a much easier question to answer, as the requirements for functional fitness athletes that want to lose weight are fairly well known. To further examine these answers, we will examine the population that is the very best at building muscle and dropping body fat. Bodybuilders.
Taking a Page Out of the Bodybuilding Play Book
The research we will be speaking of today is a compilation of nutritional research on bodybuilders and physique athletes. If you’ve read any of my previous articles, you’ll understand that top level functional fitness athletes, and natural bodybuilders are quite similar. They reach almost the same levels of leanness, and they cary largely the same amount of muscle mass. They often put in similar overall training volumes compared to hard working functional fitness athletes.
Moreover, functional fitness athletes have one significant advantage over physique athletes. These athletes are trying to reach levels of leanness that are extremely difficult to achieve. Often times they will step on stage with less than 5% body fat. Research has shown that the final few weeks of a diet, where athletes are getting extremely lean, causes the most muscle loss.
Functional fitness athletes do not have to worry about that. Most Crossfit Games level male athletes are around 10% body fat in season. Female athletes are generally around 12-15% body fat. This indicates that top performers in the functional fitness field do not need to be extremely lean. This means that we can hold onto more muscle and maintain our performance.
Due to these physical and training similarities we can make a reasonable assumption that the type of diet that they follow will be advantageous for functional fitness athletes who desire to drop weight, and body fat. Let’s get into the 7 surprising reasons you should consider a low fat diet for optimum weight loss.
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Why Do Functional Fitness Athletes Need Dietary Fat?
To be clear, I’m not advocating that you eat zero dietary fat. You absolutely need fat, for several reasons. Most of your hormones, such as testosterone, and estrogen are made from the molecules in dietary fat. If you ate no dietary fat you would surely suffer some severe hormonal imbalances. These imbalances can wreck your diet and your performance. You need some dietary fat!
There is also some limited evidence that fatty foods increase satiety, helping to keep hunger at bay. This can be beneficial when you are in a caloric deficit. Often times athletes that crash diet, and experience extreme cravings, are consuming far too little fat. However, you will see that we have other methods to help stave off those hunger pangs.
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Why Eating Fat Might Be Limiting Your Performance
As we alluded to earlier, any diet that puts you in a caloric deficit can result in some weight loss. Creating that deficit is our number one consideration. The next consideration is to decide where we will pull those calories from.
Both carbohydrate, and protein have 4 calories per gram. Dietary fat has 9 calories per gram. If you ate a kilogram of pure fat you would be ingesting 9,000 calories, where as a kilogram of pure protein or carbohydrate would be only 4,000 calories. It’s easy to see that for every gram of fat we lose from our diet, we can eat about two grams of protein and carbs.
This has two important implications. First, we can eat more protein while in a deficit, which will help us hold on to our hard earned muscle mass. Secondly, eating more carbohydrate will help us maintain our performance both in our lifts, and in our WODS/Metcons. Carbs can drastically affect your performance. Read this article to see just how much of an affect it can have.
If you are a hard training athlete, and you want to maintain peak performance while losing weight, you will need to prioritize carbs and protein. This necessarily means that we will have to drop some fat to help us maintain a caloric deficit.
Dietary Fat and Low Testosterone
Savvy readers will no doubt be yelling at their screens by now. Most folks think that if you drop your fat too low then your testosterone levels will drop as well. This is true, and research shows that athletes in a deficit eating low fat will drop testosterone levels, which can affect fat loss.
This study about weight loss and hormone affects, highlights that it is most likely the caloric deficit itself that decreases testosterone production, not just eating low fat. Subjects in that study, that were assigned to eat a higher fat diet still had lower levels of testosterone, in a caloric deficit.
Interestingly enough, this decrease in testosterone did not seem to affect strength levels, or gym performance. Just because testosterone is anabolic it does not mean that more is always better. Males will show decreases in available testosterone, and that is ok as it returns to normal once the diet has ended. When dieting smartly, it should not have any noticeable affect on your life or gym performance.
By now I’m sure you’re thoroughly convinced that there are some definite benefits to a low fat diet for weight loss. Now let’s talk about the right amount of dietary fat to eat.
How Much Fat Should You Eat to Lose Weight ?
Most researchers that have asked this question have come down to a fairly specific range. This is no guarantee that this is the best range for you, but it does work well for a wide variety of athletes. Here is an excerpt from an excellent piece of research entitled, “Nutrition Recommendations for Physique Athletes.”
Dietary fat intake of 20-35% has been previously recommended for athletes with a lower level of 15-20% for bodybuilders (Helms et al., 2014; Lambert et al., 2004). However, it is unlikely all individuals will be able to stay within this range during contest preparation since levels as low as ~9% have been reported in the literature (Spendlove et al., 2015). Protein and carbohydrate should be prioritized for muscle retention, performance and satiety, and we therefore recommend fat intake of 10-25% to allow for individual variability and dietary flexibility yet we caution strongly against very low fat intake for long periods (Helms et al., 2014).
– Nutrition Recommendations for Physique Athletes.
Once you achieve your desired caloric deficit, you need to figure out how much fat you need to eat. We will go through an example to figure this out, or you can download my nutrition calculator and it will provide a good macro split for you, as well as some other nifty nutrition and diet tools.
Dietary Fat Intake Example
Our athlete is a 30 year old male that is 5’9, and weighs 215 pounds. He is currently eating a 500 cal deficit per day with a total caloric intake of 2338 on a day he works out. Let’s assume that he should be eating 25% of his total nutrition in fat calories, according to the research cited above. This works out to 585 calories from fat. Remember that fat has 9 calories per gram, which means that he will need to eat 65 grams of fat at the high end. At the low end, he will be eating only 26 grams of fat.
Most of these numbers came from my nutrition calculator, so I recommend that you read that article to see exactly how we arrive at them. It’s not complicated, but it does require a basic understanding of macro nutrients. This leads us to our next question. How long should you follow a low fat diet?
Are Low Fat Diets Good In the Long Term?
Nope, definitely not. In fact, you shouldn’t maintain a caloric deficit forever. Your body is designed to work best in equilibrium. For the majority of the year you should eat the amount of food that you need to support your fitness goals, and not increase body fat. Maintaining a caloric deficit for very long periods of time is not healthy, and will torpedo your performance.
Most bodybuilders maintain a caloric deficit for for 3-4 months, and the most successful athletes lose on average .7% of their bodyweight per week. Obviously, it’s ok to go on a longer diet if you need to lose more body fat. However, many coaches recommend that you take periodic breaks from a diet to maintain your sanity, and keep your metabolism from slowing down too much. You can take a day or two, or as much as a week, before getting back on diet.
This doesn’t mean that you go crazy, it just means that you should eat the same types of foods, up to your maintenance levels, or a small surplus. You can even add some junk food, as long as you aren’t trashing all your hard work up till this point.
Final Thoughts
This article has been narrowly tailored to cover the 7 surprising reasons you should consider a low fat diet for optimum weight loss. Rest assured that I will be publishing a very comprehensive fat loss program for functional fitness athletes in the coming weeks. It will include a full program for the gym, nutrition recommendations, and a diet plan to get you started.
Until then you can check out my ebook where I cover nutrition and other topics in much more depth. If you have any questions put them in the comments below.
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