lose fat gain weight

nickimina1

Hellooo

Im 22, 160 cm tall and weigh 57 kg. My body fat percentage is 18%. I know that this is considered a normal range but I still feel like I look a bit fatty. I want to maintain my current weight but also lose some fat.

I plan to keep eating at my maintenance calories, but I’m wondering: should I significantly reduce my carbs and fats to achieve fat loss or do I need to go into a calorie deficit? I’m afraid of losing muscle if I cut my calories too much.

Do you have any advice on how I can reduce fat without losing weight or muscle mass? Thank you so much!

nickimina1

Retroguy2000

Is your bf% really 18%? There is a lot of error in many methods of estimating it.

To lose weight you need to be in a calorie deficit. If you are in a calorie deficit without lifting weights, you will lose about 25% of that lost mass from your lean mass. To mitigate this, frequent lifting.

I don't know about your stats or how you look, but it may be the case that a small calorie surplus plus frequent lifting with progressive overload might be a better option for you.

AnnPT77

Reducing carbs and fats at the same calorie intake wouldn't have much impact on fat loss. There might be a truly tiny bit extra calorie burn from TEF (energy to digest/metabolize food) since you'd have to be increasing protein, which has a higher TEF. However, some people see an energy reduction from significantly decreased carbs, so . . . ? Overall, it won't have much impact, even at an extreme. On top of that, fat contains essential nutrients, so we need to eat at least some for best health.

Are you male or female? For other USA-ians, 160 cm and 57 kg is around 5'3" and 126 pounds. That doesn't tell me whether you're male or female, but it does say you're BMI 22.3, middle of the normal BMI range.

I agree with Retro that most BF% estimating methods are iffy at best, but if 18% is anything near to accurate . . . 18% is a whole different thing for a male vs. a female, and BMI 22.3 tends to be a different thing for each sex, too. Knowing which you are biologically might lead us to give you quite different advice.

The combination of that BMI and BF% raises questions, too: In a statistical-averages sense, a woman at 18%/22.3 would probably be quite unusually muscular already, whereas it would suggest that a man would be average-ish in muscularity, probably more of a beginner. (At BMI 22, we'd expect a statistically typical a woman to probably be somewhere in the 20s BF%, lower 20s if pretty fit, upper 20s if more typical. We'd expect a statistically typical man at BMI 22 to be maybe mid-teens if more fit, upper teens to just above 20 if more average build. Seems like that makes a difference.)

I'm tempted to guess male based on those numbers, but it's a guess. If so, I'd probably go with maintenance calories or a small surplus as Retro suggests. If female . . . well, I don't know what to say without more info.

Either sex, if you don't want to lose muscle mass, but do want to lose fat more quickly than maintenance calories plus progressive lifting and good nutrition will get you there, then the smaller the deficit - the slower the loss - the better. That 75/25 ratio of fat to lean loss is a very generic spitballing kind of ratio, a fairly decent result for someone who is losing meaningful weight at a normal, sensibly moderate rate.

The fat/lean loss ratio is very individual, but the things that would help the ratio trend toward losing more fat and less muscle would be that good progressive lifting program faithfully performed, really good overall nutrition (especially but not exclusively ample protein), and that very small calorie deficit for ultra-slow loss. At BMI 22, you don't have boatloads of fat to lose, so slow loss would be a good plan for health, too.