Skinny fat people - help with the last few inches?

What type of exercise are you doing 5-6 times a day and for what duration. Making your diary public may help us offer some more insight.

If you figure it out, let me know.

I will tell you what happened to me because we sound similar but pleeeaasssee take it with a grain of salt because these things aren't the same for everyone.

I did DVD training as well, which, like Insanity, was mostly cardio and bodyweight exercise. I eventually got to the point of doing this every day. I got my waist to 27 and got stuck there. Against my better judgment, I fell mercy to the forums and I tried methods of significantly lowering calories and upping calories (at different times of course), both to no avail. Another common approach is weight training, so I switched to pure resistance training daily and sloooooowly struggled down to 26.5.

Eventually, I decided on a new approach based on what sounded enjoyable, sustainable, and moderate. I started to calorie cycle (focus on net calories weekly rather than daily), work out every other day, try to stay generally active in my life.


It looks something like this:

day 1: weights: upper body circuit training
day 2: walk or bike to do errands
day 3: cardio: interval running
day 4: go out dancing with friends
day 5: weights: lower body circuit training
day 6: clean the house
day 7: cardio: yoga

This was the sweet spot for me and within a month I was down to 25 inches. I love this method. It gives me wiggle room in my life calorie-wise and time-wise and I feel it is the right balance of cardio, weights, and non-exercise activity. And it's easy to adjust for weight-loss or maintenance.

The default setting on MFP is 1.0 lb per weekly loss, unless you change it. By adjusting it to 0.5 lbs per week, your net calorie goal should increase above 1200 calories. Thus, you would eat your NET goal, plus at least some of your exercise calories.

Regarding your exercise calories, make sure you do not overestimate the number.

Alternatively, some people opt to estimate calories based on various TDEE calculators. One of which is here:

http://www.weightrainer.net/losscalc.html

If I enter in the following stats for you (weight=132 lbs; body fat %=25%; weekly fat loss goal=0.5 lbs; and moderately active), I get this:

kcals per day to maintain current weight:= 2077 kcals/day (Let's round it down to 2000 calories to be a bit conservative).

Diet to Lose 0.5 lbs of Weight Per Week:
kcals per day: 1827k cals/day (Adjusted to 1750 calories).

You can eat up a total of 1750 calories with that much exercise for a month or two and see what happens. Make sure you use a food scale to weigh all food you eat to get accurate calories from what you eat. If you notice a general trend of weight reducing, over the course of a month or two, then you are on the right track. And if you are losing an average of 0.5 lb per week, then you'll pretty much on target and do not have to adjust caloric intake at all.

Lastly, be mindful of eating high-sodium, high-carb meals because that can add temporary water weight and can hide an actual loss. Thus, try to be consistent with what you eat and how much you exercise the few days prior to weighing yourself on a scale.

You shouldn't even log you exercises in. 100-200 cals a day dont matter. Just find out what your maintanence calories are on training days/off days. Keep track on sodium as some people can gain a kilo or two of water overnight cause of too high sodium and it will confuse you for a couple of days. So, when you are able to keep the same weight for at least a week, cut 200 calories. Or more/less, depends on how fast you want to lose fat. And do some research on macros.

Regardless of which method you use to assess fat mass, stick with one and wait three months before your next test. You can still get assessed once per month, if you like, and record the values simply for tracking purposes; but it's the measurement every three months that will really provide the best evidence of any downward trend.

The reason for delaying between measurements is because each respective method has a certain variation of error. For instance, your body fat percentage could truly remain unchanged, but one test could give a reading a few points off compared to another - as you personally witnessed. Or, you could have realistically reduced body fat percentage by a value of 4 in two months, yet still get the same reading the next time. However, as the months pass by, you should have lost enough fat mass so that, despite the room for error, the readings follow a downward trend.

I forgot to address your "skinny fat" concern earlier.

That is a term describing persons who may fall within a normal weight range but have a disproportionately low amount of lean mass versus fat mass.

To remedy this body composition concern, you must engage in a process where the end goal results in an increase in lean mass with a decrease in body fat. Simply put, you'll start with a calorie restriction phase, followed by a calorie surplus phase and ending with a second calorie restriction phase. Two necessary objectives that must be included throughout are strength training and adequate protein intake.

Strength training with adequate protein will help minimize the amount of lean mass lost during restriction and increase lean mass during a surplus. Note that intensity of strength training must be kept challenging regardless of restriction or surplus phase. Also, during restriction, an intake of 1 gram of protein x lbs of lean mass is the general guideline (eg: 90 grams of protein for 90 lbs of lean mass). During a surplus phase, you can adhere to a minimum of 1.25 grams of protein x lbs of lean mass (eg: 112 grams of protein for 90 lbs of lean mass).

*If you aren't already lifting weights, check out the book titled Starting Strength by Mark Rippetoe. It is widely regarded as one of the best instructional books out there because of his clinical yet easily understood approach to explaining everything.

Let's say you restrict calories and get down to 20% body fat. Now, you are ready to raise calories and maintain for a month or so. After maintenance, you'd then assume a modest surplus of 150 to 250 calories above maintenance. You're going to gain some fat during this process, but ideally with a smaller surplus, you may end up gaining slightly more lean mass than fat mass (for example: 1 lb lean mass vs 0.5 lb fat mass).

There is actually a term called P-ratio which simply refers to how much protein (muscle) vs fat is expended during restriction and how much protein (muscle) vs fat is gained during a surplus. Everyone has a different P-ratio resulting in them retaining more muscle during restriction and gaining less fat during a surplus or vice versa.

Anyway, you'd continue this surplus period for a few months until your body fat percentage hits about 25% or so. At the end of this period, you should have gained several lbs of lean mass.

Finally, you'd start your second restriction phase to reduce fat mass but try to maintain as much of the gained lean mass as possible. Again, this is why eating adequate amounts of protein while lifting reasonably heavy is crucial. When it's all said and done, you should be left with an increased lean mass and decreased fat mass for a more favorable body fat percentage.