Here is a practical basic cutting guide that allows you to adjust it as you see progress (or lack of) in your fat loss. This will work for everyone, whether your a hardgainer or a endomorph.

Cutting Diet calories:

A cutting diet should start at 15 calories per lean muscle weight, unless you were previously bulking. Your lean muscle weight is calculated by first knowing your bodyfat %. If you are 12% bodyfat, subtract 100 from your bf% to get the percentage of lean muscle weight. For example, if you weigh 200 lbs at 12% bf, 100 minus 12 equals 88% lean weight. 88% of 200 lbs is 176 lbs. So this person should start at 2640 calories / dayfor cutting.

If you are currently bulking already and ready to start cutting, then ignore the 15 calculation and just lower your current total bulking calorie intake by 400 calories. If you were to lower your calorie intake to the 15 times bodyweight calculation, you would cause your body to go into starvation mode and you would lose a lot of muscle and little fat.

Monitoring progress:

Please note, that these are just starting calorie recommendations. Everyone’s metabolism and genetics are different. People with faster metabolisms may need a higher calorie starting point. You first need to start at some point though, so you can use it as a reference point for your results.

For best results, its important to measure bodyfat % weekly. That way you can see how muscle muscle mass vs. fat mass you are losing. If you are losing weight too quick, or just as much muscle as fat, your calorie intake is probably too low. If you are losing a lot of weight quickly, but it is showing as mostly fat loss, then that is perfect! What you want is most of the weight you are losing to be fat (at least 2/3).

Avoding Fat loss plateaus:

As you lose fat, you will have to slowly lower calories to continue to lose fat. You won’t keep losing fat on the same diet for weeks and weeks, just like the same workout routine and weightswon’t lead to continued muscle gains. Long term dieters, should cycle calories to help get through more stubborn plateaus. You do this by having large high carb calorie days once in a while.

These calorie spikes help maintain healthy leptin, thyroid, and testosterone levels, which help ultimately with fat loss. If you restrict calories everyday for weeks and don’t incorporate these calorie cycles, no matter what you do your fat loss will halt. All your hormones including the thyroid, which controls your metabolism, gets stunted during low calorie dieting. A large spike in calories is proven scientifically to cause a spike in all these important hormones.

You may not have heard of Leptin, but you probably have felt the power of Leptin trying to keep you from losing fat during dieting.

What is Leptin?

Leptin is a type of chemical hormone called a cytokine, that controls your hunger and metabolism. Leptin plays it’s biggest role during long term dieting. During a long diet, your leptin levels increase in order to slow your metabolism down and increase your cravings. This is a survival mechanism by the body, to try and keep you to hang onto as much fat as possible during times of starvation. Although, dieters are not usually “starving” when they diet, it’s the bodies way of trying to stay in balance. Leptin is mainly released through the fat cells, so people who start a diet fatter will have a harder time controlling their appetite and will hit a fat losing plateau easier.

How to diet properly to lower leptin levels:

To help ward off a potential fat loss plateau, you can manipulate lower leptin levels while dieting. To do this is simple, Leptin is dependant on your glucose levels. If you have a large meal, high in carbs, your Leptin levels will drop. Not only that, but you get an extra benefit, your Testosterone, IGF-1, Growth hormone, and thyroid levels will skyrocket. All of these hormones help in fat loss and maintain your muscle.

You may be wondering how you can get away with these kinds of meals, if your goal is to lose fat. The answer is through cycling or some kind of “cheat meal”. Every few days have one or 2 cheat meals. This will help temporarily ward off the long term trend to lower leptin levels.
Realize, this does not mean that you can diet indefinitely. While the high carb meals will give a temporary drop in Leptin levels, eventually you will plateau permanently. You can only push your body so much before it eventually stops losing fat. This is how all biological systems work as they are built to resist too much extreme change. These cheat meals are just a way to get more fat loss, before you reach the dreaded fat loss plateau.