How to Get Lean & Stay in Shape Year Round

How do you not only get lean but also maintain it all year round? For most people getting lean is a struggle and then it’s even harder to maintain it, but thats not the way it has to be. You just have to understand some basic principles to make sure that you get lean and stay there for good. To get to a level considered “lean” you’re going to have to do certain things depending on where your starting point is. If you’re already in pretty good shape and just have a little bit of extra body fat you can throw in some cardio or a couple days of hiit weight training into your workout schedule…and doing that consistently, alone can get you leaner. However, if you’re starting point is at a heavier weight and you have a lot of excess fat then you’re going to have to stick to a diet for a period of time.

How long you have to stick to this diet plan depends on how much extra body fat you’re carrying and how aggressive your diet plan is. To get lean you’re mostly going to be sticking with nutrient dense single-ingredient foods. Foods that are natural and grow on the ground….the foods that we all know are healthy. Although… you can deviate from this and you can incorporate even junk food into your diet plan as long as your Macros and calories balance out at the end of the day and indicate that you had a negative calorie balance. But even with flexible dieting methods, I’m not going to BS you, getting lean isn’t easy. Just like bulking up contrary to the beliefs of the many people that have never bulked before… eating enough food to gain weight and bulk are not easy. Your gonna have to stuff yourself. And that’s not always fun. When getting lean there’s going to be a point where you’re going to want to eat more carbs than your allowed for the day or there’s going to be a snack that you desperately want that your gonna have to refuse because you’re trying to get leaner. However being consistent, maintaining an overall calorie deficit, and balancing out your Macros properly over the course of about six weeks should help everyone get dramatically leaner from where they started. The bigger question is how do you actually maintain it. To stay in shape year round you can’t force yourself to just eat chicken breast broccoli and brown rice for the whole year. Or always keep your diet clean and healthy. I don’t think it’s possible to do that and I think the people that attempt to do that wind up failing and binging out. The best way to stay lean all year round is by understanding the underlying principles of fat loss and fat gain. It doesn’t matter if you have a day where you eat a whole bunch of junk food and take in a ton of extra sugar and calories and then the next day you don’t eat anything at all. Here I’m talking about a 24-hour fast. even though this goes against mainstream Fitness advice your calories will most likely balance out no matter how much damage you did on that one day. And for those of you that are thinking what about insulin… well the huge insulin Spike that you’re going to get on the day that you pig out is going to wind up being balanced out the next day when you have virtually no insulin floating around your blood because you’ll be fasting the whole day. Whats gonna happen is you’ll get a little bit of fat gain on the day that you pig out and then you’ll lose a little bit of fat on the day that you fast and that creates a balance. Granted if you’re planning on pigging out like crazy I would only pick a couple meals to pig out with rather than eat junk food all day because that can be difficult to balance out. Now keep in mind that this approach of fasting after a day of eating junk food is just one of the many flexible dieting approaches that can work. You can do a regular intermittent fasting protocol where you only allow yourself to eat for an 8-hour feeding window that you pick for that day. That method helps burn excess calories a lot at the end of the day. Also, you could just eat one meal for the day rather than maybe your regular breakfast lunch and dinner and balance out your intake that way. There’s also the 5-2 diet which allows you to eat normally 5 days of the week and then have two days in the week where you have significantly fewer calories than normal almost like you’re eating nothing at all. These approaches to Fat Loss have proven more effective for many people than just having a steady clean eating plan for your whole life because these approaches for most are a lot easier to maintain and flexible dieting helps satisfy cravings. Just keep a couple things in mind. 1 some people that reintroduce junk food back cave.

Check out my client Khalid’s transformation where he put on a whole bunch of muscle.