Phys Fat Loss Protocol
The comprehensive strategy & playbook of tactics to shred fat
Who is this Phys dude anyways?
Best to start off with who I’m not: Not training to be a bodybuilder. Not a longevity guru. Not any sort of competitive athlete. Not living in the Tropics advocating you sun your balls during the vernal equinox.
Just someone who shares a common health goal with many of you:
🎯 Attain an elite level of metabolic health with a sufficient amount of lean body mass while maintaining high energy levels & executing my personal mission with peak performance. All of which is set up as a default system running in the background without neurotic tendencies. Because health isn’t the mission - it is the requirement to the mission.
First & foremost, I’m not making any recommendation based on something I have not found personal success with. If it’s here, I found it effective. Full stop.
The goal of the protocol outlined is to thread the needle between reductionism (oversimplifying) & charlatanism (overcomplicating). Consider this the Regular Dude’s Guide to Fat Loss. Something I’ve pieced together over the last 3 months of my health/cut phase. We all live busy lives. Kids. Relationships. Work. Business. The intention is to lay it all out for you to build your own protocol efficiently. Such is the theme on the BTP stack.
If you want some proof of work on how the protocol performed, check out the below post where I break down a recent DEXA scan:
A couple notes & basic principles we need to address before jumping in to the framework:
Fat loss = calorie deficit → In the era of dietary dogma & charlatanism running rampant, we need to address this upfront. I accept the idea we’re capable of manipulating our basal metabolic rate via skeletal muscle gains, food selection, & certain combinations of those foods. However, anyone trying to sell you on fat loss without a calorie deficit is completely full of it. Thermodynamically [redacted] and/or disingenuously grifting. In some cases both.
“Any research compounds used?” → Nope. No exogenous testosterone (no current need as my total test levels have consistently been > 900 ng/dL). No GLP-1 mimetics. No peptides or other compounds. The point here isn't to natty signal - I am all for this level of pioneering research. It's to demonstrate this is a feasible journey for *anyone*. I'm not a genetic aberration. I'm a regular dude who's been seriously training for more than a decade now. Learned from many of the best and from the plethora of stupid personal mistakes. Battled injuries from rucking, tendinitis in knees & elbows from spamming too much volume. Stalled any sort of progress training while intermittent fasting. Bought the worthless supplements. Never implemented proper bulk-cut phases & inefficiently recomp'd for years. You get it. No matter where you're at - it is absolutely doable for you. If I can, you sure as hell can too. And with proper systems development - dare I say it is pretty damn simple.
How to Use This Guide
The system is straightforward & one I’ll continue to emphasize here & on 𝕏 → View your health through the lens of a warfare campaign. This is actually a great mental model to adopt for any pursuit in life, business, & health.
Here’s what I mean by that:
The objective creates the strategy.
The strategy shapes the operations.
The operations dictate the tactics.
While we’ll focus predominantly on the variety of tactics available, I’ll touch on the very basics of how to build our universal objectives & defining YOUR individualized strategy. What’s yours is yours. What’s mine is mine.
You won't agree on all, but the intention is to go beyond the basic advice tied to cutting. Couldn't care less what the AI says or what worked for others. We need to move beyond the “muh willpower” or “eat less & move more” or more caffeine/fat burners. These aren't the foundations of a strong system. These are tactics of a weak plan destined to fail.
Objective
The high level goal is pretty much universal across time & space for any fat loss program:
🎯 Reduce body fat and improve metabolic health markers while maintaining skeletal muscle mass, cardiorespiratory fitness, & overall strength.
About as generic as a fat loss plan can be stated and varies little across most of us here. Where the personalization of your own protocol begins is in the strategic system we’ll be building next.
Strategy
Consider this as a general blueprint to determining your energy balance. No mattere where we’re at in the game of health, it all comes back to energy. There are hundreds of books written on the strategy portion we’ll cover, however we’ve cut the fat (*winks*) to deliver the bottom line.
First recommendation is to download a nutrition/biomarker tracking app like Cronometer to make your life exponentially simpler.
Just input your own measures & you’re off:
Step #1: Determine Your Maintenance Calories
Initialization → Use a TDEE calculator like the one here (LINK) to determine a rough estimate on maintenance total daily energy expenditure
Preferred Method:
Use the above calculator to estimate TDEE.
Record your personal caloric intake for 7 days.
Weigh yourself at a consistent time daily (Ideal: upon waking & after using the bathroom)
If your weight is stable - your average daily intake is your maintenance.
If 1 lb gain in 1 week, then adjust maintenance as -500 cal/day.
If 1 lb loss in 1 week, then adjust maintenance as +500 cal/day.
Step #2: Determine Your Required Daily Deficit
Set your goal weight & timeline.
Choose a rate of loss.
Preferred rate = 0.5 - 1.5 lb/week (1 lb is the sweet spot & 1.5 lb is aggressive)
Calculate overall deficit needed.
1 lb fat = 3,500 calories
Example: 20 lb loss x 3,500 cal = 70k cal deficit overall
Calculate daily deficit.
-0.5 lb/week = 250 cal/day
-1.0 lb /week = 500 cal/day
Step #3: Determine Daily Target Calories
Subtract the daily deficit from maintenance.
Maintenance calories - daily deficit = daily calorie target
Example: 2,800 cal (maintenance) - 500 cal (deficit) = 2,300 cal/day
Step #4: Determine Protein Intake
Set protein target.
Preferred target = 1.0 - 1.2 g/lb of bodyweight.
Calculate calories from protein.
Protein = 4 cal/gram
Example: 180 lb male x 1.2 = 216 grams (864 cal) protein daily
Step #5: Determine Collective Carb & Fat Calories
Subtract protein calories from total calories.
Total daily calories – protein calories = calories left for carbs and fats
Example: 2,300 cal (total) - 864 (protein) = 1,436 cal for carbs & fat
Step #6: Choose Carb & Fat Distribution
We’ll implement a carb cycling *tactic* later on so this will vary day to day.
Example: Carb/Fat split of 60%/40%
Carb → 1,436 x 0.6 = 862 cal
Fat → 1,436 x 0.4 = 574 cal
“Phys, can’t you just summarize this all into a nice, clean table for us?”
Yes.
Now that we’ve personalized our fat loss targets. It’s time to step into how we conduct day-to-day operations.
