Wanna Lose Weight? Try Gaining It First.
Some Unorthodox Weight Loss Advice
Photo by Camylla Battani on Unsplash
Wanna lose some weight? Try gaining it first.
How’s that for some unorthodox advice?
In my previous article, “Some Right Ways and Wrong Ways to Lose Weight”, I went into a bit more detail about how and why I ended up burning up some muscle during that first major weight loss period, why we want to avoid it, and how we can do so.
In order to build myself back up, I’ve gone through cycles of bulking to build up muscle and then subsequent cutting to trim off the fat that accompanied the muscle gain. So far, I’ve done three such cycles, going for about five or six months, thereabouts, in either phase. These cycles of bulking/cutting are what many bodybuilders do. Trying to build up muscle while hovering around maintenance energy can be an obnoxiously slow process, but leaning into a surplus will speed up what your body can do.
After hitting a sub-150 weight in mid-2020, I came up to about 160 and basically held steady there for the rest of the year. My first bulk was the first five months of 2021, which brought me to about 185 lbs. The subsequent cut, about another five months, brought me back down to about 150. My second bulk in 2022 brought me back to the mid-180s, and the next cut brought me down to about 160 lbs., which is about the range I ended up for my cycle last year.
For my last cut, which was longer—about seven months, from May 1st to December 1st—I, once again, ended up going a little too hard and lost some strength. There will always be some downregulation in strength and performance after you run a cut or a diet for so long, but too much may reflect some muscle loss. After this cut, I maintained my weight for about a month and was not happy with the pace of the strength returns.
I felt a little stuck. Sometimes we get into our own heads and have a hard time making rational, logical decisions. I felt like I knew what I had to do but also that I didn’t. I reached out to a fitness coach, one whose content I’ve followed for a couple of years—Andy Morgan of RippedBody.com. He also sends out a newsletter with some practical advice, Q&As, and troubleshooting, and he additionally has free nutrition and training guides available. He also has a podcast. Andy’s been a coach for a while, and he’s also co-authored a book with Eric Helms and Andrea Valdez that is, in my opinion, essential reading for any one with fitness and/or physique goals: The Muscle and Strength Pyramids. Suffice to say, he’s an expert and a professional at all this stuff.
One of the sections of his site features some of his client transformations, some of which have the timelines to note the arc of the changes. We’re all different, and some of us change quickly, and others change slowly. Some change profoundly; some change significantly; these are the true changes of real people, and it’s inspiring and motivating.
Andy and I worked together for the first quarter of 2024. Upon assessing my starting condition and situation, he had me go into a hard energy surplus, a hard bulk.
Andy set my calories way higher than I would have considered on my own. That initial calorie target was an energy deluge, a boom. My body changed directions immediately, even faster than I had anticipated, and it helped me recover my strength losses from the previous cut in about two months. I also got to experience how that much food and energy affects appetite, which is that it almost completely disappeared. Recovery time needed between training sessions diminished, and I was able to do a lot more work in those sessions.
Based on my rate of weight gain each month, Andy titrated my calories as to slow the weight gain yet still maintain a surplus, ensuring that I had ample energy for training, recovery, and muscle growth. At the end of our run, I had gained about 11 lbs., about half lean tissue and half fat. That may or may not sound like a lot of weight, but adding five or so pounds of muscle in about three months is no small feat. It would have taken me possibly three or four times longer to gain that much lean mass if I had kept my energy intake around maintenance levels. Even a marginal energy surplus is better than maintenance for muscle building, but really pushing the bounds of energy intake can maximize our efforts.
Most people are afraid to gain weight intentionally, which is understandable. We all seem to be able to gain undesired weight without much effort, and then losing it sometimes seems impossible. Why on earth would we try to do it?
Simple: it can be pretty educational and informative.
And once you learn some basic principles, losing fat is the easy part. Putting on muscle is not. And I learned a few valuable things from my experience with this hard bulk.
One is that I now have experiences with large deficits and surpluses, and seeing how my body responded to each of those conditions in more or less equal training, work, and other lifestyle conditions is eye-opening. In a deficit, recovery is slower; food focus is elevated; of course, appetite increases, and satiation between meals is shorter. Work capacity in training sessions is diminished, and sleep quality is affected (more so near the end of a long cut). And I’m sure my wife will attest to this one: I’m grumpier.
In a surplus, recovery is faster; interest in food almost disappears, and hunger, when present, is hardly noticeable. Satiety within a meal is reached pretty quickly, and satiation between meals persists much longer. Work capacity in training is remarkably high, and sleep is pretty flipping good. And, as my wife observed, I am much less stressed, more relaxed, and a genuine pleasure to be around [1].
Another thing I learned from a solid bulk like this was that I know almost assuredly my calorie maintenance range. Depending on activity levels, maintenance calories—to be in energy balance and weight stable—will expand and contract within a couple of hundred calories. I know where those lines are now.
I also learned how much or how little of a surplus I need to feel a difference in training progress. I also have an idea of what is an appropriate rate of total weight gain, like how much muscle to fat I can expect to gain given the magnitude of the surplus, and what I would consider an ideal rate of weight gain that parallels the muscle gain.
One of the most notable effects of a surplus is that, after a while, it makes you want to lose weight. You want to be in an energy deficit. A cut sounds appealing, which is your body’s way of telling you that it recognizes that there is a consistent abundance of energy. There’s no fear of starvation on the horizon.
Perhaps the best lesson from this bulk was that I saw how much I had to eat and how long I had to eat at those levels to gain substantial weight. It really puts into perspective what a single episode or day of over-indulgence does. (The answer, by the way, is effectively nothing.) I know that if I go to a party or a dinner and unintentionally overdo it, there won’t be any significant consequences to my physique. For someone like me who has a history of disordered eating, it’s liberating.
Some or all of this may sound intuitive, but it’s one thing to know it and something else to experience it. These are lessons that can only be learned from fully embracing an energy surplus, and you have to be accepting of the fat weight that comes along with it. It’s a necessary psychological shift.
Like a deficit, a surplus is not a permanent direction. Like a deficit, a surplus is a short, calculated, and limited period with certain desired outcomes and goals attached to it. A surplus, like a deficit, is not meant to be a new baseline. It’s an intervention, and once it ends, we go back to our maintenance, our homebase.
So this year sees my fourth bulk/cut cycle. After my time working with Andy, I continued the bulk until about May 1st. I am stronger on most lifts prior to my weight loss in 2019 (and the muscle loss in 2020), and since I’m a much lighter body, my relative or proportional strength is therefore much higher. At the start of May, I have been attempting to do a maintenance phase with a lean bulk component, sometimes affectionately referred to as main-gaining or gain-taining in the popular fitness space, where you hover at the top end of your maintenance range, maybe go over by a small degree here and there. My rate of progress in the gym is much slower compared to a surplus, but the progress continues.
Although I’m really happy with my strength progress and overall muscle accrual this year, I know my next cut is on the horizon. I don’t think I’ll be doing six or seven months this time. I’m thinking about half that. Still, to sort of prime myself into that direction I have had two, non-consecutive weeks of moderate cutting/dieting. Basically, I had a week on, a week off and repeated that short cycle. Like a warmup to a training session, it’s helpful to warmup for a diet. You don’t want to go cold turkey. You want to warmup into it, ease into it. You don’t go for a one-rep max or a full out sprint five minutes after punching-in on the clock. You work up to it.
And a week off doesn’t from a deficit or a cut doesn’t mean it’s YOLO time. It doesn’t mean it’s time to hit up every restaurant in sight. It just means that the energy deficit is off, and I go back to maintenance energy, back to my baseline.
This week, I started another round of this warmup cutting. I do this mainly as a form of food calibration. That is, I’m eating the same foods and meals—what I have as part of my baseline eating (workouts also remain the same—actually, I will be making some adjustments but not because of the deficit but because I am adjusting some goals for a training block)—but I’m tightening up the portions, titrating, seeing where some of those extra calories can sneak in if I’m not careful.
There’s not a huge difference between being in an energy deficit, being in maintenance—that is, more or less energy balance—and being in a surplus. The difference between being in a deficit and being in a surplus can be a measly 300 calories, which can be a protein bar or a donut; it can be a couple of slices of bread, a heaping teaspoon of peanut butter, or even one or two beers or glasses of wine, even a couple of cans of regular soda. It’s not a lot of food or drink.
Now, if that’s the difference between the two, being in either one is not meaningfully noticeable, and we are generally in a small surplus one day and in a small deficit the next, which is why we’re weight stable. If you were in a deficit or surplus that small, you would have to be consistently on one side of that equation or the other for a substantial period to even notice the smallest iota of change in scale weight let alone your physique, but that can certainly be the case.
And that’s one of the tricks to weight loss. You don’t necessarily have to weigh your food, track your calories and your macronutrients, and remove things you like to eat—in fact, you shouldn’t be doing this last one. The cool thing about losing weight is that you can make it happen just by making small downward shifts in some of your food portions. You can create an energy deficit that is significant and gets the needle moving in the direction you want consistently without it being very noticeable to your food portions, satiety, and overall satisfaction.
For example, I usually have the same thing for breakfast: a peanut butter and banana sandwich and a protein shake. When I start a cut, all I do with this meal is slightly reduce the amount of peanut butter, which is the most energy-dense food of the meal, so a slight reduction in the portion has a significant effect on net calories. At maintenance, I don’t particularly pay attention to the size of the banana. In a deficit, I’ll buy smaller ones, but the difference is like an ounce, maybe an ounce and a half, which might be 40 or 50 calories. That’s it. The meal is the same, only slightly smaller, and not even really noticeably so. And I’ll do something similar with the other meals I eat.
Going the other way, in a surplus, all I really did was add some fruit to this meal, which I still do at maintenance. I also experimented with some higher calorie breads. The key here is that even though I deviated from my baseline energy, in either direction, I did not deviate from the foods I eat or the meals I put together. In a surplus, I’m not advocating that you add beer and donuts to your meal plan. Although that could be one approach, and it may help get some extra calories in, it’s not really adding to your health and starting to alter your baseline. Still, a surplus is a good time to work in some treats, which, you can and should do at baseline anyway. You just want to be more cognizant of portions and energy density of foods at maintenance. (As always, no extremes.)
Body weight manipulation comes down to experience, knowing how much you can eat before you start gaining weight and knowing how much you have to reduce before it starts coming off and/or the same with activity—how much or how little you can do to initiate the changes you want.
When we drop weight, we have to make a concession that performance will likely go down at some point. On the flip side, when we bulk, we have to make the concession that there will be some fat gain. Experiencing how you feel and how your body reacts and responds in both energy environments is illuminating because you’ll begin to understand and attune to the signals that your body will send you.
If you want to ultimately lose some weight, start by doing a short and small bulk. Push your calories up a bit and find the line where your appetite starts disappearing. Find the line where you start gaining weight at a noticeable pace—then you’ll have found your upper energy limits. A bulk will also diminish your appetite and get you enthused about a cut.
Like anything and everything else in these areas, whichever direction you’re going, you just have to be consistent. Time takes care of the rest.
I’m taking some license here. She did say I’m more relaxed, though.
