The bottom line for losing weight is that you must create a caloric deficit. That means you must consume fewer calories than you burn. You can do this in two ways: reduce the number of calories in your diet or increase the amount of exercise you do. The most effective way is to do both simultaneously.
How to reduce your caloric intake
In principle, you could reduce your total caloric intake in one of two ways: either by eating the same foods you currently do and reducing portion sizes or by reducing intake of certain macronutrients (i.e., fat, carbohydrate, or protein). However, one of the challenges of dieting is that when your body senses that it is receiving fewer calories than it is burning, it responds by breaking down both body fat and muscle. For an athlete (and if you are rock climber, you should start thinking of yourself as an athlete), this is disastrous because when you diet you can potentially lose strength. Since we want to increase our strength-to-weight ratio, we want to maintain our muscle mass and lose weight in the form of body fat. The way to accomplish this through diet is to maintain carbohydrate intake, increase protein intake, and reduce fat intake enough to produce a caloric deficit.
We want to increase protein intake because the additional protein offsets the body’s increased rate of muscle breakdown while dieting. The reason it is important to maintain high carbohydrate intake is that the higher the carbohydrate intake, the less muscle tissue is broken down for energy (that is, dietary carbohydrate is muscle sparing). Dietary fat, on the other hand, is not muscle sparing; consequently, your entire reduction in calorie intake should come from reducing your intake of fats.
Let’s assume you are doing aerobic exercise for a half-hour 3 days a week and climbing indoors or out 3 sessions per week. (If you are not getting at least this much exercise, you should start. You will find it much easier to lose weight by a combination of diet and exercise than by just dieting.) The average female at this level of exercise will probably require about 2000 calories/day to maintain her body weight, while the average male will require about 2500 calories. You should try to consume about 500 to 750 calories per day less than you burn. This should result in losing 1–1½ pounds per week. This may seem too slow to some; however, more drastic diets do not work—they are virtually impossible to maintain.
OK, so now you have an idea about how many total calories to eat each day. The next question is how should these calories be distributed among protein, carbohydrate, and fat. My recommendations are the following: 25%–30% of the total calories in your diet should come from protein, 10%–20% from fat, and the remainder from carbohydrate. This is a low-fat diet that is relatively high in both protein and carbohydrate, as required to promote retention of muscle tissue. In order to operationalize this diet, you need to become savvy at reading nutritional labels and know that protein and carbohydrate contain 4 calories per gram and that fat contains 9 calories per gram (for those who need to know, it’s 7 calories per gram for alcohol).
So, what to eat
The challenge in this diet is keeping the protein intake high and the fat intake low. Therefore, you need to look for foods that are very low in fat and high in protein. Ideal foods are the following: beans, white-meat poultry, low-fat fishes (e.g., halibut), canned tuna, and soy-based non-fat mock meats (hint: think Trader Joe’s). You can eat essentially unlimited vegetables, since they are very low in calories. Fruits are essentially all carbohydrate and water and low in total calories, and can (and should) be eaten in moderation. Any grain products you eat should be whole grain, since they are higher in protein, fiber, and micronutrients than their processed counterparts.
Try not to add fat to anything. Throw away your mayonnaise, margarine, butter, and cooking oils. Pure oils such as these contain 120 calories per table- spoon. It is all too easy to turn a healthy, low-calorie salad into an abomination by adding excessive dressing. Instead of mayonnaise on sandwiches, substitute mustard (which is virtually calorie free), or just go without.
Keep a diary of everything you eat. Specifically note the total calories you consume and the total grams of protein in each meal. If, at the end of the day, you didn’t consume enough protein, have a blended shake made from a protein supplement and a piece of fruit in the evening. Buy the cheap soy-protein powder. Let the muscle heads waste their money on designer whey peptides.
I realize that this diet is more quantitative than some people would like. However, in my judgment, counting calories and protein grams is the only way to ensure adequate protein intake while maintaining a low-calorie diet. This is critical for athletes.
Thanks for your contribution to helping climbers send harder. Can you further explain why soy-protein powders are better than whey other than simple cost? Also why is dietary fat not muscle sparing unlike carbohydrates? I feel those are key points and would like to know more. Thanks.
Evan, soy protein actually has a slightly inferior amino acid composition to whey, but the difference is slight compared with the difference in cost. If you don’t mind paying more, or you prefer the taste, by all means use whey.
Regarding the muscle-sparing effect of carbohydrate: Your body needs a small, but constant, supply of carbohydrate for normal metabolism. Overnight, your body draws down its store of glycogen in the liver to supply this carbohydrate. When you reduce your carbohydrate intake, you reduce the size of your glycogen stores. When these run low, your body breaks down muscle protein and converts it into carbohydrate in a process called gluconeogenesis. By maintaining a high-carbohydrate intake while dieting, we reduce the amount of muscle protein that needs to be broken down for gluconeogenesis. This is the sense in which carbohydrate is muscle sparing.
The reason that fat is not muscle sparing is that the body has no way at all to convert fat into carbohydrate.
Yeah, I’ve recognized that they have a high amino acid profile as well. I’m wondering if your recommendation is considering the neutralizing effects soy has on trypsin. It seems that regardless of the cost and how much you consume the anti-nutritive effects of soy outweigh its purpose in a diet. Whats your take on that?
For the second point I just need more clarification, why doesn’t your body break down fat before muscle? How do you initiate fat oxidation without burning through muscle?
Honestly take all this questioning as just my curiosity to use your viewpoint to gain information. I am in no way trying to question your intelligence in sport or nutrition. In the end I just want to work through some points to find the best solution. Thanks.
The trypsin inhibitors in soy reduce its digestibility only slightly. You can overcome this by just consuming a little bit more, so, once again, if soy protein is substantially less expensive than whey, it is still more cost-effective to use soy. But again, if you don’t care about the cost, you are perfectly free to use whey.
Regarding your second point, I did not say that the body breaks down muscle before fat, nor that you have to “burn through” muscle to initiate fat oxidation. In response to your first post, I explained why carbohydrate, but not fat, has a muscle-sparing effect while dieting. Please reread that explanation.
I have a gluten intolerance and avoid most carbs as a result. With this is there any way you could give an example of a three meal day that would follow these guidelines and adhere to my intolerance?
Kandace, as I am not your personal dietitian or physician, I am not in a position to design a meal plan for you. However, there is no reason to consume any gluten-containing grains on this diet. In fact, most of the foods I mention in the first paragraph under “So, what to eat” are gluten free, so you should have little trouble adapting my recommendations to your needs.
Hey Jay,
Really appreciate your knowledge here and on RC.com.
I’m 23, male, 5’8″ and I’ve weighed 130-133lbs for the past 3 years of my climbing career (pre-climbing I weighed about 115). Most of the past 3 years I’ve eaten absolutely whatever I want. Multi-week addictions to bacon and chocolate chip pancakes every morning, or even after a creatine loading phase, nothing could ever move the scale.
Recently I’ve been frustrated with my lack of ability to change my body (and my v6 plateau). For the last 5 weeks I’ve been on the following: ~2000 cals (30g fat, 130g protien, 300g carb) I climb 3-4 times per week, with no cardio. Still, no change has come. My abs still are “half-visible-if-flexed” and I still weigh 132.
At this point I’m wanting to cut back to 1800 cals, but I’m worried that I’ll just begin to lose strength. I’m already feeling pretty hungry most nights.
Question 1: Does my distribution of macronutrients look ok?
Question 2: Is there really a fat loss benefit from cardio induced deficit as opposed to just eating less?
Question 3: Was ~2000 calories really not enough to create a meaningful deficit? I can’t understand how I can go from eating trash to this and not have any change.
Question 4: Is someone at the v6/5.12 level able to gain strength from training while at a deficit like this?
I’d really appreciate any thoughts you have.
Thanks a lot,
Ray