But If you want to cut weight quickly, I would eliminate sugar completely. That being said, even with all these benefits, cutting sugar from your diet isn’t always easy. When I decided to cut the first thing I did was stop eating sugar. Each phase I’ll add or subtract the amount or type of food I eat. You need to be calculated in order to keep your hard-earned muscle during a cut phase.
How to Create an Effective Cutting Diet Plan for Women
The total weekly volume is spread out nicely throughout the week too, so it’s manageable to get the volume needed each week to maintain muscle mass while on a calorie deficit. You should have no issue with overtraining with our HST program. As stated above this diet requires a higher carbohydrate intake than most weight-loss diets. This is because once consumed carbs are turned into glucose which the body uses as energy. Without enough carbohydrates in your daily diet, your body turns to your fat stores to burn for energy.
In all honesty, I did start eating sugar again after about five weeks. Even if you’re in a calorie deficit, you can’t just scarf down Twinkies and expect good results. Anyone can lose weight – all you do is eat less and your weight drops. I don’t have time to go to the gym twice and I find it difficult to work out after 9am.
Week 6
Remember that the goal of the cutting diet plan is to lose fat while maintaining muscle mass. A cutting diet plan is an eating plan mostly used by bodybuilders and fitness enthusiasts to reduce their body fat percentage while maintaining muscle mass. Sometimes, fitness influencers go on this diet when they have photoshoots to make them look as shredded as possible on their photos. A cutting diet is a strategic eating plan mainly used by bodybuilders and fitness enthusiasts to lose excess body fat while keeping their muscle mass intact. It is because a cutting diet is customized to each individual’s needs and goals, with a focus on maintaining a greater protein and carbohydrate consumption. This focus on protein helps in muscle retention throughout the calorie-reduction phase, which is an important part of the cutting process.
- Meal prep is great because it gives me the energy and nutrition I need to perform optimally, and it ensures I eat well by having healthy meals ready at all times.
- This combination delivers 42g protein, 25g carbs, and 14g fat while keeping you full for hours.
- Follow the meal plan outlined here, which also includes a Food Swaps guide below.
- This will ensure you lose the least amount of muscle tissue possible during your cut.
- Carbohydrates often get a bad rap, but they’re your body’s primary energy source (10).
- For example, you may do one HIIT workout per week and 2 low intensity long duration workouts or vice versa.
Optimizing Fat Intake
These include processed foods, sugary drinks, and high-fat snacks. The cutting diet isn’t just about restricting calories, it’s also about making smart food choices. This guide provides you with a list of foods to include in your cutting diet and those to avoid. Now that you’ve calculated your calories, you need to determine your macronutrient ratio.
This deficit allows you to lose 1 to 2 pounds a week (6). While a higher calorie deficit may help you lose weight faster, not all the weight lost will be from fat. One side effect of rapid weight loss is muscle loss (11). In 2011 a controlled trial involving 24 athletes showed that fast weight loss made some of the participants lose lean body mass (9).
The Cutting Diet Guide: What to Eat and What to Avoid
Women’s bodies have unique hormonal changes that can affect weight loss. When cutting, you need to consider how these changes impact your progress. Your menstrual cycle influences metabolism, water retention, and cravings. Pay attention to these hormonal shifts and adjust your diet plan as needed. Some women may find keto supplements helpful for managing hormones during a cutting phase. If you’re a female looking to sculpt your physique, did you know that approximately 70% of your fitness results stem from your diet?

Cardio
You’ll typically see best results with a cutting diet lasting 8-12 weeks. However, it’s important to listen to your body and adjust as needed. Don’t rush the process; sustainable weight loss takes time and patience. Carb cycling is a great way for women to lose fat and keep muscle while cutting. The basic idea is to change the amount of carbs you eat each day. You’ll have high carb days, medium carb days, and low carb days.
Nutrition and Training Strategies for Lean Muscle Growth
Success in cutting is about losing weight mainly from fat, not muscle. The bodybuilding 12 week cutting diet plan is meant to help is unimeal legit you lose fat without losing any muscle mass. There is no one shoe that fits all when it comes to this diet and so this means that you need to make adjustments using the structure provided in the article. This diet should be complemented with a lot of cardiovascular training and weight lifting for more efficient results. A cutting diet plan is a meal plan that bodybuilders and other pro-athletes use when they want to lose fat mass while keeping their muscle mass (2).
But for fat loss, specifically, you’ll want to get about 40% of your calories from protein, 30% from carbs, and 30% from fats. They’re more like guidelines you can tweak based on how your body responds. Calories and physical activity are the core components of any cutting diet, but a good macro ratio will ensure you maintain muscle tissue while losing body fat. You should have at least 100 grams of proteins everyday while 20% – 30% of your daily calorie intake should come from fats. Cutting daily total calories to 2,500 puts me in a 1000 calorie deficit for the day. And I don’t recommend it for anyone doing natural bodybuilding contest preparation, or any type of cutting for that matter.
Health News
When you’re cutting fat, protein becomes your best friend. Research shows that women who are strength-training need between 2.3 and 3.1 grams of protein per kilogram of lean body mass. Your lean body mass is your weight minus your body fat. For Sarah, who has 25% body fat, her lean mass is 52.5 kilograms, meaning she needs between 121 and 163 grams of protein daily. Cutting, often called a shredding phase, is a diet and training approach designed to reduce body fat while maintaining lean muscle mass. Athletes, bodybuilders, and fitness enthusiasts commonly use it, but anyone can adapt it to their fitness level.
Cutting Meals: How to Plan for Fat Loss and Muscle Retention
If you’re on a cutting diet, you may need to eat more protein than if you’re merely trying to maintain weight or build muscle mass. That’s because while you’re getting fewer calories, you’re exercising regularly, which increases your protein needs. High protein intake is emphasized in the meal plan to support muscle preservation, aid in recovery, and promote satiety. Balancing macronutrients is crucial for optimizing energy levels and metabolism during this cutting phase.
It involves calculating daily calorie, protein, fat, and carbohydrate needs based on weight and activity level. Essentially, you want to keep protein intake high and to strategically plan carbohydrate-rich meals around the times when you’re most active. This way, you’ll have the energy you need to train hard, and you’ll still have the nutrients needed to replenish fuel stores in muscles for recovery. You’ll be running a slight caloric deficit to encourage fat loss, which will reveal your muscle. Overall, macro ratios average 20% fats, 40% carbs, and 40% protein. You shouldn’t need to worry about gaining weight from those carbohydrates if you truly follow the portions that are listed in the later parts of this article.
Illustration: Week Cutting Diet For Weight Loss & How It Works
Try to plan so you can follow a 12-week program, tapering your calories so you don’t significantly cut them all at once. In https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/weight-loss/in-depth/weight-loss/art-20048466 addition, keep your protein high and continue resistance training to maintain the muscle mass you have. Breakfast, Lunch, Snack, Dinner, Snacks or just all small even meals like you see when bodybuilders meal prep. Make sure to time one of these as a post workout meal in order to support muscle recovery and repair. You may even find that a weight loss meal plan helps you stay organized and on track. The fundamental aspect of your cutting diet plan comes down to calorie intake.
Its main goal is to help you lose weight by burning fat while keeping your muscles strong. Once you reach your ideal body fat percentage, then you would want to maintain or build muscle. You simply can’t train hard and eat a deficit for long periods, which is why 8 to 12 or 16 weeks is recommended for cutting phases. So, the goal of any successful cutting workout & diet plan is to lose weight while maintaining pure muscle mass. To do that, we must eat at a slight deficit and continue weight training (and for most, up the cardio).
