Crushing your first “cut” phase — losing body fat without going insane

I had absolutely no idea what to expect going into a recent “cut” phase. I worked with a fantastic coach and tried to learn as much as I could along the way. Here are some tips I wanted to share to help folks who are considering something similar.

Note: This post is not affiliated in any way with any of the services or products mentioned or linked to below. None of the links are affiliate links, none have tracking codes, and there is no compensation associated with any aspect of this post. I’m just sharing specifically what worked for me, to make it a little easier for someone else.

WTF is a “cut”?

The goal of a “cut” is to drop body fat. You may have heard the terms “cut”, “bulk” and “recomp” from body building-type folks. If you aspire to drop body fat, a “cut” is a specific focused period of time where your nutrition and related activities are aimed at helping you lose weight by dropping body fat.

This phase is not forever. A guided cut phase may be around 12 weeks long, after which you’ll need to slowly ramp up your nutrition plan, re-build your metabolism, and get your hormones back in balance. And then maybe you cut again. Or not.

Also note that I’m an amateur endurance athlete, with a moderate training load cycling 10-12 hours per week. Finding an outdoor activity you love and can do regularly for your whole life is a pretty epic life hack and made this cut a lot more effective. It also makes it a bit more challenging because I’m trying to maintain and even gain athletic performance while simultaneously being in a caloric deficit. It can be done. Trust the process.

Hire a great coach

“Information is free, knowledge takes experience.” The big picture summary of how to cut body fat is to burn more calories than you take in, while providing your body the right macronutrients to ensure you’re not also losing a ton of muscle along the way. Pretty straightforward honestly. And if that’s all that was to it, you wouldn’t need to be reading any further.

You’ll have questions. You’ll be concerned about the wrong things. You’ll ignore key details that you should pay more attention to. You’ll need an educated cheerleader to highlight your efforts, not just your results. You’ll need to fine tune your plan. You’ll need to build a plan in the first place! You’ll need to adjust your nutrition plan based on your exercise plans. Your chaotic brain will lead you astray. Get a nutrition coach!

Every professional athlete in the world has a coach guiding their training. Many also have nutrition coaches, sports performance therapists, performance-minded doctors, and more. There is a reason that even the very best in the world rely regularly on others to guide their training. Several reasons, really. They know more than you. They know what details to obsess over, and which to ignore. They know how to guide you without stressing you out. They know how to adjust the plan to match your learned reality. And they let you focus on you, while they sweat the details of your plan.

If you want to thrive while you improve your physical body, especially while you are training for your sport or activities, you should hire a sports nutrition coach.

I’d highly recommend Kyla Channell and team at Nutritional Revolution. They have some great content and links to their podcast episodes on their instagram, so you can get a sense of how they work.

Tracking

A big difference between a cut phase and the ole “I’m trying to eat better” phase is that you actually really give a shit. In order to manage your efforts properly, you need to start tracking some things.

Track body weight daily

I bought the Withings Body Smart scale. If you are deep in the Garmin ecosystem, the Garmin scale is another great option. I wanted a scale that would automatically sync my weight to Apple Health and other systems, so I could make it as easy as possible to stay on top of this.

You will drop weight. Some days you’ll gain some. Sometimes it’s water weight because you forgot how much sodium is in that takeout Indian curry. What is important is that there is a daily measurement to keep you honest. Care more about weekly trends than daily numbers, but embrace the daily tally. It’s essential.

Get a DEXA scan

You can now get accurate body composition scans for fairly cheap in most places in the states at BodySpec. I should note that the Withings scale is pure garbage at assessing body comp. Don’t even look at those numbers. A DEXA scan is the gold standard for assessing your lean body mass, as well as quantifying your body fat, by region. This is absolutely essential to understand, to help you determine your goals and decide what is realistic and achievable for you. It will also be amazing to get a second scan at the end of the cut, so you can celebrate your progress. I aim to get around 4 scans a year.

Chronometer

I had tried to track my nutrition with a few different apps over the years, and after using Chronometer for a few months now, this is hands down my favorite tool for the job. When you start tracking your food for the first time, it sucks. Do I have to track everything? How to I know how much I’m eating? How do I track this meal?

Here are a few tips to make food tracking easier:

Don’t eat a bunch of bullshit. You can make food tracking way easier by just.. not eating Crazy Uncle Bobby’s Barn Buster Cheesy Mac and Meat Medley. You’re on a cut anyway right? Eat smart, track smart.
Use a kitchen scale. You can get a cheap digital kitchen scale anywhere if you don’t already have one. You’re a gram counter now.
Track it all. Be honest with yourself. A few “oh, it’s just half a cookie” slips and you’re wondering why you’re not making any progress. Want to eat it? Open the app and get it in there.
Eat lots of the same stuff. One way to stick to your plan more easily is to eat the same sorts of things often. You can mark them as Favorites in the app so it’s that much easier to add. You can also add custom recipes for things like your 5-ingredient award-winning morning oats.
Recurring items - this is a great feature to make it easier to track things like your morning supplements with one click

Bloodwork

Getting a full fasted bloodwork panel can sometimes feel like pulling teeth from your doctor. Another option is just ordering a panel and booking it yourself at places like Quest Diagnostics. This place seems to have quite a few testing sites and hopefully you can find a place close to you that has an early morning appointment to make a fasted draw that much more manageable. Your nutritionist can review this and make specific recommendations for you based on what you learn.

Goals & Planning

During my first 12 week cut phase I dropped 5.5% of my body fat. I have another cut phase to go before I hit my ultimate goal, but I’m very stoked on that progress. Like with all things in your life, you’re going to get out of it what you put into it.

The bulk of my cut came from the latter 2/3rds of the period where I was on a 750cal deficit. My cycling coach plans my workouts in TrainingPeaks. My sports nutritionist then makes a weekly nutrition plan for me, which is loaded into Chronometer. Every day I have a cycling workout planned, and the nutrition plan for the day, which takes that workout into account. Every day I know how many calories I’m targeting, and what the macro breakdown is in protein, carbs, and fat. It’s my job to eat quality foods throughout the day, that add up to those targets, while executing the workout as planned.

Sometimes you might skip a workout, so you’ll need to make nutrition adjustments to suit. Sometimes you might want to ride for another hour or so and need to adjust similarly.

Thankfully with all the amazing tech out there, lots of this tracking is automatic. Thanks to wearing an Apple Watch, and synching my cycling workouts to Apple Health by way of Strava, my energy burn is automatically updated in Chronometer, along with my body weight.

I’m happy to report that I had absolutely zero issues during the entire cut phase with this tech stack and associated integrations. It all just works.

Supplements

I’m not a doctor and I’m also not your sports nutritionist. I’m sharing what I’m taking just because I sort of wish I saw the list of what other folks were taking. There’s so much influencer bullshit floating around in this arena (ahem, AG1) so overall I’d say less is more.

Pure Encapsulations O.N.E. Multivitamin: Has all the things, just one daily capsule, tested to verify it is what they say it is. This also makes it easy to hit your micronutrient targets without being too concerned about getting things perfect from food alone.
Thorne Creatine (powder), 5mg scoop in water: You know how everyone says you should take creatine? Well, they’re right. This is recommended for everyone for general health, but is especially useful during a cut to ensure you maintain as much muscle as possible. I was worried about water weight gain some folks have mentioned, but I haven’t experienced that myself and will continue taking this every day, always.
New Chapter Wholemega Fish Oil (2 capsules, daily): This is the best fish oil product I’ve ever used. Zero fishy burps even with two daily capsules first thing in the morning before food. Boost those omegas.
Thorne D-5000: An impossibly long list of advantages in supplementing vitamin D. Tiny easy lil one to add to the daily mix.
Polyphenols for recovery: After races or full-out efforts, I’ve taken POM Wonderful Pomegranite Juice for those recently-hyped polyphenols. This is hard to quantify in terms of benefit and POM Wonderful is a problematic company, so worth considering pros and cons on how you get these in. Those tiny little tart cherry bottles you see TdF riders chugging after the finish line? Yeah, this is why.

My Food Essentials

Once you’ve got your DEXA scan and are tracking body weight and nutrition daily, the bulk of the work comes down to eating quality foods that match your daily macros. You’re likely going to be eating much more protein than you have ever eaten before, and doing that while not blowing out your daily fat macros takes some focus. And what about good carbs to keep you fueled for your workouts and life in general?

If abs are built in the kitchen, successful cuts are built at the grocery store. Here are the things that I stock up on regularly that have made eating well much more manageable than I expected.

Rice Cooker
If you don’t already have one, get yourself a rice cooker. Rice is a fantastic carb source, makes meal planning easy with portioning, and … come on, I don’t need to sell you on rice. A rice cooker makes it better than you do, perfect every time. Make a full batch, store it in the fridge for a few days and then make some more. I buy the 15# bags of Botan Calrose Rice.

Chicken Breast
Yep, chicken and rice baby. Just about every day! I bake 3-5# at a time and store it in restaurant containers in the fridge. A HUGE lesson for me was NOT to meal prep, but to ingredient prep. Store ready-to-eat foods in restaurant containers in the fridge, and portion them out as needed to build your meals that match your macros.

Ground Chicken
More chicken? Yep! High protein, very low fat. I make 2# at a time with half a packet of taco seasoning to give it some flavor. This is a great protein source to add to beans and eggs in the morning, and is great over rice for a lunch/dinner too.

A dope hot sauce collection
Eating literally hundreds of meals that are basically just chicken and rice might sound insanely repetitive, but you can fix that with various sauces. Buffalo chicken wing hot sauce. Yellowbird habanero hot sauce. Pique hot sauce. Your favorite salsa. A low-fat peanut butter Thai situation. Gochujang all day every day. Chicken + rice + spice is very nice.

Thorne Whey Protein Isolate - Chocolate
This is my favorite protein powder, great for using in recipes and just shaken in water for a quick protein boost. I highly recommend the HELIMIX 2.0 Vortex Blender Shaker Bottle for this. No annoying metal shaker ball, super quick to clean, works as well as anything else. The lid actually stays closed when you violently shake it, too.

Dymatize Elite Casein Protein Powder - Vanilla
Casein protein powder is super silky in texture and leaves you feeling full longer, so this is pretty great for using in recipes.

PBfit Simply Peanut Powdered Peanut Powder
I used to live on peanut butter. The absolute greatest undisputed champion is Santa Cruz Organic Dark Roasted Creamy Peanut Butter. Not eating peanut butter was maybe the one and only true food “loss” I felt during the cut. The fat content is just not worth it BUT you can still get peanut buttery goodness in your life by using powdered peanut. Reasonable protein, low fat, peanut taste. I use this in my morning oats and a bunch of other recipes.

Siggi’s plain nonfat skyr
There are like 48 kinds of yogurt at the stores now, it’s insane. This is the one. Absolutely incredible macros. Best tasting by a country mile. Feels like you’re eating luxury even though there is zero grams of fat in here. A mystical delight. Trust.

Good Culture Low-Fat Cottage Cheese
I’ve always liked cottage cheese but most low-fat versions are a liquid mess whose squeaky mouthfeel has you second guessing your life choices. Good Culture is the greatest brand of cottage cheese, and their 2% version tastes just as good as the higher fat versions. The organic versions are pretty spendy, but the non-organic ones are roughly the same price as other brands.

Galbani Reduced Fat Mozzarella String Cheese Sticks
With better macros than 90% of protein bars out there, these are pretty tasty and convenient. Handy to have around when you’re a little peckish and are under your protein goal for the day.

Plain water!
I know. You’ve heard this a million times. None of us are likely drinking enough water though, so this deserves another shoutout. Drink so much water. If you’re still not convinced, know that by drinking a bunch of plain water, your body will flush out and release more water. Like, the way to drop water weight is to drink more water. Crazy right? Buy a big ass vessel, fill it with water, drink it, repeat.

Read labels!
Food labeling is the Wild West. “High protein!” “Great source of fiber!” — I guess you can just make things up so please just read the actual labels. How big is the portion they’re talking about? How do the macros look? Virtually all protein bars and on-the-go snacks are just trash. I don’t even want to really recommend anything here because I think if you’re relying regularly on pre-packaged snacks it’s not going to lead to success. I don’t entirely hate these high-protein pop-tart ripoffs though, and I find them fairly hilarious.

A Word About Dining Out

Don’t. My favorite tweet I saw during the pandemic was when someone said “I deeply miss eating food cooked by people who don’t love me.” The reason restaurant foods “tastes better than homemade” is that there’s like a fistful of salt and a hero dose of butter in there. I’m not a hater, it’s just that this doesn’t really work well for you when you’re on a cut. You can’t possibly track restaurant food accurately. You will consume 2-3x the number of calories you think you are, and the next mornings weigh-in will make you mad.

I mentioned this above, but worth repeating — instead of “meal prep”, just “ingredient prep”. Shop for the essentials listed above. Cook like 2x a week, and eat that stuff every day.

I did eat out a few times during my cut phase, and will continue to do so, but I treat this like a real luxury. I try to make the best possibly choices I can from the menu, and only eat out when I’m with people I care about at a restaurant that’s truly great.

A word about alcohol

I’m stoked to see that not drinking is like a trend now. Like many people, I spent considerable time over my life in bars. The social aspect of bars, the unpublishable stories, the craic — it’s fun as hell! There’s also the undeniable networking aspect when you are early in your career. The thing is though, if you’re past that phase in your life — when you have your people, you have your career, you’ve climbed the first mountain, there are essentially zero benefits to drinking. Now that non-alcohol beers and drinks are so popular, you can also still go out and hang with friends and just drink those. It’s never been easier not to drink. Addiction is a hard road, and I empathize with anyone struggling with this. If you feel like you can’t possibly give up drinking, I hope you’re able to seek out the help that can bring you to the next great chapter in your life.

Questions?

I really want this post to be useful for folks, so if you have relevant questions, please send them along and I’ll keep this post updated. For incredible 1:1 support, guidance, planning, and coaching — reach out to Kyla. Your health greatly influences the quality of your life over time, and remember that none of us get out of here alive. Get fit, do rad shit, for as long as you possibly can. You got this.