Today I'm going to break out the Smart Board to discuss a dumb mistake that a lot of people make when it comes to dieting for a 6 pack. You see, if you rely on calorie restriction as your main and sole method of getting to a lower body fat level, you're going to run into a brick wall a lot harder and faster than the one behind me. Here's the problem: we know that in order to create a body fat loss you have to create a caloric deficit. We talked about that a lot of times before. There's a thermodynamic law that states that we need to do that. That's a given. It doesn't mean it has to come from calorie restriction because the biggest mistake people make – let's say they're arbitrarily going to pick a 2000 calorie daily maintenance level; that's what yours is.
You want to create a 500 calorie deficit because you know you need to do that in order to lose some weight and lose body fat. A lot of people will do this completely through a 500 calorie restriction on what they eat. That's the easy way to do it and it's the fastest way because a lot of people will find that they'll get results doing this, but then all of a sudden they hit that wall and they stop seeing results. It's extremely predictable because as you're doing this, think about the calories that you're also restricting from your muscles. Your muscles are going to be your best friends; your metabolically most active tissue to allow you to raise this set point.
Not from 2000, but maybe to 3000 in a day. If you have the metabolically active tissue, like muscle, to stick and allow you to burn more calories throughout the day just because of the muscle you have to maintain, you're going to allow yourself a lot more dietary flexibility in the long term. That is how you get this thing done 365 days a year like I preach. So you don’t want to do it that way. What you want to do is if you're at 2000, maybe what you do – and a lot of people may not like to hear this – they'll restrict their calories by a little bit. Take the obvious thing out of your diet.
You're probably already pretty low as it is. This is probably not what you're eating in a day, but again arbitrary numbers. Take something obvious out of your diet that you know you probably shouldn’t have from calories and then go burn 400 extra calories to get yourself down here. That is going to create a much more effective plan because you're still supplying key calories to the muscle that you're trying to build. Maybe you're not even working out and if you're not doing that, that's an even bigger disaster that we can talk about in a different video. You'd better be working out at the same time because otherwise you're going to become skinny fat.
You're going to get thin, but you're not going to look very good. It's like getting abs, but having no muscle. It's like the old saying "Having tits on a bull." There's no purpose for it. If you want to have a much more effective plan, unfortunately for some, maybe uplifting for others; you're going to have to get your ass into the gym and you're going to have to work out and start burning some calories. Our burst training workouts that we have plenty of here at Athlean-X are geared to do exactly that; help you to burn a lot of calories quickly. You don’t have to spend all day to burn 400 calories. You're not going for a slow jog here through the park. As a matter of fact, if you've seen one of our videos here we actually did a 10 minute workout – I'll link it right here – where we did nothing but burpees. 10 different variations of burpees in 10 minutes.
You'll feel what a high expenditure of energy feels like if you've never tried it before. My point is: you've got to stop looking at strictly dietary restriction of calories to get down to this number. You're going to have to get lower, but don’t look to diet alone. As a matter of fact, try to see if you can do it as little as possible that way so what you're doing is sparing the calories to allow you to support the muscle growth that's going to allow you to ultimately raise this number and make your nutrition plan a hell of a lot easier to follow. Guys, if you're looking for a way to have your ass kicked I'm more than happy to do it for you. You could head to AthleanX.com right now and get one of our training systems. I coach you through every single workout and I also provide you with a diet plan that will allow you to make nutrition much simpler than it is and allow you to actually stick to a plan 365 days a year. That is what I try to preach here at this channel year in and year out and that's what I'm trying to convey to everybody that watched us. It's not all that hard, it's just going to take a little bit of dedication and effort here and then I'll help you to do all the rest from there. See me over at AthleanX.com and in the meantime let me know how you felt about this video. Leave your comments and thumbs up and I will be back here again in just a couple days with more stuff for you. See ya!
