Popular fitness influencer and former bodybuilder recently shared his comprehensive approach to cutting in a detailed YouTube breakdown.
Drawing from years of competitive bodybuilding experience, he offered practical strategies that go far beyond simple calorie counting.
His methods focus on sustainable fat loss while preserving hard-earned muscle mass.
Whether you’re preparing for a competition or simply want to lean out, these evidence-based techniques can transform your approach to cutting.
Jump to:
- When Should You Start Cutting?
- Establishing Your Baseline Calories
- Setting Your Macros for Fat Loss
- Creating Your Initial Caloric Deficit
- Meal Planning vs. Flexible Dieting
- The Truth About Cheat Meals
- Metabolic Rate and Meal Frequency
- Optimal Rate of Weight Loss
- Breaking Through Plateaus
- Essential Supplements for Cutting
- Cardio Strategy for Maximum Results
- Training Adjustments During a Cut
- Practical Tips for Managing Hunger
- The Role of Condiments
- Mindset and Long-Term Perspective
When Should You Start Cutting?
The decision to cut is highly individual, but there are clear indicators that signal it’s time.
If you have no ab showing anymore, you might be at the point of a bulk where you’re starting to lose and plateau and you need to cut down, you know, fix your insulin sensitivity, your metabolism, your digestion.
Beyond aesthetics, cutting serves important metabolic purposes. Extended bulking phases can negatively impact insulin sensitivity and digestive health.
A properly executed cut resets these systems while revealing the muscle you’ve built.
How Long Should a Cut Last?
Duration depends entirely on your approach and body composition goals. Aggressive cuts that push body fat below 10% should typically last no longer than three to four months to avoid hormonal disruption.
However, moderate cuts with strategic refeeds can continue indefinitely if you’re maintaining gym performance and feeling energized.
As long as your body feels good, your body’s optimized, energy is good, still making progress, you can keep pushing and going, going.
Establishing Your Baseline Calories
Before cutting calories, you must know where you’re starting. The most accurate method involves meticulous tracking of current intake.
Log everything you consume for one to two weeks—including condiments, drinks, and cooking oils. Track your weight morning and night during this period.
Most people naturally settle into consistent eating patterns that maintain their current weight. This maintenance level becomes your baseline.
If your eating habits are erratic, start with an online macro calculator. Enter your stats and follow the recommended intake consistently for two weeks while monitoring weight changes.
Adjust from there based on actual results rather than theoretical calculations.
Setting Your Macros for Fat Loss
Protein becomes even more critical during a cut. Aim for 1 to 1.5 grams per pound of lean body mass as your minimum target.
If I’m 260 pounds in my offseason, but my lean body mass is 240, then I want to be a minimum of 240 g of protein. But I almost always pump that up to like 350.
Research supports higher protein intake during caloric restriction. Protein requires more energy to metabolize and is less likely to be stored as fat compared to carbohydrates.
Studies show that consuming up to 100 grams of protein per meal multiple times daily can maximize muscle protein synthesis, even in a deficit.
The 70/30 Carb-to-Fat Split
After establishing protein targets, divide remaining calories into 70% carbohydrates and 30% fats. This ratio provides sufficient carbs to fuel intense training while maintaining essential fat intake for hormone production.
The higher carb allocation also gives you more room to manipulate macros as your cut progresses.
Creating Your Initial Caloric Deficit
Once baseline calories are established, create a modest deficit to begin fat loss. Reduce intake by 200-300 calories, pulling exclusively from carbohydrates initially.
Simultaneously add minimal cardio—nothing excessive. This conservative approach prevents metabolic adaptation and preserves tools for later stages when fat loss inevitably stalls.
The biggest mistake is throwing everything at fat loss immediately. Starting with extreme calorie cuts and excessive cardio leaves nowhere to go when progress stops.
Meal Planning vs. Flexible Dieting
Two primary approaches exist for managing your cut: rigid meal planning or flexible macro tracking.
The Power of Meal Plans
Eating identical meals daily eliminates decision fatigue and removes temptation. Write out meals 1 through 5 plus shakes, then follow this blueprint without deviation.
Having the same thing I’m eating every single day, it just doesn’t even have an option to cheat on my meal plan.
This approach works exceptionally well for busy individuals who don’t want to calculate macros multiple times daily. When rushing out the door, you can make intelligent substitutions based on memorized macro values.
Flexible Macro Tracking
If It Fits Your Macros (IIFYM) offers variety but requires more time and mental bandwidth. You must calculate every meal to hit daily protein, carb, and fat targets.
This method suits people with flexible schedules who crave dietary variety. However, whole foods must remain the foundation.
Ultra-processed foods may fit your macros numerically, but they trigger inflammation, elevate cortisol, and impair sleep quality—all of which hinder fat loss through hormonal disruption.
The Truth About Cheat Meals
Cheat meals serve one purpose: mental relief. They provide zero physiological advantage for fat loss.
If eating a burger on Sunday helps you adhere perfectly the other six days, the psychological benefit may justify the metabolic cost. But optimal progress requires eliminating traditional cheat meals entirely.
I really never had cheat meals throughout my preps unless I like needed to hammer in like a burger and fries cuz I couldn’t get enough calories in.
Strategic refeeds differ completely from cheat meals. Rather than consuming junk food, increase portions of your regular clean foods—particularly carbohydrates.
Instead of 100 grams of rice, consume 300 grams plus an avocado. Schedule refeeds before heavy leg days to maximize recovery and performance benefits.
Metabolic Rate and Meal Frequency
The relationship between meal frequency and metabolism remains controversial in scientific literature. However, practical experience tells a different story.
Dividing the same total calories across more frequent meals consistently improved body composition, energy levels, and digestion—even when total intake remained unchanged.
All I did was divide from five to six meals, and I got a little bit leaner from there. And then I went from six to seven meals at the end of my Olympia prep, and it was super helpful for me.
Ramping up metabolism before initiating a cut provides significant advantages. Starting a prep while consuming 6,000 calories allows for a much longer, more comfortable fat loss phase compared to beginning at 3,000 calories.
Intermittent fasting may simplify adherence, but extended fasting windows can blunt metabolic rate over time, leading to earlier plateaus.
Optimal Rate of Weight Loss
Losing weight too quickly sacrifices muscle mass and crashes your metabolism. The sweet spot for most people is less than three pounds per month.
During competitive prep, losing 25 pounds over 14 weeks averages less than two pounds weekly—a sustainable pace that preserves muscle tissue.
Weight loss often accelerates in final weeks as water and glycogen depletion occur. Losing 10 pounds in the last four weeks of prep is normal when starting from an already lean state.
Breaking Through Plateaus
When fat loss stalls despite low calories, further restriction is rarely the answer. Your body has likely entered a state of metabolic adaptation.
Carb cycling offers the most effective solution. Implement high-carb refeed days before heavy training sessions to signal your body that food remains abundant. Follow with low-calorie days to create the necessary deficit.
This pattern prevents your metabolism from downregulating while providing fuel for intense workouts.
Alternatively, increase calories by 200 and temporarily ease training intensity. Focus on sleep quality and stress management to lower cortisol levels.
If you’re high cortisol and your sleep is shit and you’re trying to diet, it’s going to stop you from doing it.
After one to two weeks of metabolic recovery, resume your deficit. You’ll often find fat loss resumes more readily than before.
Essential Supplements for Cutting
Forget expensive fat burners. Focus on supplements that support physiological systems during caloric restriction:
- Multivitamin: Ensures micronutrient adequacy when food variety decreases
- Protein powder: Provides the leanest, most convenient protein source at roughly 140 calories per serving
- Amino acids: Sipped between meals to maintain elevated protein synthesis throughout the day
- Omega-3 fatty acids: Reduces inflammation and supports hormone production
- Cognitive enhancers: Alpha-GPC, citicoline, and tyrosine combat mental fatigue and brain fog common during aggressive cuts
A protein shake consumed immediately before dining out effectively kills cravings for minimal caloric cost—a practical hack for social situations.
Cardio Strategy for Maximum Results
Apply minimum effective dose principles to cardiovascular training. Use as little as necessary to create your deficit while preserving muscle mass.
Low-intensity steady state (LISS) cardio remains optimal for physique athletes. Incline treadmill walking at 120 beats per minute burns calories without overtaxing recovery systems.
Start with 20 minutes five times weekly. Increase duration or frequency only when fat loss stalls despite dietary adjustments.
Timing Your Cardio
Fasted morning cardio offers convenience and may provide slight metabolic advantages, though these remain scientifically debated.
Never perform cardio immediately before weight training. Depleting energy reserves before lifting compromises strength and muscle-building stimulus.
Post-workout cardio works well when consuming amino acids to prevent muscle breakdown. Evening sessions after meals provide another viable option.
Some coaches achieve remarkable physique transformations using step count alone—gradually increasing from 5,000 to 10,000+ daily steps without traditional cardio sessions.
Training Adjustments During a Cut
The cardinal rule: change nothing until you absolutely must.
Many lifters prematurely switch to higher-rep, lower-weight training when cutting. This sacrifices the progressive overload signal needed to maintain muscle mass.
If you can keep pushing forward and keep training hard and training intense through a cut and not changing anything, you’re going to be better off. You’re going to maintain more muscle or even put on muscle throughout that cut.
Continue lifting heavy weights for the same rep ranges used during your bulk. Only reduce training volume when energy levels genuinely prevent maintenance of intensity.
Strategic Nutrient Timing
When carbohydrates become severely restricted, timing becomes critical. Distribute limited carbs around training: roughly 40% pre-workout and 60% post-workout.
On a hypothetical 50-gram carb day, consume 20 grams before training and 30 grams after. This maximizes performance and recovery when it matters most.
If sleep quality deteriorates due to hunger, experiment with consuming carbohydrates before bed. This may stabilize blood sugar and prevent cortisol spikes that disrupt sleep.
Practical Tips for Managing Hunger
Cutting requires discomfort. High results demand high tolerance for temporary suffering. However, strategic approaches can minimize unnecessary misery.
Manage Cortisol Aggressively
Elevated stress hormones intensify cravings for calorie-dense foods. Excessive screen time, poor sleep, and life stress all spike cortisol.
Address these factors to reduce artificial hunger signals. Prioritize seven to eight hours of quality sleep nightly.
Structure Your Day for Success
Create your diet plan when willpower is high, then execute it when willpower inevitably wanes. Remove decision-making from moments of weakness.
Consider carb backloading if evening cravings prove most challenging. Keep carbs minimal during busy daytime hours, then allocate more for evening when sitting idle triggers hunger.
Leverage Accountability Systems
Coaching provides the highest level of accountability. If hiring a coach isn’t feasible, recruit a training partner or supportive spouse.
Online communities and transformation challenges offer free accountability. Simply surrounding yourself with fitness-focused individuals reinforces discipline.
The 10-Minute Post-Meal Walk
Walking for 10 minutes after each meal lowers cortisol, improves digestion, and stabilizes blood sugar. Research comparing this practice to metformin shows remarkably similar metabolic benefits.
This simple habit burns additional calories without formal cardio sessions while supporting multiple physiological systems simultaneously.
Optimize Digestion
Eat in a relaxed state, never while stressed or rushed. Chew food thoroughly and avoid multitasking during meals.
Consider digestive enzymes or betaine HCL if experiencing bloating or discomfort. Poor digestion impairs nutrient absorption and elevates cortisol—both counterproductive during fat loss.
The Role of Condiments
Making food palatable improves adherence without sabotaging results. Three go-to condiments that add flavor for minimal calories:
- Honey mustard: Choose low-sugar varieties and measure portions
- Sriracha: Verify your brand contains no added sugar
- Coconut aminos: A flavorful alternative to soy sauce with slightly more natural sugar
If condiments are part of your baseline diet, maintain them throughout your cut. Weigh portions at least initially—most people dramatically underestimate quantities.
Never add new condiments late in a prep. Even seemingly insignificant calories accumulate, potentially stalling progress when margins are tight.
Mindset and Long-Term Perspective
Cutting demands temporary sacrifice for lasting results. Discomfort is not optional—it’s the price of exceptional outcomes.
If you want to drive results that most people don’t get, you have to do things that most people won’t do, and it’s the way it is.
Multiple touchpoints throughout each day reinforce goal-oriented behavior. The more frequently you engage with your plan, the more conscious decisions align with desired outcomes.
Track your food meticulously. Eat predominantly whole foods. Create sustainable systems rather than relying on fleeting motivation.
Most importantly, maintain perspective. Health transcends aesthetics. Have compelling reasons beyond appearance to justify the process, and your adherence will improve dramatically.
Cutting successfully requires patience, consistency, and willingness to endure temporary discomfort. Apply these principles systematically, adjust based on individual response, and results will follow.
