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Whether your goal is to shed fat, gain muscle, or just improve overall body composition, most diet plans work, at least for a while. Here are the basic rules:
Simple, right? Yet most diets today are either extremely complex and time consuming, or they require you to completely overhaul your life.
Fat-loss diets can turn you into an obsessive, calorie-counting, macronutrient-micromanager. Or they require you to completely drop an entire food group (veganism) or macronutrient (keto). And some try to reinvent anorexia by giving it a sciency-sounding name or associating it with some goofy flavor of “spiritualism.”
At best, these fat-loss diets can turn you into a social pariah and an insufferable wanker online. At worst, they can be gateways to eating disorders. (“Water fasting” is a fun new way to say “anorexia,” isn’t it?)
Mass diets often go the other direction. Health goes out the window, you get too fat, and you engrain a lot of bad dietary habits and addictions that are difficult to kick.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Effective, sustainable nutrition strategies can be simple, fairly easy, and even economical. All you need is one protein shake per day. Let’s break it down.
At their simplest, fat-loss diets work because the caloric intake prescribed is lower than your normal, chubby-person intake. The same goes for mass diets: they inevitably force skinny guys to eat more than they normally do. There are a million ways to structure both – some smart, some doorknob stupid – but they all boil down to calories in the end.
Problems arise for fat-loss diets when the calories are too low. More accurately, when calories are kept too low for too long, since short-term very low-calorie diets are okay at times, especially if you have a lot of body fat to lose.
“Too low for too long” diets backfire. Typically, you throw a monkey wrench into the delicate machinery of your metabolism. Combine a handicapped metabolism with the inevitable binge your mind and body are demanding and the belly comes back with a vengeance.
On the flipside, mass diets often prescribe too many calories for too long, especially for the drug-free lifter. You gain far more fat than muscle. And then things really get bent as you develop something Bill Willis, PhD, calls “anabolic resistance.” That’s the impaired ability to build muscle caused by excess calorie consumption over time. Anabolic resistance is nasty, and you don’t want it.
And don’t forget, while a caloric surplus is required for optimal muscle gains, there comes a point where excess calories don’t do anything to actually build additional muscle. You need ENOUGH calories for optimal gains, not ALL the calories.
Notice the common thread here? Calories, either too few or too many. So the solution for both fat-loss diets and bulking diets is to get your calories right. And that’s actually not that difficult.
While everyone is a bit different – with different activity levels, insulin sensitivity, gut flora etc. – we can make some general assumptions based on what works for most lifters and athletes.
There are a lot of fancy formulas out there, but they all just give you a ballpark range of calorie intake for fat loss or muscle gain. If we look at all the formulas and all the advice of the smart nutrition experts who actually work out, we can do a sort of “meta-study” and come up with a pretty solid number: about 300 calories, give or take 50-ish. So…
This sane and moderate change translates into fat loss without muscle loss for the dieter, and muscle gain without excess fat gain for the bulker. From here you can tweak the number for your individual needs based on your weekly results: add or subtract 100 calories or so, see what happens, adjust again.
Again, there are formulas available, but no matter how complex they are the number you get is just going to be approximate. Here’s a simple, real-world way to figure it out.
Ask yourself: Have I been maintaining my current level of body fat for several months? No need to bust out the scale and calipers, just look in the mirror. About the same? Slowly getting leaner? Slowly getting fatter? Take a close look.
Most people default to eating roughly the same number of calories per month. Notice that’s not “per day.” We always fluctuate by the day – both in caloric intake and output – but it usually averages out over several weeks. A couple of low days, a very high day, several days at maintenance, etc.
We “accidently” settle into a certain intake level over time. For some people, this leads to slow fat gain. For others, that default amount keeps them on the scrawny side. Both are maintaining their current state. And both could gain or lose, whatever their goal, with roughly a 300 calorie deficit or surplus per day.
So don’t sweat the exact number here. What you’re naturally doing, day in and day out, probably has you at about maintenance level, unless you’re actively getting fatter, losing weight quickly, or building tons of muscle every month.
That magic number, roughly 300 calories more or less, can all be taken care of by simply adding one protein shake per day to your normal diet, assuming you’re already an active person who hits the gym often.
Replace one solid meal per day with a protein shake. Swap out whatever meal contains the most calories, like dinner, or whatever meal contains the junkiest food, like that quick lunch you grab at a restaurant. (Choose dinner if nighttime overeating is an issue for you.)
Let’s say that regular lunchtime meal normally contains 600 calories. A Metabolic Drive® Protein shake (two scoops) contains 220 calories. Make the swap and you just knocked 380 calories off your day. That’s 2660 fewer calories per week, which means you’ll be dropping body fat. And most likely, that shake has more protein and far fewer carbs than your normal meal, so your macros will look much better, you’ll feel fuller, and you won’t have any blood-sugar crashes.
If you normally skip breakfast and find yourself compensating later in the day by overeating at night, have the shake for breakfast to autoregulate your hunger hormones and gain back some control in the evening.
Simply add one Metabolic Drive® Protein shake per day. That’s 220 high-quality calories and 42 grams of extra protein every day. Now, since muscle gain is your main goal, you can bump those calories up further by adding a little natural nut butter or fruit to your shake, like a banana or berries. That puts you at around 300 calories extra per day or a bit more. That’s 2100-plus surplus calories per week. Fast, easy, and no cooking, math, or Tupperware required.
This One Shake Diet isn’t going to cause you to drop 10 pounds of fat in a week. Nor will you gain 10 pounds of muscle in a month. There are diets that seem to do that, but they really don’t. “Weight” loss or gain is tricky business.
The dieter doesn’t want to lose muscle. The bulker doesn’t want to gain excess fat. The One-Shake Diet keeps it real. Lose a pound of bodyweight with this strategy and that’s a pound of fat. (A deficit is more likely to cause pure fat loss if it’s not extreme.) Gain a pound and that’s a pound of mostly muscle, assuming you’re lifting weights. That’s realistic progress and it’s sustainable for much longer than a crash diet or a see-food-diet mass plan. Think about this:
When bulking, do you want to gain 20 pounds with only 3 pounds of it being muscle? Or do you want to gain 5 pounds with 4 pounds of it being muscle?
For fat loss, do you want to lose 10 pounds fast with half of that weight coming from catabolic muscle loss? Or do you want to lose 10 pounds a bit more slowly, but pretty much all of that being fat weight?
The answers should be obvious.
Since this strategy revolves around a protein shake, you must choose wisely. That filler-filled whey with a trick label you bought for 18 bucks at the same place you buy windshield wiper fluid and tampons isn’t going to cut it.
What both the dieter and the bulker need is a shake with a blend of quality proteins: micellar casein and whey isolate. Biotest Metabolic Drive® Protein is the best choice. And unlike many protein supplements, Biotest doesn’t “spike” the protein content or play funny label games. Since taste is critical for diet compliance, Metabolic Drive also has the advantage of tasting like a decadent milkshake. Blend with ice and it’ll knock your socks off.
As a bonus, a Metabolic Drive shake (two scoops) is $2.53. That’s less expensive and more nutritious than most packaged diet meals for the person looking to lose fat, and cheaper than the average extra meal for the person wanting to gain muscle.
Most people won’t even need to count calories with this strategy. And assuming that his or her training is congruent with their goal, the one-shake dieter could easily lose a pound of fat per week, while the natural gainer could see a couple of pounds of muscle gain per month. And all without revolving your life around your diet plan.
