Hacking Your Biochemistry to Drop Holiday Weight FAST
Hey superhumans, back again to share my rapid fat loss protocol to shed all the weight gained from the Holiday debauchery that’s taken place over the last month.
Let’s assume a worst-case scenario: 4 lbs of fat gained since Thanksgiving. That’s one of these gained every week.
To get rid of that, I’m going to need a substantial deficit of 14,000 calories. Since this is going to be a short-term cut, I’m able to take advantage of biochemistry and eliminate this fat as fast as possible *without* slowing down my metabolism.
To start, I’m going to TDEEcalculator.net and calculating my TDEE as sedentary. This is my “maintenance” calories and I’ll be adding in calories burned from all activity to calculate my total deficit.
Day 1
30 minutes of HIIT cardio (the body primarily uses glycogen for high intensity exercises)
Fasting the entire day
Supplements: 200mg caffeine before cardio and 1g l carnitine 4x per day
I’m going to be doing a 48-hour fast and kickstarting it with a HIIT cardio to dump my glycogen and get into ketosis quicker. During the 30 minutes of HIIT cardio, I track my heart rate with my Garmin watch and come up with a conservative estimate of 400 calories burned from the workout. Due to a cool thing called EPOC (excess post-exercise oxygen consumption) aka the “after-burn effect” I’ll be adding 15%, or 60 calories to that. Additionally, I walked 11k steps. When you calculate TDEE as sedentary, this assumes around 5k steps per day, so this gives me an additional 6k steps of calories burned.
The rule of thumb is that a person burns about 0.04-0.05 calories per step. This can vary based on walking speed, terrain, and individual metabolic differences, but it gives us a starting point for estimation.
Let's calculate the calorie expenditure for walking 6,000 steps at an conservative rate of 0.045 calories per step:
Calories Burned=Number of Steps×Calories per Step
Calories Burned=6,000×0.045
Let's do the math:
For a 6'2", 200-pound man walking 6,000 steps, the estimated calories burned would be approximately 270 calories.
So let’s break down the total calories out for the day:
2,513 maintenance
460 HIIT + after burn
270 walking
Total: 3,243
Since I didn’t eat anything today, my calories in = zero. A lb of fat is equivalent to a 3500 deficit, so I’m nearly 1/4th of the way of my goal in a single day. Was a lb of fat actually burned today? No. I’ve mostly burned through my stored glycogen, however, tomorrow I’ll have little to no glycogen to use for energy, so the fat loss is going to be cranked up big time.