Ep. #192: Why Are People Skinny Fat and How Do You Fix It?

[00:00:00] Hey, this is Mike and welcome to another installment in my in five minutes or less series, where I answer one common question quickly and simply, because while long form content is great, sometimes it is also nice when someone just gets right to the point and tells you what to do and how to do it in five minutes or less.

And that’s what I do in these episodes. And this time around, we’re going to be talking skinny fat, what it is why people wind up skinny fat, or at least the most common reason why people wind up skinny fat despite dieting and exercising and taking a bunch of supplements and what to do about it. All right.

So first let’s talk about why many people wind up skinny fat. Skinny fat, despite obsessing about eating clean or following one kind of diet or another, doing a bunch of exercise, usually a bunch of cardio, taking a bunch of [00:01:00] supplements and so forth. And the primary reason why so many of those people are skinny fat, despite working pretty hard at trying to not be skinny fat is they are paying too much attention to their body weight and not their body composition.

Now, body weight is obvious. Of course, you step on the scale, you get your weight, body composition, not so obvious because it refers to what that weight is comprised of, how much of that body weight is muscle, how much of it is fat, how much of it is bone, how much of it is water and so forth. Now, body composition is far more important than body weight because body composition is what determines what you’re going to look like at any given weight.

And as a general rule, the less muscle you have, the lower your body fat levels are going to have to be to have any sort of noticeable muscle definition. And that really strikes at the heart of the skinny fat problem, which is having [00:02:00] way too little muscle. Which then makes you look, even though your body fat levels, aren’t that high from a per, body fat percentage perspective.

So let’s say a guy is at 15 percent body fat, or let’s say it’s a woman and maybe she’s at 25%. Those are not bad body fat percentages. Those would be generally considered athletic, but if you come, if you combine those body fat percentages with too little muscle, you get a skinny fat look. If, however, you add quite a bit of muscle.

So if you take a guy or you take a man or a woman with above average muscularity and you put them at 15 and 25% respectively, they look very different. And so the goal then is even when people say, they want to lose weight, really the goal is not just to lose weight, but to lose fat and not.

Muscle. And then if somebody says they want to gain weight, the goal is not just to gain weight, but it’s to gain muscle and not fat, or at least gain as [00:03:00] much muscle as you can with as little fat gain as possible. So the first thing here is to, again, rewire your thinking toward body composition and away from body weight.

In the end, you want a certain look in the mirror and how you should look at that is not. What is that weight going to be? But what is that body composition going to look like? What body fat percentage is that going to be? And approximately how much total lean mass are you going to need to gain to achieve that look?

And when you start thinking that way, then you see that what. What most people do to try to get into shape or lose weight is really counterproductive. So you have very low calorie dieting, like starvation dieting, very low protein dieting. You have excessive amounts of cardio and minimal amounts of resistance training.

That’s the recipe for skinny fat because while doing that. That will definitely help you lose weight. No doubt. If you’re in a huge caloric [00:04:00] deficit, that alone, of course, is going to drive weight loss. But then if you add on top of that low protein intake, excessive cardio and little or no muscle training, yes, you’re going to lose a lot of weight.

You also, you’re going to lose a fair amount of fat. But you’re also going to lose a fair amount of muscle, and that’s bad. That’s really what contributes to the skinny fat look. Again, when you have people that they lose large amounts of weight, they lose 20, 30, 40 plus pounds. Which is great, but are very unhappy with what they see in the mirror because they’ve lost too much muscle.

They don’t have the muscle tone that they want to have that overall look that they expect, with whatever body fat percentage they’re ending at.

Hey, quickly, before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about it? Because no amount of [00:05:00] marketing or advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth. If you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it.

It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say, Thank you. You can find me on Instagram at muscle for life fitness, Twitter at muscle for life and Facebook at muscle for life fitness. All right. So if that’s how people, or at least a lot of people wind up skinny fat, what’s the solution for those of you that are there now?

And for those of you that are not skinny fat, but are about to embark on a weight loss journey, what about you? And fortunately. The solutions are pretty simple. Okay, so if you are currently skinny fat, what should you do? Let’s approach it like this. So if your caloric intake is currently very low, so if you [00:06:00] are eating somewhere around your basal metabolic rate because you’ve simply been restricting your calories for a long time.

Then your first priority should be getting that number back up to where it should be. And I don’t want to make this video slash podcast too long, so I’m just going to send you to an article that you can read about this. Actually there are two articles I recommend you read just so you have a full understanding of what you’re supposed to do and why.

The first is if you go to muscle for life and you search for metabolic damage, you should read that article, which breaks down obviously the whole subject of metabolic damage, which just so you know, is. At least if nothing else, it’s a misnomer, but anyways, check out that article and then search for reverse diet.

So your first priority from a dietary perspective is going to be getting your calories back up to a healthy range. Really what we want to do is we want to get them up to where your total daily energy expenditure Should be, and we’re going to be combining that with exercise, of course. [00:07:00] So your TD is probably going to go up, but we want to make sure that you are not in a caloric deficit, that you are eating more or less the number of calories that you’re burning every day, and that this is a high healthy number.

So then when we go into a deficit to lose fat, we are not starving you basically. And if your caloric intake is currently at a healthy level. So if you are, if you understand what I just was talking about in terms of total daily energy expenditure, and that’s more or less where your intake is at. So you’re more or less eating the number of calories that you’re burning every day.

And this is a a normal calorie intake. healthy number. You haven’t been severely restricting your calories for a long period of time. Then you can focus your dietary efforts on losing fat. Meaning you can go into a caloric deficit to lose fat because chances are. If you are skinny fat, you are going to be new to weightlifting and resistance training, at least a proper weightlifting resistance training.

And that means that you are going to experience [00:08:00] glorious newbie gains. You’re going to be able to gain muscle while losing fat. So we might as well take advantage of that and just have you go into a deficit to bring your body fat percentage down. And then we’re going to use your exercise to drive muscle growth up.

And you will achieve the holy grail, the body recomp. Also as a quick note on that last point I’m assuming that your body fat percentage is too high as well. So you have a healthy metabolism and your body fat percentage is too high. So if you’re a guy and you’re over 15 percent body fat, or if you’re a woman and you’re over 25 percent body fat, And you have a healthy metabolism, then recomp is the way to go.

And from the dietary side of things, that means caloric deficit. Now, if your metabolism is healthy and your body fat percentage is not too high. So if you’re a guy around 10%, if you’re a woman around 20%, your metabolism is healthy. Then we actually want to just focus on maximizing muscle growth. You could call that clean bulking, lean bulking, there are different terms [00:09:00] for it, but it’s basically going to boil down to eating slightly more energy than you burn every day, which helps your body’s muscle building machinery work as efficiently as possible.

And if you want to learn more about that, head over to legionathletics. com and search for clean bulk and you will see an article that I wrote on it. Now, in terms of exercise, and this applies to all three cases noted above, you want to focus the majority of your efforts on heavy compound weightlifting.

And by heavy, I mean working with 75 to 85 percent of your one rep max by compound. Of course, multi joint exercises, compound exercises that involve multiple muscle groups as opposed to isolation exercises that involve, just one joint movement or one muscle group. Now, in terms of cardio, you actually don’t have to do any.

You’re probably going to lose fat. The diet and the weight lifting will be enough. However, doing cardio does help speed up the process. And I, myself, do like to include cardio in my routine when I’m [00:10:00] cutting. The key though is not doing too much, because it’s going to interfere with your weight lifting and it’s probably also going to accelerate muscle loss.

What I recommend is that you do no more than an hour and a half to maybe two hours of cardio per week. When you’re cutting and you can start even lower than that. You could start with 30 minutes or maybe 60 minutes of cardio per week when you’re cutting. And then as time goes on and you need to keep your energy expenditure up, then you add a little bit more cardio, but you never get excessive.

And in case you’re wondering what I myself like to do, I like to do 25 to 30 minute high intensity interval sessions. When I’m cutting and I’ll do three to four of those sessions per week. I prefer biking because it’s convenient. I have a little bike down in my exercise room in my basement. And also research shows that biking is one of the better forms of cardio for minimizing the interference effect.

[00:11:00] With the weightlifting. Hey there. It is Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful And if you did and don’t mind doing me a favor and want to help me make this the most popular Health and fitness podcast on the internet then please leave a quick review of it on iTunes or wherever you’re listening from This not only convinces people that they should check the show out It also increases its search visibility so And thus helps more people find their way to me and learn how to build their best bodies ever too.

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I read everything myself, and I’m always looking for constructive feedback, so please do reach out. Alright, that’s it. Thanks again for listening to this episode, and I [00:12:00] hope to hear from you soon. And lastly, this episode is brought to you by me. Seriously though, I’m not big on promoting stuff that I don’t personally use and believe in.

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