The “Skinny Fat” Solution (FAST FIX!)
The “skinny fat” body is instantly recognizable. It is characterized by having a skinny body with no appreciable amount of muscle mass while still maintaining enough body fat to look soft without a shirt on. This is an all too common look and one that needs to be changed starting today.
And so, if you find yourself skinny fat, the good news is it’s not only a fixable solution, but it’s one you can fix fast, just like Jesse. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa who you calling skinny fat? I mean, do you have a short memory? No, but I have a bad memory. Too much head trauma.
What s up guys, Jeff Cavaliere, Athleanx. com. Jesse Laico, Athleanx. com. By the way, skinny fat.
Here you are. This is a picture because pictures tend to help people with bad memories. Well, I thought we deleted those a long time. No, we keep them around for just these purposes like this. Guys, if you’re looking for a solution to your skinny fat problem, the good news is, as I mentioned in the open, it is fixable and it’s fixable quite fast if you do the right things.
All right. So, when we’re talking about skinny fat we’re looking at a situation where you sort of look like this. You’re skinny and you’re fat. I mean, let’s look at a little bit differently. You lack muscle and you still maintain some fat around your waistline, especially for men, particularly around their waistline.
You’ve got skinny arms, maybe skinny legs, you got no chest, maybe not even any abs, but you got some midsection fat. Well, that looks a lot like me in those pictures. There you go. So now how do we fix that? We’ve got two choices, right?
You can either opt to attack your fat problem and try to get skinnier. However, I wouldn’t advise that because when you do, you end up looking like this. That doesn’t look so good. No. What this is, is this is just a very skinny person.
See, the base of what’s happening in a skinny fat person is a lack of muscularity. They have no muscular development. So, what you’re going to want to do is make sure that you build muscle to start fixing this problem. However, we do have to consider nutrition, too. And there’s actually two things that I know about every skinny fat person watching this video right now, two facts.
What’s that? The first thing is they’re not following a training plan. Okay. Sort of like you work following a training plan, Jesse. All right.
Why do you have to call me out? Which is why you were skinny fat. We’ll get into that in a second. The other thing that I know is that you are not hypocaloric. You know what that means?
That means less calories than your maintenance level. Maintenance level. That’s right. You are not there because if you were, you lose the body fat that still remains around your midsection. Yeah.
In the case of Jesse, his hypercaloric state wasn’t there because he was eating too many gummy bears and some other things. Right? Still calling me out. But you’re still accumulating too many calories from all those sugary foods. So, let’s start there.
What is the game plan for you and what you’re going to have to do to fix this problem once and for all? From a nutrition standpoint, the fact that I know you’re not hypercaloric means at least you’re at maintenance. Yeah. If not, you’re in some sort of calorie surplus. Well, guess what?
You’re in a good enough state to build muscle. Because we actually know that you can build muscle at the same time that you’re losing fat in a caloric deficit as long as your protein content is high enough. Right. The recommendation there is about . 8 grams per pound of body weight.
If you’re in that range and you’re slightly hypercaloric, not very hypercaloric, but let’s say 200, 300 calories below your maintenance levels, you’re still going to be able to add muscle mass, albeit at a much slower rate. But you can still do it if your protein levels are up. But we know that you’re at least at maintenance, if not above. Yeah. My recommendation from a nutrition standpoint, just to ensure that you’ve got the building blocks to build muscle, it’s just to take out some of your carbohydrates and swap in some protein.
So do me a favor, just count your protein content and grams for one or two days. We generally like to eat around the same things almost every single day, so just do it for two days. Though I don’t ever really advise becoming a mathematician when it comes to counting your calories and measuring out things every single day. Just for your own awareness it might help you to see how much you’re taking in. Yeah.
Because if you’re not at that . 8 grams per pound of body weight right now, you might be surprised at how below that level you are. Simply taking out some carbohydrates on a gram per gram basis, they have the same amount of calories, that’s four you can make that easy swap. We don’t have to play around with increasing or decreasing calories. Right.
Now, nutritionally that’s good enough. But we have to focus on that other thing. I remember I said you’re not training. No, you’re exercising. You’re exercising.
Look, if you’re not on some sort of a committed plan, you’re not going to build muscle. If you exercise and think that that’s a committed plan, it’s not. And it’s the reason why you haven’t built any muscle. You can’t look like this and be a skinny fat person and have any real training history under your belt. And what I mean by training is having a progressive plan that is followed consistently.
Because I’m sorry, even a bad plan— Not dangerous plan. Not a dangerous plan, but a bad plan, and a lot of them out there by the way. But a bad plan follow consistently is still going to help you to build muscle. Yeah. So, you need to get on a training plan and these are the things that have to be part of that plan.
Number one, you have to have a focus, as we always talk about here, on building your base strength around a strong foundation in the bigger compound lifts. Right. Just like Jesse has. Yup in the squat, bench and deadlift. I’ve been progressing the weight that I’ve been using over a long period of time, but short increments of that amount of weight and the weight has gone up actually pretty significantly.
So then in two-or three-time body weight. Three times, yeah. So, then your squat is going up as well. Yeah. So, building around this foundation.
But let’s talk about reality here. Reality is you might have something called extra phobia. Which I definitely had. And you’re not alone. A lot of people, when they first start out of the plan, again, no muscle on your body, which means you’ve probably never even hit the gym.
Because we know even as a newbie, you’re going to gain muscle sometimes just by looking at the weights, but you have to look at the weights consistently in order for that to happen. You need to understand that some of those exercises are going to feel a little daunting to you and you may avoid them altogether. And that’s a mistake, right? I talked about and in many videos before, you need to start somewhere on them, realize that just because these are basic exercises, don’t assume that they’re so simple to do. Right.
The more compound the exercise is, the more complex it actually is to perform it. You’ve got a lot of different muscles working together in sync. You’ve got to move an uncoordinated body, oftentimes through space, through these multiple joints, which can become challenging. And you have many different areas up and down the kinetic chain for these weaknesses to actually rather ugly head and cause that lift to go the wrong direction. Yeah.
Right? You could have tight ankles, you could have a lack of mobility in your hips, you could have a lack of thoracic extension. All these things would inhibit your ability to perform the squat, let’s say, safely and also maximally by adding as much weight as possible because you’re not moving through space in the most ef