12 Week Fatloss Challenge

With my 40th Birthday around the corner I’ve decided to challenge myself to get visible abs by the end of 2025. Most of my life I’ve been an unathletic skinny-fat guy (by which I mean skinny with some tire around the midsection). I tried gym on and off throughout my life with lacklustre results.

A couple years ago I got a bit more serious about hitting the gym after reading Peter Attia’s Outlive book and after about 2 years of relative consistency I managed to add about 5kgs of muscle for a total of 66kg fat-free mass and drop from 17% to 13% bodyfat.

It hasn’t all been smooth sailing: sometimes there were periods on inactivity because of difficult life events, sometimes adding muscle added too much bodyfat and then trying to cut bodyfat resulted in losing a lot of the muscle I’d gained and so on. Nevertheless I’ve learnt a lot (sometimes what doesn’t work) and I’m familiar with exercise, gymming and eating well so there’s never been a better time to focus myself.

My personal goal is to hit 8% bodyfat or visible abs, whichever comes first, while maintaining my existing muscle mass.

I’ve previously tried John Berardi’s Get Shredded Diet which seems to work for about 4 weeks before I hit a plateau. Even on low calarie and low carbs while maintaining weight training and cardio I would see very little decreases in bodyfat (often like 0.1% per week) while being extremely disciplined with diet. It’s also generally an unpleasant time and not something that could be sustained for a long time.

I’ve decided to switch to something more similar to Tom Venuto’s “Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle” program which also dovetails pretty well with Attia’s recommendations for longevity.

My basic plan is to do 3 x weight lifting sessions and 4 x 1h Low-Intensity Steady-State cardio per week (maybe more cardio depending on how it goes). I’ll eat a bit more and have carbs before and after weight training on gym days (as opposed to basically only fibrous vegatable cards on Get Shredded).

I’ll keep a weekly log here with how things are going and any thoughts I had on the week.