How to Get Single-Digit Body Fat

If you want to get leaner than lean, every bite counts

BY LOU SCHULER

 Keep the carbs, cut the fat

The conventional wisdom of the ‘80s and ‘90s was that fat made you fat. The less fat you ate, the better. Today, it’s a given that the fewer carbs you consume, the leaner you’ll get. So it may come as a shock to see that bodybuilders typically

use a low-fat diet: 15 to 30 percent of their total calories.

That doesn’t mean their diet is high in carbohydrates. Not exactly. It just means that a bodybuilder who’s cutting calories while also training longer and harder needs the carbs for energy to fuel his workouts. Some fat is necessary for health, and to keep testosterone levels up. But out of the three macronutrients, fat runs a distant third in importance when your goal is to get as lean as humanly possible.

Ready for some math?

We’ll say you’re currently eating about 3,000 total calories on an average day. Since you want to subtract 500, your new target is 2,500 a day. (This is based on nothing, other than my need for nice, even numbers. The actual amount you would need for super-low body fat might be more or less.)

For protein, we’ll split the difference in the previous example, and say your goal is to eat 200 grams a day. That’s 800 calories, or about a third of your total.

We’ll also split the difference for fat, and say it’ll provide 22 percent of your total calories. That’s 550 calories, or just over 60 grams a day. It’s the equivalent of 4 tablespoons of olive oil, plus one egg yolk.

That leaves us with 1,150 calories for carbohydrates, or about 287 grams a day. It works out to about 45 percent of your diet. On paper it looks like a lot, but in the context of an aggressive fat-loss program, when you’re training an hour a day and eating less than you’re used to, it probably won’t seem like much at all.

The closer you get to your deadline, the more crucial it is to hit your calorie target on the nose. Maybe you can overshoot your protein goal without putting entire project in jeopardy. (Protein, as you may know, helps to limit your appetite.) But if you regularly exceed your allotments for fat or carbs, you can probably forget about reaching single digits.

Which brings us back to Dr. Nadolsky and his scale. When I asked him about it for this article, he agreed that “weighing bananas sounds ridiculous.” But while a medium banana has just over 100 calories, including 25 or 26 grams of carbs, the actual banana you have with breakfast might be bigger or smaller. “I’ve had bananas that differ by 100 percent,” he said.

The lesson here is an important one: If you’re careless about one thing in your diet, chances are you’ll be careless about others. By the end of the day you might be off by a couple hundred calories. No big deal for most of us, most of the time. But when you’re shooting for a level of leanness you’ve never achieved, one the average guy can never hope to reach, you can’t afford to be careless.