Where To Start To Get Lean And Mean For Summer by Ray Burton

How do I get truly lean and mean this summer? You work out and you watch what you eat, and you know what? There’s not much else I can say to a question like that, because it’s so vague and general, because I don’t know your weight, I don’t know your activity level, I don’t know what you’ve been eating, so the first thing, if you’ve never done a thing in your life is to get active and start looking at what you’re eating and as vague as that seems, that’s the good answer to that one.

To get started on the right path to a lean and mean physique, you need to get a starting point. You need to have an idea of where you are so that you know where you need to make the corrections in your course. In order to know how far off track you are from where you are compared to where you want to be with your actions requires a bit of learning on your part. You're going to have to educate yourself in the basics of cardiovascular fitness, resistance training and proper eating.

So lets glaze over the last one, eating, a little bit. How about the quantity of food you should be eating? See if this sounds familiar. “If I’m doing high intensity workouts five to six days per week, can I keep my calorie intake around 1,500 initially to jumpstart and then ramp up the number of calories as needed? Most eating plans say I should be eating around 2,000 calories per day, but I find it to be a lot of food to eat.”

That’s pretty normal, that kind of question. You can go into a deep caloric deficit very short-term just for a jumpstart, but the longer you stay down there, the more muscle you’re going to sacrifice and it will only work for a limited amount of time before everything starts to shut down. Having said that, one good way to go about that is to go to your proper level of calories and keep zigzagging, so if you have the proper level of calories one day, but then drop down low the next and then come up to where you’re supposed to be the next day or do two down, one up, or any sort of configuration of that sort so that you’re always circling around your optimum zone.

As far as whether you should be eating 2,000 calories per day or not, that’s really hard for me to say, because again, it depends on your activity level, your lean factor, for lack of a better description, because someone that’s really obese and someone that’s really lean have different needs and I don’t know what calculator you used. I'm going to assume that your calculations are correct because you've done some research. Of course I can’t attest to that, but for you saying that it’s a lot of food to eat in a day, that is what 98% of the people out there say. As soon as they start eating correctly they go, “This is a lot of food to eat”. So even if they find it a lot, if you want some really good results, you just have to buckle down and do what’s necessary. How you’ve learned how to eat might not be how you should be eating, so it’s going to take some time to change.