Your body is made in the kitchen. Okay, so if you’re an Olympic athlete who burns through 20,000 calories a day on the bike it’s made peddling through mountains in France. But for most of us, a shredded diet begins and ends in the diet.

What you do in the gym just helps you pack on muscle and add definition.

If you’re interested in completely shredding your muscles, adding definition and really taking your physical appearance to the next level you need to bring in a fat shredding diet.

Before we begin though, we do like to point out that a real diet is something you can live with for the rest of your life. It becomes a lifestyle.

You want to maintain your shredded appearance, and to do so you need to maintain a shredded diet.

This particular diet is a “shredding” diet.

It means that you swap it in right before beach season or before a big event. It’s perfectly safe, but this diet is designed to push you over the edge before a competition without becoming dangerous.

So when you want to take a current healthy diet and maximize it to the best of its abilities this is the capper to add on top.

A Bit More About the Shredding Diet

This diet is all about squeezing out the last bit of fat from your body. It isn’t a “for life” diet due to the calorie restrictions.

Instead, it will help your body flush out all toxins and really reset itself.

Due to that, it’s a solid diet to bring into the fold once a year or two for two to three months (hello beach season!).

In fact, in just a 12-week stint it’s possible to cut your body fat 6 to 12 percent.

That’s substantial.

So mark your calendar for an end date. This way you have a time frame to look forward to.

This way, if you follow the diet every single week, day in and day out, you have an end target date.

Now, let’s say you really like the results of this diet but find following through with it for two or three months just isn’t possible. If that is the case you can utilize the features of this diet every other week or a few days during a week. In this way, it almost works like intermittent fasting.

This is also beneficial if you’re trying to push your body fat down (let’s say you’re at 18 percent and you want it down closer to 10 percent). This can help.

This particular diet is one you will need to build up to, so sprinkling in days with this shredding diet is acceptable. From there, you can determine what works best for you and whether you should utilize it every single day.

The Shredding Diet Isn’t About Putting On Muscle

If you’re looking to pack on muscle size this is not the diet for you. There are plenty of great diets out there designed to help you strip off fat while putting on muscle.

This, however, is not one of those diets.

This is purely about shredding and dropping weight. The idea here is to maintain as much muscle mass as possible while taking off the undesirable weight.

Now, there will be a bit of a muscle incline here if you decide to go with the six to 12-week diet method.

Whenever focusing on a reduced calorie intake diet there just isn’t anything you can do about that. That is why this particular diet is a good capper to perform at the end of a bulking period.

Cutting Calories For the Shredding Diet

In order to cut fat, you need to cut calories.

The only way you’ll ever drop weight is if you burn more calories than you bring in. No matter how many other diets want to say you don’t need to count calories, calories are units of energy.

If you don’t burn the calories it is stored in your body, typically in the fat cells. That’s just the science of caloric intake. With this diet, you’ll be cutting your calories down, potentially significantly.

How many calories should you focus on?

Take your current weight and multiply it by 10. Let’s say you weigh in at 175 pounds. Multiply that by 10 and you’ll end with 1,750. That’s how many calories you should aim for.

Ideally, you’ll target just under that, but as long as you ballpark stay in this range by 100 calories or you should be good to go.

In order to maintain your muscle mass, you do need protein. Protein should be about 30 percent of your daily calorie intake.

So let’s say you can consume 1,750 calories per day. 30 percent would be 525 calories.

Because your protein calorie intake is limited you want to maximize the amount you can squeeze out of this.

When shopping around you can typically find a protein powder that runs nets you around 30 grams of protein for 180 calories (give or take, depending on the brand). That means you can bring in almost 90 grams of protein if you were to focus completely on protein powder for your 30 percent. T

hat’s not enough to really put on any size at 175 pounds, but it’s enough to help you maintain.

Thankfully, you’ll be cutting fat off so even if you do actually lose some muscle mass it won’t be apparent.

Now, there’s one thing to say about protein. The protein found in your protein powder may be the highest protein gram to calorie ratio, however, it is not always the most filling. 90 grams of protein powder goes pretty quickly. You may feel fuller with 20 grams of egg white protein than you do with 30 grams of protein powder.

You’ll need to experiment a bit with this particular diet, but you may find it’s better for your overall wellbeing (aka the ability to make it through the diet) to focus on slightly higher calorie proteins if it means helping you feel fuller.

Eating Strategy

The best way to squeeze everything you can out of this diet is to cut your allowed calories into four different meals. This helps maintain your metabolic rate without allowing it to drop off.

As you will have a reduced calorie intake you will need to help offset the reduction with an increase in supplementation.

Two such supplements are BCAA and creatine. These supplements will help minimize any kind of muscle and strength loss).

The amino acids and creatine will maximize the amount of protein you intake, ensuring as little of the protein is lost in the digestion process.

Make sure you figure the calories from your supplements into the total daily amount.

But how much should you take?

If you’re 200 pounds or under you’ll want to combine five grams of BCAAs and 2.5 grams of creatine.

Instead of pairing this off with each of your four meals you want to consume one serving before you workout, one serving after you complete your exercise session, and then put the other two in between meals to give your stomach something to digest in between your smaller meals.

If you are over 200 pounds you’ll want to double the serving size (10 grams of BCAAs and 5 grams of creatine).

With a limited calorie intake, you won’t be consuming your full dietary requirement of vitamins and minerals.

Due to this, you’ll need to make up for it with other supplements.

First, take a multi-vitamin (you should be doing this anyway). You’ll also want to add fish oil or krill oil to the diet. If you find you have trouble focusing add in supplements like gingko extracts.

These supplements will help lift any mental fog.

Beverages

You need to drink water throughout the day.

You don’t want to drink any kind of calorie-rich beverages. Most of these beverages provide very little bang for the calorie buck.

If you weight 150 pounds and can only consume 1,500 calories do you really want 300 going to a container of orange juice or Coke?

That’s a full meal devoted to drinking a soda, which just isn’t a good way to divvy up your calories.

At first, you will likely feel tired and sluggish when starting out the diet. The lack of calories will do that to you.

So if you need a cup of coffee, by all means, go with the coffee. Just keep it black. If your stomach can’t handle black you can add in some cinnamon (which is great for your metabolism).

You can even add in some ginger, which is not only good for your metabolic rate but it helps with clearing out the mental fog as well.

Other than this, don’t put anything else in your coffee.

Feel free to drink as much tea as you want. If you can’t muster drinking water throughout the day a good option is to grab a water bottle and add in a few tea bags, then refrigerate it at night. When you wake up you have cold tea ready to go. With an assortment of tea flavors, you can mix it up throughout the course of the day.

After all, you might be cutting down your calories but it doesn’t mean you can’t have any flavor injected into your diet.

Workout

While abs and a cut body are made in the kitchen you still do need to work out during this diet. Of course, you probably won’t be able to go as hard simply because you don’t have the same calorie levels. That’s alright.

In fact, this might be a great time to switch up your workout and incorporate muscle confusion. So go light with your weights and slow down your lifts.

This way you can still maximize your workout routine while confusing your muscles.

By doing this, when you are finished with this shredding diet you can switch back to both your old diet and your old lifting method, allowing you to squeeze the most out of both.

If you’re intending on using this diet for a full 12 weeks it will be difficult. We’re not going to hide that.

However, if you stick with it you will see incredible results.

When to Avoid This Diet

A low-calorie diet is not for those who are currently going through health problems. It is always recommended to consult with your doctor whenever you decide to try a new diet, especially if you have health concerns.

However, as this is a reduced calorie diet your cells will not receive as much energy throughout the course of the day, which limits cellular reproduction and repair.

As long as you are a healthy individual without any current complications, by all means, go forward and try this diet out.

By sticking with it you’ll see serious muscle definition improvements.

In Conclusion

This shredding diet is not a diet you’ll continue on, day in and day out, for the rest of your life. But that’s perfectly fine. That is not what this diet is designed for.

As long as you know this moving forward you’ll be able to get the most out of it. This kind of diet is designed to be the final capper on your bulking routine.

So after going through a time of bulking up, you can use this diet to shred away any fat you might have put on. You can use the diet for up to 12 weeks every year or two, or you can use elements of the diet and sprinkle it into your weekly routine.

However, you decide to go about using this diet you will find it can substantially improve your physical appearance while allowing your body the ability to process out any undesirable build up from previous dieting or supplementation.

Whatever has brought you to this point though, if you’re interested in shredding fat and potentially dropping up to a percent of body fat a week, this is the diet for you.