Random ramble about dieting coming in.
For me, the best way to get and stay lean is through making gradual changes to my calorie intake and energy expenditure.
I've tried every trick in the book in the past - crash dieting, intermittent fasting, making myself puke after devouring a cheat meal (not my produdest moment), Clen, T3, Adderall, Sibutramine - the list goes on. The only thing I never bothered to try is DNP because I work in an office environment and didn't fancy being sat at my desk sweating buckets.
The more drastic methods have shown some results in the short-term, but cutting down to low body fat takes time. What I've also found is that it's very easy to rebound afterwards and undo the progress entirely. If you want to stay lean, you need to do it in a more sustainable way.
In terms of drugs, Clen makes me feel incredibly anxious and impacts the quality of my sleep, T3 makes me extremely flat and weak which effects the intensity of my training and stimulants like Sibutramine and Ephedrine give me a disgusting jittery wired feeling. In my opinion, it's not worth sacrificing your daily quality of life or jeopardising your training/recovery for the small fat-loss benefits you might get from the drugs.
In terms of diet, if your deficit becomes too large too quickly, hunger will become an issue. You want to avoid spending the entire day feeling starving if you can help it. You'll also lose strength and fullness which is going to be detrimental to your training.
Ideally you want to be in a position where you're not too hungry, you're mentally alert, you're still able to train at a reasonable intensity and you're still recovering with a lot of good quality sleep.
The best way to check all of those boxes for me has been to make gradual adjustments and cut over a longer period of time with a combination of calorie restriction and increased activity.
I'll usually start my cut with a deficit created through calorie restriction of ~300 calories and then a further ~200 calories of extra activity on average over the course of the week. The extra activity can be anything you like. I usually aim to increase my daily step average and add some light LISS cardio sessions, power walking on the treadmill at maximum incline.
When reducing calories, I don't make any radical changes to my diet. It's easy to chip off 300 calories per day without even really noticing through small tweaks like swapping semi-skimmed milk for skimmed, using sweetener rather than sugar in a brew, cooking one meat meal in Frylight rather than olive oil and so on.
So you can start your diet/weight-loss without even feeling as if anything has changed. You're not going to feel the impact of a 20-minute walk here and there or a sweetener in your brew rather than a sugar. This means you can start chipping away at your body-fat with minimal stress.
I usually try to weigh myself at the same time each day with the same scales in the same location for consistency. I take a note of my weight each time and will look at the median weight at the end of the week to account for any fluctuations. As long as the median is dropping by 1lbs a week, I keep things the same. Once I'm not hitting 1lbs loss, I'll reduce calories, increase activity or a combination of the two by 150 calories per day. The first 1-2 rounds of the decrease can usually be made with further small tweaks like the ones mentioned above, as I go deeper, I'll usually look at reducing the carbs in the meals that are not around my workouts first. I'll always try to keep some carbs in pre and post-training if I can help it.
Once I'm quite deep in to the diet, my maintenance could have dropped a decent amount compared to when I started, but it's never overly noticeable as long as I'm achieving the deficit through a combination of calorie restriction and activity. If it was just one or the other then it would be much more noticeable because I'd either be eating considerably less or spending a lot of time doing cardio, when it's a combination, that is never an issue.
I never tend to set a goal weight. I'll stop cutting when I'm happy with what I see in the mirror. It seems pointless aiming for some arbitrary number to me, unless you're doing something specific like fighting or competing at a certain weight class. By the time I get there, I never feel too burnt out because I've done it gradually over a long period of time and I usually take the same approach with bulking, slowly adding calories as a sudden jump in calories/body weight effects my sleep, blood pressure and digestion.
It might not be to everybody's liking, but it's worked well for me. In the past when I've done more intense cuts and used fat-burners, more often than not I would start eating like a pig as soon as I wanted to start gaining and would lose my condition and feel awful within a matter of weeks. Slow and steady with gradual changes has suited me much better. If you're on a massive time crunch then maybe it's not for you. But maybe plan ahead a little more next time and avoid that time crunch in the first place. And if the bulk following the cut follows the same principle, you'll never have a great deal to lose to begin with.
The end result is you've lost all of the fat you wanted to, you've maintained strength, you've not lost an ounce of muscle mass, you've not had to suffer/feel hunger and you've not put your body under stress running fat-loss drugs. The only negative is that it must be done over a slightly longer period of time.
