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Hosted by Paul Evans, Registered Nutritionist (@paulthenutritionist)
Tired of the endless food fads, influencer nonsense, and TikTok nutrition “hacks”? This podcast cuts through it all.
No Forking Nonsense delivers straight-talking, science-backed nutrition advice that actually makes sense — in under 20 minutes. No fluff. No fads. Just real answers from a qualified expert who knows what works in the real world.
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Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Forking Nonsense. And this episode is about how to lose fat and gain muscle and whether it is actually possible. And it is possible, but there are a few caveats. There are three people who they can absolutely lose fat and gain muscle and there are three types of people where it's less easy to do so. The job today is to work out which category you fit into.
@paulthenutritionist:Now this isn't just for men because men wanna get big, be big and strong and have perhaps probably, but I hear a lot of women going, I want to look tone. What does tone mean, girls? What you essentially wanna do is you wanna have some form of definition. What I can categorically tell you is you going to the gym and lifting weights isn't gonna make you quote unquote bulky. I have been trying to get quote unquote bulky since I was 15 years old and I'm now 37 and I'm still waiting to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger.
@paulthenutritionist:So you have absolutely no concerns there. What you do wanna do is you want to look like you have a bit of shape. You don't wanna have soft bum. You don't wanna have soft arms. Those are usually the goals of what you want when you say you don't wanna get bulky, but you wanna have some kind of shape of the hoe.
@paulthenutritionist:So this is about that. How do you do all of that? And I'm gonna talk you through some things that aren't really spoken about from a nutrition perspective. I've really got into the research in this one because it's a thing that I'm really interested in, which I'll go into, I'm sure, some point. Anyway, in other news, are you sick of your algorithm pumping shite at you all day every day?
@paulthenutritionist:Well, the answer to that is to change your algorithm. How do you change your algorithm? By engaging with this which you're already doing. Just start clicking shit on app called Nutritionist. That there will update your algorithm.
@paulthenutritionist:I've done it. I've had loads of people message me saying that that actually helps. So if you're sick of negative information, then that's what you need to do. In other news, top link of this description. Have you clicked it?
@paulthenutritionist:The meal deal framework is completely free. It's helping loads of people. It's a free resource where I've gone through every single supermarket in The United Kingdom, and I have found the healthiest, nutritious, most flavorsome meal deal combinations so you do not have to waste money and think about it yourself because I am all about me doing all the thinking for you. Anyway, let's get into this episode on how you can lose fat and gain muscle. Let's go.
@paulthenutritionist:Okay. So I am going to shake things up a little bit here because I wanted to do some research on how this could be possible. There's been kind of back and forth for years about whether building muscle and losing fat is possible or whether it's not. And I guess logically, it makes sense that to build muscle, you need to be in an energy surplus, and to lose fat, you need be
@paulthenutritionist:in a deficit. And that is right, but there is a bit of
@paulthenutritionist:a caveat. And it's something that I've landed on with some research. And I just want to go through it to just add a different perspective to this. Now you're in a surplus for two hours after lunch, but at four in the morning, you're in a deficit. Now across the week, you might average a deficit whilst also having plenty of windows where you're in a surplus and enough material to signal your body to build something.
@paulthenutritionist:And the fat on your body, remember, is just stored energy. And that is the whole point of what I'm talking about here. Your body can pull from the fat whilst utilizing protein and signaling your body to recover. And they're kind of two separate processes using two separate things. So the question isn't can you do both, it's under what conditions.
@paulthenutritionist:And that is what we're going to be discussing here. So the honest group is that there are probably four groups, and I want you to kind of work out which one you're in. Group one, you're brand new to, resistance training. If you've been lifting properly for less than about a year, you are going to make more progress, whether you plan to or not. Beginners gain muscle fast, and they can do it in a deficit without too much trouble.
@paulthenutritionist:So enjoy that because it's not gonna last. The second group is that you're coming back after some time off. So this is the best position in the entire kind of talk, if you like. And and I guess nobody really talks about it because if you've trained before and then you stop, you will regain muscle quite dramatically faster than you built it the first time around. The leading explanation for that is that muscle fibers keep the nuclei they gained from the previous training block even when the muscle shrinks, which is, I guess, a benefit, if
@paulthenutritionist:you like, of training in the first place.
@paulthenutritionist:So if you've trained for years, then you had kids or you had an injury or a job that, I don't know, caused you to not be able to train and you're coming back into it now, you are in the single best window that there is, so do not waste it. Group three, you've got a decent amount of fat to lose. So the more stored energy that you're carrying, the more your body can pull from it whilst it's still building. So someone at 30% body fat has a far easier job than someone at 12% body fat. And this is counterintuitive, and it's worth me kind of highlighting that being further from your goal actually makes this a little bit easier than it would if you were the other way around.
@paulthenutritionist:Group four is that you're quite lean and you've trained hard for years.
@paulthenutritionist:I'm sorry, but this is really hard, and this is the scenario that I'm in.
@paulthenutritionist:We can still make progress, but it's much slower, and it requires a little bit more kind of meticulous planning. It demands near perfect execution, and you'll probably get further by picking a direction for a few months. If this is you, you already know most of what's in this episode anyway. So which are you? Because three of those four categories should be attempting this right now instead of doing whatever they're currently doing.
@paulthenutritionist:And here's the one bit that catches people out. A lot of you think you're in group four because you went to the gym in your 20s and you know how to lift weights. That is
@paulthenutritionist:not group four. That, my friends, is group two, I. E, you're coming back after time off. You're in a good position, probably the best position. So step back, recognize that, actually, you are
@paulthenutritionist:not the same person as you were when you were in your twenties and decide to do something about it. And here's what I want you to do. There's a few levers that we can pull here. And the first one
@paulthenutritionist:is, you're gonna be surprised, protein.
@paulthenutritionist:And the number is much higher than you think. And this is the one with the best evidence that you could possibly find behind it. So there was a 2016 study and they what this study did is it took 40 young men and it put them in an aggressive deficit for four weeks. Really hard training, six days a week, resistance training and interval training. One group ate 1.2 grams of protein per kilo, the other 2.4, and everything else was the same.
@paulthenutritionist:The low protein group lost fat, and they held roughly steady on muscle. The high protein group lost more fat and gained about 1.2 kilos of lean mass in four weeks in a deficit. They did the same training. They're in the same deficit. The only difference was the protein.
@paulthenutritionist:Now four weeks is short, and we've got to
@paulthenutritionist:take into account these were young men, which changes everything. But the training volume was absolutely brutal. But the direction was, like, in terms of where they were going, is very consistent. And it matches what I see in practice constantly. So what do you actually eat?
@paulthenutritionist:If you're training and you're trying to do both at once, you wanna be eating somewhere around 1.6, 1.8 to an absolute maximum of 2.2 grams of protein per kilo body weight. For most people listening to this, I would say you wanna be 1.8 to two grams of protein, and that could be anything from 110 grams to 180 grams a day. Nearly everybody I assess is on around half of that and genuinely believe they are eating a lot of protein because they have a protein shake after the gym. And here is the part that most people don't recognize. It isn't just taking the amount of protein, having loads for dinner.
@paulthenutritionist:There is a very, very clear study in 2013 where the same total protein was consumed at three different patterns across a day. So 20 grams every three hours beat 10 grams every ninety minutes, and it beat 40 grams every six hours. So a 140 grams of protein taken as 30, 30, 40, 40 across four meals will do more for you than the same 140 grams where 90 of it arrives at 08:00 at night. Most people's day looks like this, cereal, meal deal, fucking massive dinner, one protein rich meal out of three, and the other two are just basically bread, which brings me to lunch. Because lunch is where most of this falls over with 90 of people listening to this.
@paulthenutritionist:You're at work. You got five minutes. You're sitting at Tesco looking at a wall of sandwiches, and whatever you pick is gonna have probably about 12 grams of protein in. This is where I have to say I got so sick of making this point that I made a free guide for it. It is in the top link of this description, and it will show you how to build a proper high protein lunch out of any UK shop in about thirty seconds.
@paulthenutritionist:Click it now. Literally, pick up your phone now. Go to the top link. Just click it, put your email in, and you'll get it in one minute. Plus it's also gonna show you how to kind of work the meal deal system so you're not throwing money away.
@paulthenutritionist:It's completely free, and it's gonna really help you eat your protein consistently. The second lever to pull is your deficit is probably too big. And here's what most people do, and it sabotages everything. They decide to do this properly, they need to starve themselves. And then they can't understand why they're not building any muscle.
@paulthenutritionist:If you have too big of a deficit, your body is going to stop prioritizing muscle. There is not enough to go around. So it makes a decision, and it doesn't make it in your favor. You want to aim for about roughly half a percent to 1% of your body weight per week depending on how heavy you are. If you're ninety kilograms, that is about roughly, roughly about 0.25 half kilogram, you know, to 900 grams a week.
@paulthenutritionist:That's it. And that is the maximum target. There's work on elite athletes comparing slow and fast weight loss. Both groups lost weight. The slower group held on to a lot more lean mass and, in some measures, gained some faster sorry, more consistently than the group who were on the negative deficit.
@paulthenutritionist:Slower genuinely will get you absolutely more progress, not just more sustainable in that kind of irritating way that people say it. Literally, you will have more muscle at
@paulthenutritionist:the end of it. If you are losing more than the kilo a week and you're not sustain... Sustainably, substantially overweight, you're losing things you'll want back. The third lever, the training. And also a word about classes here.
@paulthenutritionist:Resistance training isn't optional. Like, you have to lift weight. Without it, you're in a deficit. And the deficit is going to leave you looking like Paul Diraglif or Mo Farah, right? And your body has no reason to keep muscle.
@paulthenutritionist:Two to four sessions a week, every major muscle group covered. Now the uncomfortable bit, and some of you are going to be annoyed. You doing body pump is not resistance training.
@paulthenutritionist:Now I'm not having to go
@paulthenutritionist:at body pump and body combat and, I don't know, body kick, kick pump, whatever they're called. They're really good for consistency and accountability and for getting
@paulthenutritionist:your body moving and for enjoying things if a class is what's going to
@paulthenutritionist:get you through the door. But if you've been doing the same class with the same weight for eighteen months, your body will have adapted to
@paulthenutritionist:it about six weeks in, and it has no reason to change. Muscle grows in response to demand that it hasn't met before. That is the entire mechanism. So the question isn't, did I train? It's, was today harder than the same session a month ago?
@paulthenutritionist:If you're finding it easier every single time you go, then you need to lift heavier. You need to do more reps. You need to slow it down. You need better control. You need less rest.
@paulthenutritionist:Something has to move. That, my friends, is
@paulthenutritionist:called progressive overload. And the other thing,
@paulthenutritionist:quality of each set matters much more than the number of sets. When I train with friends,
@paulthenutritionist:I sometimes train with clients of mine, I will hype the conversation, slow down, we're in no rush, and another cue point is if you are trying to get four sets of eight out, it's okay to split that set up.
@paulthenutritionist:Take your sets as close to failure as possible within two or three reps of the point where you couldn't do another one with decent form. Most people stop at seven or eight reps when, actually, they've got 13 in
@paulthenutritionist:the tank, and then they
@paulthenutritionist:end up wondering why they're not making progress.
@paulthenutritionist:The next lever, and this is the one that nobody mentions. So I want
@paulthenutritionist:you to remember this from this episode if you
@paulthenutritionist:remember nothing else because it's the one thing that isn't posted on Instagram. Your sleep will decide where the weight comes from. I'm going to say that again. Your sleep is going to decide where the weight comes from. So there was a study it was a small study in 2010,
@paulthenutritionist:but it's one of the most important things in this whole area.
@paulthenutritionist:They took overweight adults, and they put them in the same calorie deficit twice. Once with eight and onetwo hours in bed, once with five and onetwo hours in bed. Same deficit, same food, same people. And they lost about the same amount of weight both times. But with those on the short sleep, they lost far more muscle than they did fat.
@paulthenutritionist:I'm going to
@paulthenutritionist:say that again. Those who were on five and a
@paulthenutritionist:half hours sleep lost loads more muscle than they did fat. The scales said that the diet was working, the diet was working, it was just taking the wrong thing.
@paulthenutritionist:If you are training hard, eating properly, running in a sensible deficit, and sleeping five and onetwo hours sleep, you are undoing a large part of it. Nobody is going to
@paulthenutritionist:tell you that because the number on the scale looks fine. This is also why you cannot out protein bad sleep. There's no supplement for it.
@paulthenutritionist:You just have to go to bed and prioritize your sleep. There is an episode on this feed around optimizing your sleep. I am an expert at sleep. Please do listen to that episode, and it will transform your sleep.
@paulthenutritionist:So how do you know if it's working if the scale can't tell you? Well, this is, I guess, the practical bit. It's going to save you, I
@paulthenutritionist:guess, feeling like you've got to quit six weeks in. If this is working properly, your weight will probably barely move. You're losing fat and gaining muscle. The two things will often cancel each other out on the scale. The scale is probably the single worst thing to measure when you are looking to build muscle.
@paulthenutritionist:So if you weigh yourself every morning and, you know, you take the week's average, which I would recommend, you'll usually conclude that things aren't going in
@paulthenutritionist:the right direction, and then you'll feel quite depressed. So what we need to measure is something different. Firstly, your waist. Take measure, same spot, same time, so I would say usually on a Monday morning, consistent as you like. And what should be happening is that should
@paulthenutritionist:be going down while your weight holds in terms of the weight on
@paulthenutritionist:the scales. And that's a bit of a signal for you. Two, and probably the most important thing here, what are you lifting?
@paulthenutritionist:Are the numbers going up? Perhaps in conjunction with your waist going down. If you're not tracking what your lifts are doing, you have absolutely no idea whether you're training. The amount of people I see in the gym who are just hopping from one thing to another, they're not really paying attention. If you said to them, what are you lifting?
@paulthenutritionist:I think I was lifting this. Not good enough. Get yourself an app. There's plenty of apps out there. You can use AI.
@paulthenutritionist:You can make a spreadsheet. I used to take a little notebook, like, so I knew exactly what was happening. Three, clothes. People laugh, but it's one of the most reliable signals there are. Same jeans, different fit, same weight, t shirts if you're a man looking feeling a bit tighter around the arms.
@paulthenutritionist:Really important, four photos. Same light, monthly, same spot, same time. You won't see day to day changes and maybe not even week to week changes, but you absolutely will see changes between twelve weeks or so.
@paulthenutritionist:And be realistic about the speed. If you're going in
@paulthenutritionist:you're in the second group, so you're the group whereby you've been off for a bit or you haven't been training consistently or as effectively as you know you could to your group two or group three, you might see a clear difference in eight to twelve weeks. If you're a newbie, you're probably going to see changes faster.
@paulthenutritionist:If you're someone who consistently trains, you're probably not gonna see too much change maybe for about a year, and that's kind of
@paulthenutritionist:the way it works, unless you've got your nutrition down. So a bit of
@paulthenutritionist:a humble bug here. I am in a bit of a gaining phase at the moment, and I am consistently my waist is going down, my lifts are going up, and I am putting on anything from 0.1 to 0.25 kilograms of weight every week, so I'm in the surplus. So my metric is
@paulthenutritionist:going in the right direction because I'm absolutely meticulous with my nutrition. But that's something separate that I can't kind of go into on a podcast episode like that.
@paulthenutritionist:Things you can ignore. So this is quick because it's where most people waste their money. Fasted cardio does not give you more fat loss over a day. I mean, it if you like it, but don't do it because
@paulthenutritionist:you think anything's going to happen. The anabolic window. You do not have thirty minutes to get a shake in or your muscles disappear. You've eaten in the last few hours or you're gonna have your dinner afterwards, you should
@paulthenutritionist:be fine. Carbs at night. Nothing happens to carbs after 7PM. I mean, they don't know what time it is. Almost every supplement, with one exception, and I'll give it to you because it's cheap and probably the only one with enough evidence behind it.
@paulthenutritionist:Creatine. Three to five grams a day, any brand, about tenner a month. That is all you need. Your smart scales doing body fat reading. I did a whole episode on this, probably about a year ago.
@paulthenutritionist:It is a guess. And worse, it's a bad guess.
@paulthenutritionist:So completely ignore it. I have manipulated those scales. Did a, post about it a few months ago where I managed to manipulate it to show that I had lost 5% body fat overnight just by increasing my carbohydrate. Listen.
@paulthenutritionist:Just know it is completely inaccurate and a waste of time. So what do I want you to take from this? Few things. Number one, building muscle and losing fat at the same time is real, and it's documented, and it
@paulthenutritionist:can happen. Number two, it works best if you're new, if you're coming back after time off, or you're carrying a decent amount of fat. If that's you, start now, because you're going make the most progress. Three, protein is the lever with the strongest evidence. You need a minimum of 1.6 grams per kilogram, maximum 2.2 grams per kilogram, and spread it across a day.
@paulthenutritionist:Make sure you're pairing it with carbohydrate. Four,
@paulthenutritionist:keep the deficit modest. Usually around
@paulthenutritionist:0.25, maybe half to 1% of body weight a week. Faster than that is gonna cost you muscle. Five, train against resistance and make something harder than it was last week, last month. Turning up, doing the same stuff is not progressive overload. Six, sleep is gonna decide whether you're losing fat or you're losing muscle, and there's different outcome there.
@paulthenutritionist:This is an absolute non negotiable. So the ask I've got for you, two things before you go, and they're both free. First of all, download the meal deal guide. If your protein total falls apart at lunchtime like many people, most of you, it does, that will fix everything in thirty seconds. Second thing, ask question.
@paulthenutritionist:So many people listen to this and I I'm... I know that many of you get a lot from these episodes. I mean, I I get messages from you all the time or I meet people. Ask questions. There will become a point in future where you do not have access to me, where I've got enough space, enough capacity to reply.
@paulthenutritionist:But at the moment, I reply to everybody. The best place you can message me, if I'm honest, is email because I see those at... No. That's my Instagram. Paul@nutritionistuk.com.
@paulthenutritionist:Second place is Instagram at paul nutritionist. But I get a lot of DMs, so sometimes I miss them. But I always try and reply to as many people as possible. If you've got any questions, if you need anything, if you want to explore the lunch and learn, we've now booked 10 of them. There's still some spaces after Christmas.
@paulthenutritionist:If you want me to do a lunch and learn online for your workplace, send me a message, and I'll book you in. But other than that, hopefully, you found this useful, and I shall catch up with you on Friday.