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Answering a super common question that we get all the time is Dr.

And I feel you 1000% and I think I have some good suggestions.

You came here for some reason, maybe a mistake on your part.

What the fuck are you supposed to do if you're skinny fat?

It's, you know, not a clear definition, but it's a spectral definition.

So it's folks on the end of the spectrum, where compared to their peers, they don't have a ton of muscle, but also they have some pretty significant fat stores.

Like if you had to describe someone's body to someone before a blind date or a set up date, that's the kind of body that's a little tough to describe.

You know, like you set up your friend Rob with Rebecca, both are names, isn't that nice?

You know, it's a blind date, Rebecca, shut up, I can't tell you.

And she's like, hi, just give me like a clue.

Is he like fat, is he like, you know, is he like skinny?

You know, yeah, yeah, It's like a skinny guy trapped inside a fat person's body.

Didn't mean to use your name, but skinny fat is actually the living proof of the fact that the body type system they used to use with mesomorph, endomorph, ectomorph is bullshit because they forgot skinny fat.

Remember, ectomorph is like you're skinny but lean.

Mesomorph is your fucking Superman, jacked and lean.

Endomorph is your fat but fucking jacked underneath.

And they never talk about that 1 because it's fucking rough.

First of all, how your body is and how you look doesn't fucking matter.

And hardly anything in life are fucking whole industry is a goddamn like leisure, leisure industry is the whole thing is a game.

Anyway, what does a Elon Musk's body composition and Jeff Bezos was going to say some shit.

And so if you're, you've got solid game, you're handsome, you're rich and successful and just not a piece of shit, you're going to be doing just great in your life being skinny fat.

But if you want to not be skinny fat or you want to be less so, what is the proper thing to do?

And a lot of times this is where standard advice kind of clashes with the predicament of the skinny fat person.

A lot of people say, you got to fuck bulk, bro.

And a lot of these folks are entering lifting for the first time.

Well, yeah, on the 1 hand, like the bulk, I feel you on that, but they're like, well, I'm already fat.

If I'm in a bulk, I'm just going to be like a fucking sumo wrestler.

That's not why I entered the training and nutrition game is to become that.

And then the other hand, if you say, well, all right, just cut.

I'm fucking lifting all these weights, eating all this goddamn protein powder so that I look like some kind of something.

And if I just diet a bunch of weight off, I don't want my coworkers and the girl of my dreams who also is at work and that's problematic.

I don't want her to be like, oh my God, are you okay?

And no, I just, I just started a fitness program.

You want her to be like, Oh my God, are you like on steroids for just Rebecca?

And she's like, ah, that's Rebecca again.

What the fuck are we supposed to do with skinny fat people in order to get them in the kind of shape that they want to be in more than they are in now?

So I think a really good approach to the skinny fat situation is something like this.

Priority number 1, if you are skinny fat and you've just entered the fitness space, just started lifting or whatever, is to just begin, continue to lift hard or begin lifting nice and hard.

Nothing crazy, 3, 4 sessions a week is good for almost everyone at this stage.

Like an hour each at a time, train whatever muscle groups you want to develop, probably all around is good.

And on the nutritional end, just try to make your diet nutritious and feed your muscles.

Which is to say, multiple meals a day of mostly healthy foods and keep trying to hit like the decent amount of protein.

If a bodybuilder looks down at your meal on his way with his own meal out of the restaurant you're eating at, he should be like, oh, there's some protein on that plate.

As opposed to being like, what the fuck are you 4 years old?

Or like, oh, are you getting over a breakup?

Cause there's only dessert foods out there.

So you want some veggies, some fruits, some whole grains, nice, good slab of meat or vegetarian protein source, a glass of milk, something like that.

And we have a ton of videos for you guys on just nutrition for healthy eating that we have.

I don't know where the fuck Scott the video guy is going to put it.

He may tell me to go put it somewhere if you know what I'm saying.

So yes, we have tons of ways to eat healthy, but basically, we just want this person, this individual to eat healthy and not 100% healthy, but just healthy baseline and eat plenty of protein.

So underneath the skinny fatness, the muscles will be growing.

And in addition to that, a lot of times when people cut out a bunch of junk food and try to eat more healthy, they lose a lot of fat, too, often at the same time because they're just beginning the process.

You basically shoot for maintenance calories with this whole plan or just eat enough food to where you're not super hungry anymore and just call it there.

You may lose weight, you may gain weight based on how your body responds to the hunger signaling of weight training.

Some people when they start weight training, even if they eat well, they gain weight.

That's solid, you're gonna gain mostly muscle anyway, or all muscle, it's gonna be amazing once you cut down later.

If you just aren't super hungry when you start eating healthy foods, you're gonna be building a ton of muscle under the hood because of the high protein and the great health value of the food and because you're training for the first time in your life, but you may actually lose a bunch of weight so that by the time it comes time to like cut on purpose, you're already pretty fucking lean and you're not even skinny fat anymore.

What I would recommend doing that for is, I don't want to put too fine a point at it, but like basically a year.

If someone comes to me, if you came to me, this is the way I make all these videos as far as like the PowerPoints for them.

The way I answer questions in these videos is if a human being actually came up to me and like had a real fucking life situation, asked me what to do.

So I don't ever want to say like it has to be a year, but like, yeah, at least 6 months and maybe as long as a year and a half to 2 years.

So if you just started lifting weights, you're kind of skinny fat, you don't know what to do, eat healthy and at maintenance with plenty of protein, train hard, or just fucking put the horse blinders on for 1 year straight.

Is it the most rapid body transformation you can have?

No, but it's the 1 that'll make the biggest impact shortly after a year.

So let's say about a year of this, you've done it.

The prediction is that you are going to be substantially harder.

My doctor says that's an intractable problem for me at this point.

What you are going to be is like less mushy.

You may have a similar overall shape, maybe, but your shape will probably be better.

Your arms will all tire at the sleeves and you are physically harder to touch because more of you underneath is muscle and less is fat.

This is already really good news, but it's just the beginning.

After that year of essentially re-comping, gaining muscle while losing fat, and taking advantage of the fact that that's really all you need to make crazy transformation, crazy progress, After that, what I recommend is taking like about a 12 week fat loss phase where you lose like, oh, a half a pound to a pound and a half per week, depending on how large you are.

But like for your average 170 pound, 180 pound person, maybe just even a pound per week, just a little above that.

You lose maybe 12, 15 pounds in the course of 3 months.

And remember you have built quite a bit of muscle and now that muscle gets revealed substantially more.

Now you're looking way, way, way different.

This is when the people start complimenting you.

This is when Stacy from accounting's like,

Holy shit, Stacy, you've been in this job for like 4 days.

Anyway, it's like I practiced this before.

So after this fat loss phase, you're going to look pretty fucking good, way better than ever.

And then depending on sort of which way you want to zig or zag, you can choose your destiny.

You can choose to maintain for a few months to let the diet fatigue cool off before going again and doing another fat loss phase.

Cause you're like, ooh, I love this look, but I'm so close to being actually fucking lean.

I need a little maintenance and another 3 month diet and then I'm gonna be a fucking world champion.

Amazing, totally fine answer if that's you.

You could get down to this new body fat level and be like, oh my fucking God, I look unbelievable.

My social life's night and day, my confidence is incredible.

I'm not a fucking freak bodybuilder, weirdo, asshole, steroid addict.

I'd say some other words, but the current social justice movement prevents that.

So I'm just gonna maintain and keep lifting 3 or 4 times a week, keep eating fundamentally healthy and just do me for the rest of my life beautifully perfect dance.

So we don't all have to go on like, what am I now?

Year 23 of a self-improvement journey that's actually killing your insides.

And or you could say, hey, like I love this new look, but fuck man, I could do with a little more muscle and you start a slow muscle gain phase and then you do maintenance, fat loss, muscle gain, et cetera.

And then you're in the life of getting more jacked over time and lean over time, which at some point like the way you look and All the way up to that point, you are better looking than ever.

I will say 1 thing before we wrap this up.

A lot of folks who have been skinny fat before, they harden up, they diet it off, and then they're pretty fucking chiseled.

They are like, I want to be bigger, but I feel like if I try to gain weight, I'll just get really fat again.

The answer here is if you're gaining it like half a pound per week for 12 weeks, that's like 6 pounds total.

There's just no way that – let's say you only gain pure body fat.

You're going to gain some fucking muscle.

Maybe most of it will be muscle in your first try.

If you gain only 6 pounds of pure body fat, if you started at like 174 pounds, you went to 180, That is barely an impact on your physique.

That's like 3, just over 3% body fat gain.

If someone goes from 12% to 15% or 15% to 18, you're not like, holy shit, Jim, what happened to you?

Was Japan opening up a new sumo division?

So you just get like a little pudgier, and then here's the deal.

Just a few weeks of hardcore fat loss dieting will wipe that slate clean for you.

So if you've been skinny fat before, if you have a decent control of your appetite regulation situation, you're not just gonna fall in to a White Castle portal and go through a Taco Bell portal and get shit out of a Burger King portal, that's not going to happen to you, then there's not any way you're going to make magically back to super fat status.

Do it with mostly healthy foods and a little bit of junk.

You absolutely can put on cycles of muscle and go through mass gains even if you've been fatter before or skinny fat before.


Speaker 0: Hey folks, Dr. Mike here for Renaissance Periodization. Answering a super common question that we get all the time is Dr. Mike, what do I do if I am skinny fat? And I feel you 1000% and I think I have some good suggestions.

In your quest to look the best. You came here for some reason, maybe a mistake on your part. We'll find out very soon. So do you bulk? Do you cut?

What the fuck are you supposed to do if you're skinny fat? So first, let's define skinny fat. It's, you know, not a clear definition, but it's a spectral definition. So it's folks on the end of the spectrum, where compared to their peers, they don't have a ton of muscle, but also they have some pretty significant fat stores. Like if you had to describe someone's body to someone before a blind date or a set up date, that's the kind of body that's a little tough to describe.

You know, like you set up your friend Rob with Rebecca, both are names, isn't that nice? And she's like, oh my

Speaker 1: God, like, what does Rob look like?

Speaker 0: You know, it's a blind date, Rebecca, shut up, I can't tell you.

Speaker 1: And she's like, hi, just give me like a clue. Is he like fat, is he like, you know, is he like skinny?

Speaker 0: You know, yeah, yeah, It's like a skinny guy trapped inside a fat person's body. She's like, oh? They're like, I said that wrong. Just kidding, Rebecca. It'll be more than you need or deserve.

Jesus, I hate Rebecca for some reason. In any case, sorry, Rebecca's out there. Didn't mean to use your name, but skinny fat is actually the living proof of the fact that the body type system they used to use with mesomorph, endomorph, ectomorph is bullshit because they forgot skinny fat. Remember, ectomorph is like you're skinny but lean. Mesomorph is your fucking Superman, jacked and lean.

Endomorph is your fat but fucking jacked underneath. Skinny fat's the other 1, man. And they never talk about that 1 because it's fucking rough. Right. But hey, a couple of things.

First of all, how your body is and how you look doesn't fucking matter. And hardly anything in life are fucking whole industry is a goddamn like leisure, leisure industry is the whole thing is a game. It's a joke, right? So first of all, you're skinny fat. Don't worry about it.

None of this shit fucking matters. Anyway, what does a Elon Musk's body composition and Jeff Bezos was going to say some shit. Boy, I got jacked on me real quick. Bill Gates, what does he look like? Doesn't fucking matter.

He's a goddamn billionaire, right? And so if you're, you've got solid game, you're handsome, you're rich and successful and just not a piece of shit, you're going to be doing just great in your life being skinny fat. I wouldn't worry about it anything. But if you want to not be skinny fat or you want to be less so, what is the proper thing to do? And a lot of times this is where standard advice kind of clashes with the predicament of the skinny fat person.

Here it is. A lot of people say, you got to fuck bulk, bro. You got to just fucking started lifting. You got to bulk. And a lot of these folks are entering lifting for the first time.

So they really have a lot of questions. Well, yeah, on the 1 hand, like the bulk, I feel you on that, but they're like, well, I'm already fat. If I'm in a bulk, I'm just going to be like a fucking sumo wrestler. That's not why I entered the training and nutrition game is to become that. And then the other hand, if you say, well, all right, just cut.

Well, hold on a second. I'm skinny underneath. I'm fucking lifting all these weights, eating all this goddamn protein powder so that I look like some kind of something. And if I just diet a bunch of weight off, I don't want my coworkers and the girl of my dreams who also is at work and that's problematic. I don't want her to be like, oh my God, are you okay?

Do you like

Speaker 1: have like cancer or something? Like, Jesus Christ, Who

Speaker 0: the hell just says that to someone? And no, I just, I just started a fitness program. You don't want that sort of shit. You want her to be like, Oh my God, are you like on steroids for just Rebecca? And she's like, ah, that's Rebecca again.

It was always Rebecca. So bulking sucks. Cutting sucks. What the fuck are we supposed to do with skinny fat people in order to get them in the kind of shape that they want to be in more than they are in now? So I think a really good approach to the skinny fat situation is something like this.

Priority number 1, if you are skinny fat and you've just entered the fitness space, just started lifting or whatever, is to just begin, continue to lift hard or begin lifting nice and hard. Nothing crazy, 3, 4 sessions a week is good for almost everyone at this stage. Like an hour each at a time, train whatever muscle groups you want to develop, probably all around is good. And on the nutritional end, just try to make your diet nutritious and feed your muscles. Which is to say, multiple meals a day of mostly healthy foods and keep trying to hit like the decent amount of protein.

If a bodybuilder looks down at your meal on his way with his own meal out of the restaurant you're eating at, he should be like, oh, there's some protein on that plate. That's nice. Good for that guy. As opposed to being like, what the fuck are you 4 years old? Who made your plate for you?

Or like, oh, are you getting over a breakup? Cause there's only dessert foods out there. So you want some veggies, some fruits, some whole grains, nice, good slab of meat or vegetarian protein source, a glass of milk, something like that. Just good nutrition. And we have a ton of videos for you guys on just nutrition for healthy eating that we have.

I don't know where the fuck Scott the video guy is going to put it. He may put it nowhere. He may tell me to go put it somewhere if you know what I'm saying. He's often rude to me. Is that a problem?

Comment below. So yes, we have tons of ways to eat healthy, but basically, we just want this person, this individual to eat healthy and not 100% healthy, but just healthy baseline and eat plenty of protein. This is going to do a few things. It is going to supply muscle growth. So underneath the skinny fatness, the muscles will be growing.

And in addition to that, a lot of times when people cut out a bunch of junk food and try to eat more healthy, they lose a lot of fat, too, often at the same time because they're just beginning the process. So what's your body weight going to do? You basically shoot for maintenance calories with this whole plan or just eat enough food to where you're not super hungry anymore and just call it there. You may lose weight, you may gain weight based on how your body responds to the hunger signaling of weight training. Some people when they start weight training, even if they eat well, they gain weight.

That's solid, you're gonna gain mostly muscle anyway, or all muscle, it's gonna be amazing once you cut down later. If you just aren't super hungry when you start eating healthy foods, you're gonna be building a ton of muscle under the hood because of the high protein and the great health value of the food and because you're training for the first time in your life, but you may actually lose a bunch of weight so that by the time it comes time to like cut on purpose, you're already pretty fucking lean and you're not even skinny fat anymore. Amazing. What I would recommend doing that for is, I don't want to put too fine a point at it, but like basically a year. If someone comes to me, if you came to me, this is the way I make all these videos as far as like the PowerPoints for them.

The way I answer questions in these videos is if a human being actually came up to me and like had a real fucking life situation, asked me what to do. This isn't like just hypotheticals. This is like real shit. So I don't ever want to say like it has to be a year, but like, yeah, at least 6 months and maybe as long as a year and a half to 2 years. So I'd say a year is a good goal.

So if you just started lifting weights, you're kind of skinny fat, you don't know what to do, eat healthy and at maintenance with plenty of protein, train hard, or just fucking put the horse blinders on for 1 year straight. Is it the most rapid body transformation you can have? No, but it's the 1 that'll make the biggest impact shortly after a year. So let's say about a year of this, you've done it. The prediction is that you are going to be substantially harder.

I don't know about down there. My doctor says that's an intractable problem for me at this point. That's neither here nor there. What you are going to be is like less mushy. You may have a similar overall shape, maybe, but your shape will probably be better.

Your shoulders will be a little bigger. Your arms will all tire at the sleeves and you are physically harder to touch because more of you underneath is muscle and less is fat. This is already really good news, but it's just the beginning. After that year of essentially re-comping, gaining muscle while losing fat, and taking advantage of the fact that that's really all you need to make crazy transformation, crazy progress, After that, what I recommend is taking like about a 12 week fat loss phase where you lose like, oh, a half a pound to a pound and a half per week, depending on how large you are. But like for your average 170 pound, 180 pound person, maybe just even a pound per week, just a little above that.

You lose maybe 12, 15 pounds in the course of 3 months. And remember you have built quite a bit of muscle and now that muscle gets revealed substantially more. Now you're looking way, way, way different. This is when the people start complimenting you. This is when Stacy from accounting's like,

Speaker 1: I'd really like to account for

Speaker 0: your deck. She's, is that too much? Holy shit, Stacy, you've been in this job for like 4 days. Of course. Yes.

Tonight at 8. No. Yes. I live with my grandma. She's cool.

She'll be asleep by 730. Anyway, it's like I practiced this before. So after this fat loss phase, you're going to look pretty fucking good, way better than ever. And then depending on sort of which way you want to zig or zag, you can choose your destiny. And there are a couple of options.

You can choose to maintain for a few months to let the diet fatigue cool off before going again and doing another fat loss phase. Cause you're like, ooh, I love this look, but I'm so close to being actually fucking lean. I need a little maintenance and another 3 month diet and then I'm gonna be a fucking world champion. Amazing, totally fine answer if that's you. You could get down to this new body fat level and be like, oh my fucking God, I look unbelievable.

My social life's night and day, my confidence is incredible. I'm not a fucking freak bodybuilder, weirdo, asshole, steroid addict. I'd say some other words, but the current social justice movement prevents that. So I'm not into that sort of thing. So I'm just gonna maintain and keep lifting 3 or 4 times a week, keep eating fundamentally healthy and just do me for the rest of my life beautifully perfect dance.

So we don't all have to go on like, what am I now? Year 23 of a self-improvement journey that's actually killing your insides. And or you could say, hey, like I love this new look, but fuck man, I could do with a little more muscle and you start a slow muscle gain phase and then you do maintenance, fat loss, muscle gain, et cetera. And then you're in the life of getting more jacked over time and lean over time, which at some point like the way you look and All the way up to that point, you are better looking than ever. I will say 1 thing before we wrap this up.

A lot of folks who have been skinny fat before, they harden up, they diet it off, and then they're pretty fucking chiseled. They are like, I want to be bigger, but I feel like if I try to gain weight, I'll just get really fat again. The answer here is if you're gaining it like half a pound per week for 12 weeks, that's like 6 pounds total. There's just no way that – let's say you only gain pure body fat. That's not going to happen.

You're going to gain some fucking muscle. Maybe most of it will be muscle in your first try. If you gain only 6 pounds of pure body fat, if you started at like 174 pounds, you went to 180, That is barely an impact on your physique. That's like 3, just over 3% body fat gain. If someone goes from 12% to 15% or 15% to 18, you're not like, holy shit, Jim, what happened to you?

Was Japan opening up a new sumo division? That's not even a thing. So you just get like a little pudgier, and then here's the deal. Just a few weeks of hardcore fat loss dieting will wipe that slate clean for you. So if you've been skinny fat before, if you have a decent control of your appetite regulation situation, you're not just gonna fall in to a White Castle portal and go through a Taco Bell portal and get shit out of a Burger King portal, that's not going to happen to you, then there's not any way you're going to make magically back to super fat status.

So don't worry about it. Take your time. Do it right. Do it calmly. Do it with mostly healthy foods and a little bit of junk.

You absolutely can put on cycles of muscle and go through mass gains even if you've been fatter before or skinny fat before. Folks, I sure hope I made some sense. You know, not all the jokes are funny. That's all I'm going to say. See you

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Skinnyfat To Ripped: How To Decide If You Should Cut Or Bulk