Are you aware of this community called FI/RE?
No, it’s not a group for recreational arsonists.
It’s also not a club for pre-teens who claim that everything is “lowkey fire”.
FI/RE actually stands for “Financial Independence/Retire Early”. FI/RE people spend their time and efforts trying to figure out ways to squirrel away savings, maximize their 401k and pay as little as possible for their monthly needs all with the goal of dropping out of the daily rat race while having enough money to sustain them for the rest of their lives.
You know those Instagrammers who buy a Lambo and drop $2k on a steak covered in gold leaf because, you know, YOLO? The FI/RE people are the direct opposite of those folks.
And, hey, I think these FI/RE disciples are mostly smart. So many people buy things they can’t afford and end up swimming in credit card debt while constantly looking out of their blinds waiting for the tow truck to show up to repossess their Nissan Maxima cause they are two payments behind.
I learned about the FI/RE community where I learned about most communities. Through the safety of my laptop screen on Reddit. And while a lot of the discussion there revolves around such thrilling topics as dollar cost averaging the S&P 500 and how to save 12 cents per week by washing your t-shirts by hand, one recent post really got my attention.
It was posted by a guy who spent the better part of two decades following all of FI/RE’s best practices. And, lo and behold, it worked. He was now in his later 40’s and according to his meticulous spreadsheets only a couple of years away from quitting his job, selling his modest one bedroom apartment in Akron and retiring to the Florida panhandle.
But before his fellow firestarters could congratulate him on a job well done, he began to lay out a set of regrets from engaging in this lifestyle. His longtime girlfriend, who initially supported his thrifty efforts, left him. Citing the fact that they never traveled, never set aside time for fun and never had kids.
Her leaving led to a reckoning. What was the point of aiming for this ultimate freedom if it meant that he lived a life of no adventure, no good times, no memories, no family?
He was socking away all his money to “have a life” but, in reality, life had slipped away.
And while most people think this kind of all-or-nothing thinking only shows up in money, we’ve built the exact same trap in fitness.
In our world we have our own version of “let’s put all our eggs in one basket in the hopes of a glorious future filled with amazing body composition, incredible strength and all the sexual partners of our choosing”. And this approach is something that we affectionately refer to as bulking and cutting.
If you are unfamiliar with bulking and cutting it actually isn’t very hard to imagine what it might be just from the name.
When you are bulking, you spend all your time eating a surplus of calories (sometimes a remarkable surplus) in order to gain (ideally) as much muscle mass as possible. You accept that you will also accumulate fat mass during the bulking period but you justify this trade off by knowing that under that layer of fluff lies what must be pounds of newly formed Grade A beef.
After bulking for months or possibly years, you enter the cutting phase which is much the same but just in reverse. You put yourself in a caloric deficit, wear sweat suits while doing long, slow steady state cardio in the hopes of melting the fat away and revealing that muscle mass that you have accumulated.
Now, don’t get me wrong. For drug-assisted lifters or teenage boys who do a very high volume of training and little else, bulking and cutting can be an effective strategy.
But for most recreational lifters (ie. everyone reading this right now) bulking and cutting simply leads to constant levels of dissatisfaction.
When you are bulking, sure, you look like a guy who lifts but you also look like that slightly obese guy around the office who should probably opt to go up one pant size the next time he buys a suit. Instead of people asking you what you do for workouts they ask what your cholesterol numbers look like.
And when you cut, rather than revealing a chiseled physique, you once again don’t really look like you spend time training. The best you can hope for is Janice from accounting noticing that you “lost a little weight” and wondering if you are suffering from a breakup or an illness.
Much like my Reddit friend who realized that by spending his life saving he actually missed out on a lot of life, when you are endlessly cycling between bulking and cutting you just spend most of your time never being in the shape you really want to be.
So, what is the alternative?
That’s a great question and I don’t have a definitive answer because I don’t know you. It would be like asking your financial advisor how to save for retirement without telling her your age, how much money you make and what your goals are.
But in an effort to reward your patience by reading this far, I will give you two viable approaches.
Most people are a bit overweight and would really benefit from a health, confidence and aesthetic standpoint if they lost some body fat in order to reveal some definition and change their silhouette. The best way to approach this is to engage in a moderate caloric deficit (eat 250 - 500 calories below your daily maintenance needs), make sure that you are getting ample protein and lift heavy weights about three times per week.
This strategy is going to help you consistently lose fat while maintaining or even increasing your lean muscle mass, bone density, hormonal profile and general health.
If you view yourself as very weak or scrawny for your frame, you can utilize the same strategy but with a slight caloric surplus. Around 250 - 500 calories in excess.
This will give you the opportunity to increase size without risking the majority of that weight being body fat rather than muscle.
Can you add cardio to these plans? Sure. But that is more for performance and health rather than body composition improvements. Don’t think of cardio as a way of burning calories. Consider it more for increasing your daily activity levels and keeping your organs healthy.
Both of these simple strategies are not a short term fix. You will not get shredded in 6 weeks or put on 48lbs of muscle in 48 days or whatever your favorite Instagram account claims that it can do for you.
But it will help you get to where you want to go without feeling like shit along the way.
Because the goal shouldn't be to suffer now so you can finally enjoy your body later. The goal is to build a body you don’t need a break from.