I’ve been working for 3 1/2 years towards achieving and maintaing 10% body fat composition. In that period, I have mostly oscillated between 14 and 16%, reaching a (fleeting) minimum of 11% a couple of years ago – as well as highs of 20% after overly hedonistic vacations.

For the following two weeks, I am going to try a new system. It combines all the elements that have worked for me in the past, for both this goal and other habits on which I am more successful.

• A weekly rhythm, with four days of leanup (Monday-Thursday) and three days of relaxation & near-maintenance (Friday-Sunday). I don’t know what level of willpower or mindfulness I would need to diet through a weekend, but I know it’s too elusive to chase. I want to enjoy the weeks where I lean up, at least their last three days.
• Intermittent fasting: on the lean days, I will eat in a very restricted window of two hours.
• A big dinner: I like big dinners, there’s no way around it. So, on the lean days, I will consume my meals between 1800 and 2000, to make my dinners as big as possible.
• A drastic caloric deficit on the lean days: it is hard (sometimes very hard) to live through a day of a high caloric deficit – although most of the pain seems to be focused on very specific moments. However, the slow drip of steady weight loss drives me nuts. I need to feel a strong wind in the sails, and a drastic caloric deficit provides that speed.
• Maintain my level of activity and workouts during the lean days: on these days, I will maintain my relatively intense training, as well as level of activity (biking, walking) – and as importantly, working intensely as well. Staying active and busy is the best thing to do during a lean day.
• Maintain a high level of protein intake: I estimate I need about 100g of protein per day, for both satiety and to preserve my muscles during a drastic caloric deficits. So I will take four scoops of whey protein on the lean days, which add up to about 82g. These will add up to 400 calories.
• Eat as much as possible: I love eating and I love to eat a lot, so the plan needs to account for this. This is a problem. How can I eat a lot, if the entire game of fat loss is to create a caloric deficit? The trick is to find foods that are highly nutritious in micronutrients, dense (with a lot of fiber) and satisfying. I’ve settled on the following: raw broccoli, raw carrots and sauerkraut (this last food is why I’m calling this protocol the sauerup). They are all incredibly filling. A broccoli head or half a kilo of carrots are about 150 calories; a bag of half a kilo of sauerkraut is 100 calories. So I will alternate broccoli and carrots, and always have the bag of sauerkraut. These will up to 250 calories.
• On Friday to Sunday, enjoy while practicing mindfulness. the weekend is perhaps the hardest part of the week, because the risk to cross six lanes in the highway in one manoeuvre is sky high. I am a world-class expert at taking leave of my senses while stuffing myself, and this is particularly the case after days of high caloric deficit. So, on these days, I will stick to an abridged version of Geneen Roth’s eating guidelines: sit down while eating, make food the main focus of your attention, and put down the fork between bites. The fourth one, stopping eating when getting full, inspires the fear of God, so I will only dabble in that one. The others, however, need to be followed with iron determination. In any case, they make for an extremely healthy approach to food, one that I’ve been slowly developing recently.

In summary, this is the plan:

• Monday and Wednesday: train, stay busy, at 18 have 2 scoops of protein, eat a head of raw broccoli and a bag of sauerkraut. Have another 2 scoops of protein.
• Tuesday and Thursday: train, stay busy, at 18 have 2 scoops of protein, eat half a kilo of raw carrots and a bag of sauerkraut. Have another 2 scoops of protein.
• Friday to Sunday: train, enjoy free time with family and friends, eat three good meals a day practicing mindfulness like I had paid thousands of dollars (using credit card debt) to be in a meditation seminar.

I estimate that on lean days I will generate a deficit of 1800 to 2000 calories, which translates to 7200-8000 calories. This is about a kilo of fat, a remarkable achievement for four days of effort. If I can then maintain those gains losses during the week, that’s it. I am currently at ~15% and need to drop four kilos of fat to get to 10%.

There could be a lot that could go wrong. And yet, I’m excited to try this. I am sharing with you to create accountability, and in the rare (but not impossible) case that this is actually tenable and therefore useful to you.

Onwards and downwards!

Update: the experiment was a failure. Despite the beastly sodium intake of sauerkraut, it was still hard to stick to the plan and not add extra calories to dinner.