 Hi friends, welcome back to my channel and a very special welcome if you're new here. My name is Jen. I'm a certified weight loss and nutrition coach and today, today is the video you've all been asking for. We're gonna talk all about my current cut that I am on for weight loss, for building lean muscle, for leaning down. We're gonna deep dive into what a cut is and I'm going to share with you some brand new services that I'm going to be offering if you would like to embark on a cut as well. So if you're excited, give this video a big huge thumbs up. Make sure you're subscribed. Your bell notification is turned on because I actually upload five videos every single week. Down in the description box, I will link nutrition coaching, highly recommend personalized macros and calories. This is how I have lost and maintained a 140 pound weight loss as well as one-on-one coaching for accountability, to ask questions or talk with me directly. You'll also find links and discounts to my favorite things and my Facebook group. It's free, it's supportive, come on over and join us. We would love to have you. So let's jump into my cut, how to structure a cut, why you should cut, and all of the new services that I'm offering. As you know, I embarked on a cut starting January 1st. My cut is for the duration of eight weeks. Typical cuts are anywhere from eight to 12 weeks and the reasoning and the method behind the cut is to lose body fat, to lean down and to increase lean muscle. Cutting diet involves calculating your calorie, protein, fat and carb needs to reduce body fat and maintain muscle mass. It should be paired with weight lifting as well as cardio. Typically when you hear the word cut, it's associated with bodybuilders or people cutting to be in some type of bodybuilding competition. However, a cut is anytime you are in a calorie deficit. If you're currently in a caloric deficit with which anybody who's on a weight loss journey is, you're technically cutting. You are eating less calories than your body needs to maintain your weight, therefore leading to weight loss. Let's deep dive more into what is a cut diet and why it's beneficial. It's essentially meant to put you in a caloric deficit to cut body fat while maintaining and potentially even building lean muscle mass. Cuts typically tend to be higher in protein and carbohydrates moderate fat. And like I said, typically involves some type of weight lifting or strength training. Lifting weights or strength training promotes muscle growth which in turn helps combat the losing of lean muscle while cutting calories. There's a big difference between weight loss and fat loss. Weight loss is the loss of fat, lean muscle and water and fat is the loss of fat. Our goal, especially during a cut or while we're in a caloric deficit is fat loss. We want to maintain all of our lean muscle, even build lean muscle while shedding fat. This is what is optimal for our body. This is what is optimal for our health and what will help keep the fat loss or the weight loss off long-term. Now, when you're in a cut or when you're in a caloric deficit, this is tailored to each individual. Everybody is different. So everybody requires a different amount of calories, protein, fats and carbohydrates to reach their goals. For me, my cut involves lowering my calorie intake from maintenance to being in a deficit, upping my protein, upping my carbohydrates and lowering my fat just a little bit. Carbohydrates are used as your body's primary source of fuel. So if you're doing more exercise which is what is part of a cut, you need those extra carbs or that extra fuel. You're not going to gain weight because you up your carbs. Your body's going to use those for energy to make it through your workout and then sustain your energy throughout the day. Carbs are not bad. Carbs are essential. Absolutely essential for weight loss, fat loss, lean muscle building and a healthy overall lifestyle. So the first thing that we need to do when we enter a cut is to calculate our caloric intake. I mentioned in the beginning of the video that I offer personalized macros and calories. This is a service I have offered on my nutrition and weight loss coaching website since I became a weight loss coach almost three years ago. You need to know your caloric intake to be in a deficit, to be in a cut. You also need to determine your protein intake, your fat intake and your carb intake specifically for your body. And again, that's what personalized macros and calories does. Also, meal timing is really important in a cut or in a caloric deficit. Utilizing those carbohydrates for energy and really the best time of day to consume carbs, fats and protein. You really wanna focus on eating whole foods when you're on a cut following a 90, 10 rule. 90% whole real foods, 10% fun foods. So you're really limiting those fun foods, those more processed foods, those less whole foods during your cutting phase. This is because we want to optimize nutrition to again take us through our workouts, take us through our cardio and optimize the loss of fat and weight during our cutting phase. There's also things like treat meals, also known as cheat meals or refeed days that we incorporate into a cut as well. This is going to typically be one meal or one day that you eat in a calorie surplus to help refeed your body, to help boost your metabolism and keep that muscle in check. Typically these treat meals involve eating a little bit more carbohydrates, a little bit more fat and a good amount of protein. I know for me that I have a treat meal every single week. This is basically where I'm allowed to eat one meal per week that I want, whether that's an appetizer, an entree, a dessert, or all three. This just helps refuel my body with essential nutrients and calories that I've restricted during the rest of the week on my cut or in my fat loss stage. So the first four weeks of my eight week cut, I did not have a treat meal. So I have not had a treat meal since starting my cut. Now the second four weeks of my cut or the second month of my cut, I will allow myself one treat meal per week. It's really important to make sure that you're not in a severe caloric deficit and that you actually do refeed your body and give your body the calories that it actually needs to even maintain your weight loss and maintain your metabolism even while you're trying to shed fat. If you're on a diet, if you're counting calories, if you are in a calorie deficit, you are essentially in a cut. You are not giving your body the calories that it needs to maintain your weight loss. You're in a deficit so that you can reach your weight loss goals. Now, contrary to popular belief, contrary to diet culture, you do not wanna be in a calorie deficit forever. During a 12 month period, during the course of a year, you should go from being in a calorie deficit to being in maintenance, to being in a calorie deficit and so on and so forth. You should not have the entire year in a deficit. This isn't healthy for your body. It's not healthy for your metabolism and actually being in a constant deficit decreases your success of weight loss. Now, like I said, this is contrary to diet culture. Diet culture tells us eat as little as you can, lose all the weight that you can as fast as you can. This is actually counterproductive. You need to eat as many calories as you can, the majority of the time and still lose weight and even eat at maintenance in sporadic phases during the year to refuel, refeed and boost your metabolism. So when you go back into a calorie deficit or back into a cut, it's even more successful because you were in a maintenance period in between. This is something that is really, really important to me in the new year. This is why I decided to enter a cut at the beginning of the year for only eight weeks, which means I'm only in a deficit for eight weeks. When those eight weeks are over, I'm going back to eating at my maintenance calories. This will allow me to boost my metabolism, continue to build and maintain, lean muscle, be healthy, be happy, and be able to enjoy my life. We have to do what is sustainable for us and being in a calorie deficit isn't sustainable. You don't wanna be on a diet your whole life. You wanna optimize that diet period, that miserable cut period being in that caloric deficit, optimized by going into a phase of being in maintenance. So that is my goal this year. I'm going to go through phases of cutting and I'm going to go through phases of maintenance. That's going to really help optimize my nutrition and my metabolism. And I will tell you that following this approach to weight loss is going to keep the weight loss off forever and you're going to be the healthiest version of yourself and your metabolism, it's going to be metabolizing from here on out, which is going to help you lose weight and keep it off. Now there's some helpful things that you can do during a cut. Choose more fiber rich foods, drink plenty of water, try your hand at meal prepping so you have those whole real foods prepped and ready to go. Avoid liquid carbohydrates and increase your activity, your cardio, your exercise. Again, this is going to help you maintain that caloric deficit. And what you have to remember is when you're in a cut, it's only for a short period of time, typically eight to 12 weeks. And then again, you go into maintenance. So you get to go back into living your normal life, eating more calories and really getting that fat burn and that metabolism boost from that eight to 12 week cut. I'm really excited about this. This is the healthiest approach to weight loss and this is the healthiest way to keep your weight loss off long term. While you're in this cut and then transition into your maintenance period, you're helping maintain your lean muscle and lean muscle burns calories all day long. While I'm sitting here, my lean muscle is burning calories. So strength training, maintaining and building lean muscle is essential to keep your weight loss off long term. So that is what I am currently doing. Like I said, I'm entering into week four of my cut. I'm not gonna lie to you, it's been tough but there's an end in sight. That is what makes it doable. If I knew that I had to be in a cut for the rest of my life, I couldn't do it. It wouldn't keep me motivated. It's not sustainable for me. I absolutely could not do it. But knowing that I'm going to be boosting my metabolism, optimizing my nutrition and setting my body up for a really healthy maintenance period and then knowing that the next time I go into a cut, I'm going to be losing fat. I'm going to be reaching my weight loss goals and keeping it off is what drives the motivation. Having that end in sight is really important. You wanted more information on my cut. So that's why I wanted to do today's video. I wanted to explain what a cut is, what I've been doing and why. And a lot of you have asked me about going into a cut yourself, boosting your metabolism, boosting your fat loss and really knowing that the weight that you lose, you're going to be able to keep that off long term without dieting for the rest of your life. And that is exactly what going into a cut and then going into maintenance does for you. So I wanted to put together a program to help you navigate going into a cut. This is going to be a very personalized program. Part of this program is going to include your personalized macros and calories. Now, if I've already done those for you, that is fine. I'm going to redo them for you to put you into an eight to 12 week cut. Your personalized macros and calories are going to look very different than the ones that I did for you originally. If you haven't had them done before, then these will be specific to a cut period. I'm going to give you specific food guidelines. I'm going to give you specific ways to build your meals. I'm going to make it flexible. I'm going to give you a list of foods and how to pair those together to optimize your meals during your cut period. I'm going to give you an exercise plan. It's not going to be an intense exercise plan. It's going to include cardio and strength training, which we should be doing anyways. And we're going to build that up over the course of your cut period. Like I said, you have to include some cardio and exercise to optimize your caloric deficit during your cut period. It's also going to include a Zoom call per month of your cut. So if you choose an eight week cut period, it's going to include two Zoom calls. If you choose a 12 week cut period, it's going to include three Zoom calls. This is a one on one call with me where we're going to go over your cut. You'll be able to ask your questions and I'm going to help you navigate your cut to be the most successful. This is also going to include weekly check-ins with me. You're going to check in with me via email once a week, letting me know how your cut is going. Look at your exercise, your food log. I really want to give you one on one personalized 100 support, 100% support during your cut so that you can be the most successful. This is an all-encompassing cut package. There's going to be two options, an eight week cut and a 12 week cut. Both of those periods will include the same services. I highly, highly recommend taking advantage of this. Like I said, you shouldn't be in a diet forever. You should go into periods of caloric deficit and go into periods of maintenance and this program is going to help you navigate that. You will have this information for the entire year. You'll have the information for every time you go into a cut and you'll have the information for every time you go into a maintenance period. It's going to be, again, personalized and specific to you. I wanted to make this extremely affordable because I really, really want every single one of you to be able to take advantage of this because this has really changed the game for weight loss. It's going to help you optimize your nutrition, really fix and boost your metabolism so that you can maintain your weight loss. Nobody wants to lose weight, just to gain it all back again. We want to keep our metabolism fired up and revved and metabolizing as much as possible even while we're losing weight. It's going to help you build a healthy exercise, cardiovascular and strength training routine. It's going to help you build meals more effectively that you can take with you throughout the rest of your life and I'm going to give you every single bit of information and tool you need to be successful. I will go ahead and pop up here on the screen all of the details involved in this cut program as well as, again, what is included. I will put all of this information down in the description box for you. I will include all of the payment options as well to pay for these services. I'm going to be offering two different payment options for you. I got a lot of questions when I was offering my macros 101 class group coaching if there was a way to break it up into multiple payments rather than paying for everything upfront. So I wanted to make sure that I offered that to you because it's that important for me for each and every one of you to take advantage of this cut service so that you know how to optimize your weight loss. So if you decide to pay in full, you'll actually receive a discounted price and then I'm going to offer you the option to pay in two payments. Now your actual cut will not start until you've paid in full. So if you want to start right now, you'll want to make sure that you pay in full and take advantage of the discounted price. And if you want to be able to break that up into two payments, then again, your cut will start once those two payments have been made. But this will allow you to break that fee up into a little bit more affordable option for you. I wanted to, again, make sure everybody had the opportunity to take advantage of this because it really truly has helped me so much in my relationship with food. It's helped me with my exercise, with my metabolism and it's really helped me redefine my health and weight loss goals. It's really been instrumental and it's been one of the best things that I've done on my weight loss journey so far. So again, all of the information will be linked down below for you on how to take advantage of paying in full or breaking that up into two payments. I'm really excited for this. You can do your cut right along with me. And like I said, once you pay for this service, you'll be able to utilize this every time you want to go into a cut or into a maintenance. And like I said, do not be in the calorie deficit all year long. You need to make sure that you are in periods of a deficit and periods of maintenance. I am going to be doing this all of 2024. So of course I'll be sharing that with you. And I'm really excited to help you embark on this personalized journey for you to help you reach your goals. I'm so excited to see you guys knock this out of the park. I know that you're going to love the cut period and the maintenance period and just how it's flexible and sustainable. And it becomes a lifestyle, not a diet. No more dieting in 2024. We want to do what is a lifestyle, what is sustainable and what's going to keep that weight off long term. So again, everything is down in the description box for you. And of course, if you have any questions, leave them down in the comments. I'm so excited about this. Originally I wasn't going to offer this service, but so many of you have asked for this that I wanted to make sure that I offered it to you. And because I have been in a cut now for almost four weeks, I know how beneficial this is for fat loss. So if you enjoyed today's video, give it a big thumbs up, again, subscribe, turn your bell on so you don't miss a future video. And don't forget to check out the description box for all of the details on this service that I am offering. It's available as of today for you. Also in the description box, you'll find links and discounts to my favorite things and my Facebook group. Come join us. We would love to have you. Thank you so much for watching. I'm so excited to help you reach your goals in 2024. And I'll see you in the next one. Bye.