Sexy 4 Summer Road Map - How to get lean

In this episode I break down the exact step by step format to get lean for summer, with little to no knowledge needed on how to do it.

Transcript

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What's going on, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Life Unfiltered. So today I am going to run through this so quickly. I'm going to try to give you so much value. Um, in the next 10 to 15 minutes, that's what I'm gonna try to cap it at. This is gonna be the exact roadmap to a sexy for summer 2026. If you are planning on getting lean, looking your best in a bikini, in a swimsuit, whatever it is, this is what you're gonna need to do. And I'm gonna make this as simple as I possibly fucking can. I'm gonna make it so insanely simple that you do not even have to understand what exactly is going on. You just need to follow the steps. So if I wanted to cut and get lean as fuck for summer with very little knowledge on how it actually works, this is exactly what I would do. We're just gonna get right into it. So, first things first, no secret here. I'm gonna preach this until the day I die. Track your fucking food. That is mandatory. It really is. It is not obsessive, it is not what you think it is. This is how you even learn what like is in each food, what macronutrients fall under, you know, which which foods fall under which macronutrient food groups and stuff like that, right? Like you really do have to have an understanding on this. Maybe I shouldn't say you have to, but I can guarantee you your progress will 10x if you really truly do track your food and actually get an understanding of how this actually works, because everything gets a lot easier. The adjustments become a lot easier, you understand how much protein you're actually getting, which I 1000% guarantee you is already not enough. It is literally a guarantee. Uh, if you're someone who doesn't track your food, unless you've been tracking in the past for years and years and you understand that. But most likely, if you have not been tracking, I 1,000% guarantee you you're not getting enough protein. Um, most people are pretty heavy on a carbon fat diet. Fats is a sneaky one, that one's always significantly higher than anyone realizes within their diet. And if you're someone too who eats like, I don't even want to say a lot of processed foods, but like you can literally think of things like protein bars or other random snacks. These things are gonna be hopped in fats, and a lot of people don't normally realize that. Um, or any processed goods in general, whatever you're buying that's packaged is probably loaded with fats, it's probably high in carbs, extremely high in sodium, which is just gonna cause your body to bloat and blow up and hold on to a lot more water retention, which is gonna see that scale increase, everything like that, right? So once you actually learn and understand macronutrients, those are your proteins, your carbs, and your fats, you actually will start eating a lot more of a balanced diet because you're just paying attention to it. And I'm not gonna say that you have to sit there and track your food forever and you have to be so perfect and track it to a T. Um, but however, when you can learn about this stuff, it's just gonna balance you out and it's gonna make your physique a lot better too, right? You have more room and more numbers to play with, you understand what they actually do. Um, obviously, if you're not eating enough protein, you're not really efficiently building muscle, you're just gonna actually end up having a little bit of a softer look underneath. Even if you do go through a cut, it really doesn't matter because you've just not given yourself the building blocks to actually build muscle. If you're eating a, let's say, very high carb diet, maybe you look a little more full, but you're a little bit more what we call watery, where you're just a little bit more, I don't even want to say bloated, but again, it's just a softer look because you're more filled out. There's more water absorbed into your muscles, more glycogen, stuff like that. Glycogen is just carbohydrates stored in your muscles uh as energy. Um, and then same thing with fats, right? Fats is just a very, very calorie-dense macronutrient. It's nine calories for one gram. So if you're overconsuming on fats, you're gonna run into the same issue where you're just you're just looking, you know, a lot more soft, right? Overall. So this is really crucial to figure out and learn about, and then just understand the balance of it. So you can actually give yourself the dream physique that you want. And again, this is very much a beginner's tutorial here. I don't even know if I want to call it a tutorial, but we're gonna call it that. Um, and a step-by-step process. So, no, you don't have to understand these right now, right this minute, or right away, but you should absolutely look to learn about this in the future. So, first things first, track your food. You absolutely must, if you don't uh already track your food, track for one to two weeks first. Do not change your diet. This is something I always stress and preach. Do not change your diet. Literally eat exactly as you are right now for one to two weeks, track all of your food. Again, does not have to be perfect, just track it and give yourself an idea roughly of how many calories you're actually eating on a daily basis. You're either gonna be very much under consuming heavily or you're gonna be over consuming heavily. Maybe you land right in the middle mark, which is actually great because you're probably more around your maintenance level at that point, because you're gonna have a maintenance level of calories specific to you, to your height, to your weight, to your gender, to your uh the amount of muscle mass you have, how active you are, all kinds of different factors like this. Um, but first things first, track your food for one to two weeks, figure out roughly where you're at. What you can do with those numbers is literally look back on the data for that seven to 14 days, take your total calories from each and every day, punch it into like chat GPT, Google search, whatever you need to do, and just say, here, give me the average out of all of these numbers that I've listed. And it's just gonna give you the average. So if you were somewhere, you had like you were someone who's eating 1600 calories, then 2200 calories, then 1700 calories, then 2900 calories, it's gonna spit you out an average somewhere, right? Maybe it ends up being 2300. Okay. Now the next step, find out your maintenance calories. Crucial. Find out where you actually are supposed to be versus where you are at. So what you can do is you can go to calculator.net. It is an online calculator, very, very, very simple. You're gonna punch in your stats again, your age, your height, your weight, all that fun stuff. Super simple. And then you're just gonna click calculate maintenance weight, boom, it's gonna spit you out your number, it's gonna show you where you're at. So if your average was 2300 calories, your maintenance was actually let's say 2500 calories, you're actually not very far off of that. That's not terrible. That is not terrible. You you can actually work with that and you can still go into a calorie deficit based off of that 2300, though. You're not gonna base it off of your 2500 because you weren't eating at that rate or at that level of um of food intake, I should say, of calories. Um, if your maintenance level was, let's say, 3,000 calories, and you were someone who was only eating 1800, you skip breakfast, you skip snacks and meals, you eat small portions at dinner, whatever it is, you're eating like 1800 calories and your maintenance is 3,000 calories. Guess what? You are absolutely not going to be looking to go into a cut. You are absolutely gonna be looking to increase your calories and build it back up to that maintenance level. Um, and that's gonna be your first step. You're definitely not looking at a cut. If you cut, there's nothing there. Like you're not gonna have any muscle mass built underneath. You're just gonna have a soft look, probably as it is right now. You're basically gonna be looking to try to cut body fat, uh, which is gonna also go against you because you're already at that point kind of on a lower amount of calories. You don't have a lot of room to decrease. It's like 1800. Well, if you want to start at 1500, sure, that's fine. You can probably lose a little bit of fat. But from there, you know, there's not a lot of wiggle room to work with. Like you're not gonna go down to 1300 or 1200 or something like that, even though a lot of people do. This is a massive mistake that too many people make because you're just putting way more stress on your actual body. Uh, you're slowing down your metabolism, you're absolutely killing your metabolism, which in turn, when you already don't know anything about this stuff and you tried to do that, you're actually just gonna make it much, much, much harder for yourself in the long run because you're gonna have no idea how to come back out of that because it's very strategic as well. So we don't want to go to that low of a point, stress out your body, um, crash your metabolism, and then from there, you're like, well, I don't know what the hell I'm doing, and then you start slapping on body fat like crazy, gaining a bunch of weight, and all that. That cut was literally for nothing because you were already just not in a proper starting point for that. So if you're well below your maintenance calories, you 100% absolutely should just build that back up to your actual maintenance levels. Don't even think about a cut. What I would do for that, just to keep it plain and simple, is I would increase your calories by 200 roughly every two weeks. Watch the scale, listen to your body, take progress pictures, like compare them on a weekly basis, make sure you're not actually gaining or putting on weight, but increase your calories by roughly about 200 or so every couple of weeks, build it back up to your maintenance. When you get to your maintenance, no you're not done. You need to hang out there. You need to, need to, need to for a minimum of eight weeks, absolutely bare minimum. 12 weeks really should be the minimum. Uh, and even longer than that is just gonna be so, so, so much better for you. Um, but, anyways, we're not really talking about all that stuff. So, the next point is find your maintenance calories. If you were eating roughly around your maintenance, that's fantastic. Now you have to set your actual calorie goal. So you can start in a 15 to 20% calorie deficit, roughly is a pretty good starting point. Uh, I'd probably go more with like 20%, to be honest. We still want to keep your food as high as we can normally, uh, but if you want to get a little bit more aggressive with it, that's honestly perfectly fine. I normally don't see a lot of issue with that. Um, so that's okay. So if you were whatever, your maintenance was 3,000 calories, take 20% off of that, drop that down to whatever that would even end up being. It's probably like 2600, 2700 calories, something like that. Uh, and then you can kind of start your calorie deficit. So setting your macros, if you really did want to get into this, if you didn't have the knowledge for it, don't worry about it. What I would actually just do is if you don't understand macros, don't know how to adjust that those things, just aim for your calorie target and your actual protein target. Um, that's gonna honestly be the main things for you to at least still be able to cut body fat, cut some weight down, and start to look lean, everything like that. Um, are you gonna get your absolute 10 out of 10 best physique out of it without actually adjusting macros? No, but you're gonna get a lot better of a physique that, you know, comparing to what you probably started at, and you're probably gonna be very happy with that if you're someone who already has little to no knowledge, anyways. So that's completely fine. Um, if you are adjusting your macros, if you have a relative understanding of macronutrients and you want to adjust those and you know how to hit your protein, you know how to hit your carbs, you know how to balance your and hit your fats and stuff like that, that's totally cool. For setting your macros, I always, always, always will try to keep your protein at the absolute max, and then as well as a high carb diet as well. Keep uh fats a little bit on the lower because what we're looking to adjust when we're going through a calorie deficit is typically your carb intake. We can drop carbs because those are typically the most, like that's the food that we're eating the most of, typically. That's the macronutrient we're eating the most of. So normally, like a higher carb diet is roughly around 40%. That's a pretty common, balanced out kind of diet that most people eat. Um, and then we want our protein to be nice and high too. So you can go with like 35% of your diet to be protein, 40% to be carb, 25-ish percent to be fat. And you can literally bounce those numbers away around any way you want. If you wanted to go 40% protein, 35 carb, um, 25 fat, whatever, that's cool, or etc. etc., you can bounce that any way that you want. Um, but what I'd recommend, and if that doesn't make any sense to you too, what I would do, the very simple way to put this, just to at least get yourself a protein goal, if you wanted to go with calories and protein, is I would just aim bare minimum. I mean, everyone knows this rule of thumb, bare minimum is one gram of protein per one pound of body weight. If you're 170 pounds, you should 100% be eating 170 grams of protein. That's complete bare minimum, to be honest. Like you should 100% be eating a lot more than that. I suggest eating more, like 1.2 to 1.4 grams, if possible, per one pound of body fat or body weight, sorry. Um, it's just going to one, really maintain your muscle mass, especially as you're getting deeper and deeper into a calorie deficit. It's gonna help you obviously kind of maintain your strength and stuff like that as well. Um, and it's just yeah, it's just overall gonna be very beneficial for you. If you start cutting protein way down, like you know, there's there's really no true benefit in that. You're just gonna be kind of losing uh in the wrong in the wrong way, essentially, right? So um, for example, I mean, my protein goal right now, and this is different for everyone, it doesn't matter what it is, right? You just want to be higher than one gram per one pound of body weight at least. But for example, just to put this into perspective, I mean, my protein goal is 250 grams daily right now. That's never change, like that doesn't really change other than on a high carb day. Then I eat 200 grams of protein so I can have more carbs. Um, but point being is yeah, I eat 250 grams of protein per day. And it's not like I'm, you know, I obviously don't weigh 250 pounds. Like I was eating this when I was weighing 190 pounds. I was eating this, I'm eating this still right now, where I weigh, uh, I don't even know, I think 173 pounds or something like that. Because obviously I've been cutting for a while. I'm in my competition prep. Um, but that's never changed. 250 grams of protein. When you have a high protein goal like that, it forces you to eat a lot more whole foods. And this is a really good purpose to it, too, as well, because a lot of people will take a little bit too much flexibility, be like, okay, cool, I can still fit these kind of random bullshit meals into my diet and into my calories, but there's really no benefit in them. Um, and they're probably quite low in protein, anyways, and you're hitting like a bare minimum protein target, that's really not gonna do much for you. Um, but if your protein is set high, like 250 grams, like I intentionally have to eat so much protein just to hit that goal. Like breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks all have to be absolutely loaded with protein, right? Like, if I had four meals a day, let's just say for an example, and each one had 50 grams of protein in it, that's still only 200 grams of protein. So, like, I have to still figure out like I have to eat way bigger portions of protein, which one is also going to help keep you full, but two, again, as I mentioned, it's gonna maintain that muscle mass that you have, right? So, super important, keep that nice and high. Don't be scared of how high it is, don't be like, you know, shy away from it by any means. There's no limit to it, like there's really no limit to how high your protein can be. Your body's gonna digest it all, and it's like you're not gonna put on any extra weight or anything unless you're in a calorie surplus, obviously. Um, and yeah, so it's it's all good with that. Uh, next thing is if you were kind of again, just to go back to the macronutrients thing, if you were setting your um macronutrient targets, you can just start by decreasing your carbs. As I said, keep your protein high, keep your fats pretty low, and then you can just start pulling from your carbs. So if you were eating 400 grams of carbs, knock that down to let's say 350 to start or something like that, right? 360. Um, and then kind of just keep pulling from that as necessary, as long as you're obviously still losing, right? Again, you don't really want to be dropping your calories consistently if you don't have to. Like, I would always much rather take the approach of increasing your actual activity levels and cardio versus decreasing calories because there's no benefit to eating less food. Like eventually you're you're just putting way more stress on your body, you're becoming super, super depleted. Uh, everything gets a lot harder, you're losing strength in the gym, you're losing motivation, you're losing energy, you're losing your focus, your sleep quality actually is gonna begin to suck a little bit too, most likely. Um, it's just there's nothing good about decreasing your food intake. So, really, if we can just add activity, that's always gonna be the first option and route to go. For your weight training, you should be hitting three to five sessions per week. No question about that. Um, if you're someone who's like pretty invested into the gym, anyways, that obviously isn't gonna be any sort of issue. Um, honestly, it does have to fit your lifestyle and it has to fit your schedule, but there's no beating around the bush here. The more you can do, honestly, is the better. Like, if you can hit five sessions, then that's that's always still gonna win, right? Like, honestly, it's not like we want to go overkill and hit seven days a week. That's never ever the goal or anything like that. We need rest days. But you know, someone who's lifting two times a week or three times a week versus someone who's lifting five times a week, well, you're probably gonna see more progress on five times a week. Um, so aim for that three to five times per week on a structured plan. Don't change it. There is no need to change your plan, at least in my belief, when you're in a calorie deficit, because you're not building muscle in that phase, anyways. You're not aiming for new goals, right? You're not really working on anything, you're just looking to maintain the mass and the actual shape that you have and that you had built, hopefully, in that sort of off-season where you weren't when you weren't cutting. So, yeah, you don't need to change anything, you don't need to program hop or anything like that. I literally recommend just staying on the same plan that you've been on. You're hitting these same muscle groups in the same ways, everything's good. You're, you know, you're gonna take a lot more shape out of that, and it's there's no sense to change it and start trying to force your muscles to work in different ways when you're not even getting a proper food intake now, you're not gonna be building muscle, your recovery is not gonna be nearly as good. So there's just no real reason to do that. Um, next thing is steps, step goal. Absolutely set your step goal. There's no excuses for this. You should not even miss this. It has to be done. Like, honest to God, it has to be done. It's the bare minimum thing, right? 10k is the bare minimum. Increase it by 1,000 as needed, go up to 11k, go up to 12k. Don't be scared to up it too. A lot of people are like, oh, I've never done 12,000 steps before. That feels like a lot. It's gonna feel like a lot at first, but you're gonna get super used to that. You just have to build it into your actual routine, and then it becomes super easy. You're like, oh, about 10k. I was complaining about 10k before, and now 10k feels like a breeze. You're doing 12k, you're doing 13k, whatever it is. Uh, it's just so, so, so simple, right? It's about that total calorie burn. It's just such a simple, low dose, low impact way of burning calories. Um, and then for cardio, so yes, you should absolutely do cardio. I I know there's a big, you know, there's I don't know, a lot of opinions, I guess I could say about this one um from a lot of different people. But to be honest, in my opinion, like cardio isn't is not that bad thing. Not that bad. It is not a bad thing, it is not going to kill you. It is very, very good for your cardiovascular health in general. Like, honestly, you should be doing it even when you're not cutting. Um, but especially when you're cutting, this is the additional factor that's really gonna move the needle and have you watching that scale drop, watching your body fat drop, everything like that. So you can start with a pretty low dosage if you want. 15 or 20 minutes is normally pretty good. Do it every single day that you actually train. So if you're in the gym five days a week, do cardio five days a week. Start with 20 minutes, uh, do that for a little while. If things are slowing down a little bit, scales not moving, or your body composition doesn't seem like it's changing much, as in the physical shape and the amount of body fat that you can see. If you're not getting like much leaner, then just increase it. Go up to 25 minutes, eventually 30 minutes. Don't be scared of this either. Don't be scared of increasing it. I know time is sometimes a factor for everyone, but just find a way to fit it in, right? Like that's at the end of the day, that's all it is. Find how you can fit it in, make it a part of your just your daily routine and your non-negotiables. This isn't a forever thing, too, right? Like, if you're really gonna go through a cut phase for like 12 weeks, let's say, you're only sacrificing this for 12 weeks. It's not your entire life. So don't like stress about it or how it's consuming your life or anything like that. Like, just enjoy the process, enjoy watching your body physically take shape and change, and and obviously, you know, build build this like physique that you know you've you've obviously wanted, right? And just kind of do the work to be proud of that. Um, but yeah, you can add additional cardio on rest days as well. Like, there's definitely no harm in that. Like, you could literally do low impact cardio seven days a week, low intensity, nice. Uh it's actually called lists, low intensity, steady state. So, again, we don't want you doing anything high intensity. Super crucial to note that don't do anything high intensity, do not go on there and try to blast 140 to 160 beats per minute on your heart rate. Like, keep it low, keep it steady, 110, 120 beats per minute, nice steady pace. Like stair climber, you're on level like three, probably, depends on the they're all different, but like typically, probably level like three is is a good place to start. Hop on the elliptical, hop on a seated bike. Same thing, right? We're not looking to completely burn you out and run you to the ground, it's just a steady pace. That's really all it is. Um, and it's not meant to absolutely kill you. Like, yes, we want your heart rate up, we want to make sure you're working, and it's that extra calorie burn, but that's really it. Um, next thing here is drink. This is such a boring one to talk about, but drink loads of water. Drink so much water and lots of electrolytes. Your recovery matters so much more than you actually know. Um, again, these are kind of you know, your water helps with everything. I mean, it's the transportation of you know, all of your nutrients and everything like that. And it's also a huge aid. In your actual digestion, which is a very underrated thing that we talk about and not a lot of people know about is when you're in a calorie deficit, your digestion is definitely going to start to slow down. Obviously, you're giving it less food, things aren't moving as quickly in there. Um, and especially if you're like lacking water and you're dehydrated, like you definitely might run into some issues with that. It's not uncommon at all. So just make sure you're very well hydrated, and then as well for your actual recovery, as far as you know, for your muscles and how that goes. Like, you want your muscles to be able to fully recover and like properly hydrate and properly have you know nutrients transported them as they should be and everything like that. So, and then the next one, actually, and the very last one is proper sleep and rest. Like, this is literally everything. So many people overlook this, like it's it drives me crazy. I think it's maybe just because it's it's a little less known. Like people don't think their sleep matters as much as it truly does, but it matters probably 50 times more than you realize it does. Um, it's everything. If you're not getting proper rest, you're not getting proper recovery. Your body is physically only actually recovering when you are sleeping. That is the only time in a 24-hour span that it's not doing anything and it actively has the time to rest and rebuild itself and refuel itself. So even when you're sleeping, like your body is obviously it's also going to work at this time to heal, right? To heal and recover itself, right? And all the sort of stress and damage that you're causing it. But if you're getting like four or five hours of sleep, which is actually really, really common for a lot of people, uh, your stress levels are gonna be a lot higher, right? Your cortisol is gonna be up and you're gonna have a lot harder time losing the fat. This is where it comes into play because when your stress is higher, your body wants to hold on to that body fat. It's in a bit of a panic mode, it just wants to keep it for like energy, it's just not feeling safe, whatever you want to call it. Um, and it's gonna hold on to that body fat. So if you're working your ass off and you're doing all this cardio and eating, you know, very low amount of calories and your sleep sucks, it's like your body is gonna be totally stressed out. Even if you don't physically feel stressed out in your own head or something like that, your body's actually stressed out. And even though we we can't see that, right? But you have to know that and understand that and what it's actually coming from. Um, so it's just gonna cause you to have a really hard time uh losing body fat, right? So you could be going through your cut and like wondering what the hell's going on, why's the scale scald, or even worse, why is the scale going back up? Well, it's because your your body's under stress, and again, it's just gonna hold on to this water retention and stuff like that. Um, but that's really it. That's the whole entire game plan. Tried to go quick, kind of went a little bit longer than it was supposed to be, but that's okay. That is literally the roadmap to sexy for summer 2026. If you have questions about this, if you are unsure about this, if this made zero sense to you whatsoever in general, reach out to me on Instagram at tiger perkafit. Send me a DM, send me a message. I'm happy to answer any questions that you have. I also obviously can physically help you one-on-one, get you inside of a program, get you absolutely shredded for summer in the best shape that you've physically ever been in in your entire life. If you you feel like you're just ready to take that next step and to have someone actually physically guide you through it and not only guide you, but actually teach you everything that I just talked about in way more detail and in more depth, so you actually understand it and you can actually take that knowledge with you for the rest of your life so you can do it yourself coming up to the next summer or the next holidays or whatever you want to do, right? This is where it comes in handy, and this is where it also, you know, as I said, learning about macronutrients, learning about nutrition, especially. This is huge. This is everything. You only have to learn this kind of stuff once, and you have that knowledge for life. So if you want some additional help, reach out to me on Instagram. I'd be happy to help you out. But for now, thank you so much for listening, and I'll catch you in the next one.