Calorie Requirements For Overweight, Obese, and Skinny Fat People (Nutrition For Health and Hypertrophy Part 3)

In the previous part I talked about calorie needs to maximize muscle hypertrophy for lean people.

But what about people who are not lean like obese, overweight, and skinny fat people? These used to be special cases but as things have changed, they are now the common case.

These are 3 different types of people and their nutrition needs for hypertrophy are different, but there is one thing they all have in common:

IF YOUR STOMACH IS NOT FLAT, YOU DO NOT NEED A CALORIC SURPLUS TO GAIN MUSCLE.

I will repeat: If you are obese, overweight, or skinny fat, you do NOT need a caloric surplus to gain muscle. DO NOT BULK.

Your body is surrounded by energy in the form of fat. You do not need to consume extra energy over baseline to build muscle. Your body can use the energy stored in your body fat to fulfill its energy needs to build muscle.

Before I get into how much you should eat, it is important to define what each of them means. Because they are often overused and don’t have clear meaning in many people’s heads.

Defining overweight, obese, and skinny fat

This is how the general definition goes:

Overweight: This is a man with fat on his belly (stomach not flat) up to 30% body fat by DEXA (25% body fat by older measures).

Obese: This is a man with 30%+ body fat by DEXA (25% body fat by older measures).

Skinny fat: This is an overweight man (see above) who has less than 1 year of proper training experience. In other words, it means they are not only overweight but they also have very little muscle mass (hence “skinny” and “fat” at the same time).

Note that the last one gets overused a lot on the internet because the internet is full of people who don’t know what they are talking about. They think skinny fat means anyone who isn’t big and doesn’t have visible cuts on their body. That’s not true.

You can have quite a bit of muscle but not be huge. And still have enough fat that the muscle isn’t visible. That doesn’t make you skinny fat. It just makes you overweight.

Another reason people tend to mix it up is that there is actual overlap because all skinny fat people are overweight but not all overweight people are skinny fat. Because someone with muscle mass is not skinny fat even if they look chubby (by definition).

To keep things clear we must have some clear delineation, let’s re-state the terms so that we have clear discrete groups and keep things simple.

To make it even clearer because TONS of people confuse these terms, here are some images I found from Reddit and other parts of the internet:

Calorie Intake For The Obese

An obese person can easily build muscle in a deficit. They not only do not need a surplus, but they can build muscle eating less than their maintenance.

To add to that, an obese person needs to have one big priority in their life – losing the fat. Because being obese means they are highly likely to get tons of lifestyle diseases like diabetes and they might even die decades before their time from a heart attack.

Not to mention all the damage they are doing to their knees and organs by simply carrying so much fat.

An obese person needs to eat a caloric deficit of at least 500 calories per day so they can drop the fat down fast.

You will gain muscle as an obese person on a 500 calorie deficit.

If you are a newbie, you can gain ~0.75kg per month and if you are an intermediate, you can gain around 0.5kg per month. These are great numbers and it’s probably going to be less than this.

If you are close to your genetic muscular potential, then you will either maintain or lose some mass (but it’s worth it unless you really need that extra muscle, say as a professional powerlifter).

Calorie Intake For The Overweight But Not Skinny-Fat

An overweight person can also build muscle in a deficit, but not in a deep deficit. If you’re eating a 500 calorie deficit, your ability to build muscle will be impacted.

This is simply because you have less overall fat to take energy from, so getting 500 calories from it plus whatever it takes to build muscle is a big ask. If you eat a big deficit, your recovery and muscle growth will suffer.

Remember, your priorities still need to be losing the extra body fat for the same reasons an obese person needs to lose body fat.

But if you want to gain muscle at the same time (which you should want to do), you have to keep the deficit small. A small but not too small deficit like 300 calories per day is perfect.

Since your newbie gains are exhausted, you gain muscle at slower rates (~0.5kg per month). Again this is the higher end and realistic gains will be less than that because most people don’t have perfect training, nutrition, recovery, etc..

Note that you can somewhat enhance muscle gain at this stage by calorie cycling. What this means is that instead of eating a 300 calorie deficit every day, you eat more on training days and less on off days.

The net caloric intake per week is the same, just that you have more calories on days you train when muscle protein synthesis (MPS) and Myofibrillar protein synthesis (MFPS) are highest.

A 300 calorie deficit per day means ~2100 calories per week.

Let’s say you train 4 times a week.

What a calorie cycling approach will look like is eating maintenance on training days and eating a ~700 calorie deficit on the off days. You will probably need to add some cardio here and there to make this work (or you will feel like you’re starving on the off days).

The end result is that your body is more anabolic on training days (as for trained people, MPS peaks in a few hours) and you are maximizing that by eating more, but at the same time your focus is still on dropping the body fat which you are doing by eating less on the off days.

Calorie Intake For The Skinny Fat

Just a reminder that we define a skinny fat person as someone whose stomach is not flat but is not obese yet and has less than 1 year of proper training experience (i.e. untrained).

Untrained people can put on muscle really fast – this is called newbie gains. You can gain about ~0.75kg of muscle per month on average in your first year of lifting. You could even gain a bit more depending on your genetics.

You gain muscle so fast that you can look noticeably different to everyone even with just 4-6 months of training. The first year of lifting is physically and mentally transformational for most young males.

At the same time, if you are carrying excess body fat, your body can easily use the energy in the stored fat to build muscle.

In other words, the re-composition potential (where you lose fat and gain muscle at the same time) is very high just like their untrained obese counterparts.

But unlike untrained obese people, skinny fat people don’t have that much fat to lose.

A skinny fat person can achieve significant body re-composition by training hard and eating maintenance.

Your body fat percentage will go down not just from losing fat, but also from gaining the muscle. It will be quite rapid.

Let me show you the math:

Initial state: 70kg untrained male at 25% body fat. This means 17.5kg fat mass and 52.5kg lean body mass (LBM).

Let’s say this man trains hard and eats maintenance every day. He gains ~7.5kg muscle and loses ~7.5 kg fat in his first year.

(Keeping the numbers simple and conservative – reality is likely to be even better but let’s say he has shitty muscle building genetics. We assume he does everything else right like eating enough protein, progressive overload, etc.)

Where does that take him?

End of 1 year: He is at 60kg lean body mass and 10kg body fat. In other words, less than 15% body fat.

To conclude, body fat levels go down both when you gain muscle and when you lose fat.

You don’t need a deficit because your body is going to build muscle at a rapid rate and will burn lots of fat in the process.

All a skinny fat person needs to do is train hard and eat maintenance and not fuck it up.

Get your protein, sleep, and other things sorted and I promise you this will be the best year of your life.

You will never again see as much muscle growth come so fast as you will in your first year (unless you’re taking hormones or gear).

Nothing special is needed. Just consistency and adherence.

You don’t need to do calorie cycling or anything. In fact, as you can see in the graph above, MPS peaks almost 24 hours later for an untrained person.

In other words, you will be building muscle even 24 hours after your workout as an untrained person. So just eat maintenance every day.

Give it one year and see the difference it makes. You are someone who will be an entirely different person if he puts his head down and does the work.

Strongly recommend getting a copy of Live Intentionally: 90 Day Self-Improvement Program and getting to it.

In the next part of this series, I’m going to talk about macronutrients (protein, fat, carbs) and macronutrient timing.

Until next time.

– Harsh Strongman