The body fat solution - five principles for burning fat, building lean muscles, ending emotional eating, and maintaining your perfect weight

As an aspiring teenage bodybuilder in the mid-1980s, I was initiated into the world of body transformation. That’s when I began learning philosophy and methodology so effective for getting lean, I was ultimately able to achieve body fat as low as 3.7 percent while at my competition peak. To give you some idea of what that means, the average male has about 17 percent body fat and the average female has about 25 percent. If you want to see six-pack abs, you’ll usually need to drop to under 10 percent body fat if you’re male and down to about 15 percent or so if you’re female.

Three percent is essential to body fat in men, which is the amount necessary just to stay healthy. This means my body fat got so low, virtually no fat was left beneath my skin. People told me I looked like a walking anatomy chart. In bodybuilding vernacular, the word for that is “ripped.” Mind you, I’m not naturally lean. Before I learned how to cut body fat, I’d never seen my abs. In fact, I was a slightly chubby freshman in high school, embarrassed to take my shirt off for swimming class. How things changed.