HSN Protocol: Lose Fat Without Losing Performance

Javier Colomer 8 min. of reading Fitness Leave a comment

Let’s begin the HSN guide to Lose Fat Without Losing Performance

Since I started writing articles, I always had the dream of writing a protocol to achieve almost impossible body fat percentages. Unfortunately, I never had the time (and in my opinion the necessary knowledge) to write it.

Today, with more confidence and greater knowledge, the time has come.

Index

1 Clarification before starting the protocol
2 What does the HSN Protocol for Fat Loss consist of?
3 Restricting calories
4 Fat loss and hormonal environment
5 Foods allowed: IIFYM
6 Increase unsaturated fats
7 Using fats to maintain muscle mass
8 Sources
9 Related Posts

Clarification before starting the protocol

The first thing I want to make clear is that I am not one of those who think that diet is 70% of success

The need for exercise, especially high-intensity exercise, is ESSENTIAL to lose fat, as there are metabolic stimuli that can only be achieved this way.

For this reason and many others, even if you take care of your diet, you will never see optimal results if you do not train properly. Therefore, this protocol is aimed at people who train with a high workload.

In sedentary individuals, the outcome may be completely different, and they may even gain fat.

The second thing I want to clarify is that this protocol is not based on a linear diet, meaning that calorie and macronutrient intake will vary throughout the week. At times we will be close to a typical ketogenic distribution, while on other days we may even consume more calories than we need.

As we will see below, the expression of certain genes will vary depending on fat or carbohydrate intake, or even training, and this is something we must understand.

Our biological system is dynamic and adapts depending on what we do and how we do it

The goal of this protocol is to adjust these expressions to create the perfect environment in which the body loses fat without strong resistance—something impossible in a hypocaloric diet

What does the HSN Protocol for Fat Loss consist of?

Restricting calories

When we talk about fat loss, the first thing that comes to mind is:

I must consume fewer calories than I need

following the first law of thermodynamics:

Energy is neither created nor destroyed, only transformed

This law can be represented as follows:

▲E (Change in energy quantity) is the difference between calories consumed and calories expended

Thus, if you burn more calories than you consume, the result is negative, meaning you will lose weight. This is nothing new for most people; however, our body is not simple enough to be reduced to this law.

We find that with the same calorie deficit we can lose fat, muscle, or a combination of both. A calorie from protein behaves very differently from a calorie from carbohydrates or fats, and, for example, with a high-protein diet we can consume more calories than we expend without gaining fat¹.

In hypocaloric diets, the body not only fails to oxidise fat during the day, but also synthesises it²⁰. In fact, fat synthesis and storage were five times higher in calorie-restricted mice than in those fed ad libitum, likely due to increased expression of fat-synthesising enzymes.

When we are in a hypocaloric diet, meaning we consume fewer calories than we expend, the body prepares to regain lost weight in the future. In other words, a long-term hypocaloric diet is not only ineffective but can even be harmful.

This explains why many individuals regain their initial weight easily^2,3,4,5,6.

This is a critical point, as even slight deficits of 5% can lead to fat gain, demonstrating that the body is not governed solely by the first law of thermodynamics

Fat loss and hormonal environment

Chronic exposure to a calorie deficit leads to:

a decrease in metabolic rate,
a drop in body temperature, and
neuroendocrine changes that alter hunger perception.

An important fact that few people know is that many of these changes occur due to the calorie deficit, not the fat loss. This means we can lose fat without harming metabolism. Sounds good, right?

To achieve this, we must go deeper: the hormonal level