The objective with any fat loss phase is pretty straight forward but most people actually have two goals when they say they want to lose body fat. They want to lose body fat and keep or gain muscle. So how do you set up your goal to accomplish this?
When setting up your diet, the RP Diet Coach app will already outline what it believes is the formula for the best success. This means the target weight to reach between the start date and end date is set and the app takes care of the rest.
For most people, going with the highest success is the best option to go with provided it ensures those two criteria mentioned above are top of mind.
You could also opt to go slow and steady. This will slow things down beyond what you would need to do but sometimes this can be helpful is you don't handle diets very well, have a massive appetite, or are just anxious about jumping in too hard.
Lastly, you can customize your goal but we do not recommend ever exceeding 1% of body weight change per week. Meaning if you weigh 200 pounds, we do not recommend exceeding 2 pounds of weight change per week. If you wish to not only maximize fat loss and muscle retention, but also set yourself up for success long term, this would be unwise to pursue. If you wish to lose more quickly than the highest success option you can certainly set up your diet and the app will still look to prioritize minimizing any risk to muscle loss in the process.
Setting Fat Loss Diet Length:
The length of your fat loss phase can vary. If you wanted a short fat loss phase, you could do one as short as 1 or 2 weeks. While you can, this really isn't enough time to make any meaningful changes. For regular fat loss phases, the length is generally best to be between 6 and 12 weeks. Anything exceeding 12 weeks tends to not be overly favorable for long term success. The longer you go, the larger the impact on you physically and mentally. Shorter than 6 weeks tends to reflect mini-cuts, which can have separate purposes.