What should I do if I think I’m “skinny Fat”?
Here’s what we recommend 👉
“What do I do if I think I’m skinny fat?”
You’ve dieted. You’ve tracked.
You cut down and realized you don’t have the definition and shape you thought you would.
PSA: You’re not dealing with a fat-loss problem. You’re dealing with a muscle mass problem.
Most people spend years cycling in and out of deficits, trying to get “toned,” when what they actually need is to spend the majority of the year building muscle. That way, when they actually get “lean,” they see some shape.
If you’re in this category, the fastest way to look better isn’t another cut. It’s building more muscle.
Why another cut won’t work:
You can’t reveal what isn’t there.
And if you’ve been dieting for months (or years), your training quality and recovery are likely suffering. Continuing to push into lower calories:
Further blunts muscle growth and likely encourages you body to lose muscle
Worsens recovery
Increases fatigue and food focus
Leaves you with less and less to “show” for all the effort
In other words, you’re not stuck. You’re just under-muscled. A 12-week surplus isn’t going to cut it; you’re going to need to spend most of 2026 in a building season.
The Big Picture Plan:
If you want to build as much as possible in the next year and achieve a solid body recomposition, we recommend splitting your year in a 3:1 ratio of building to cutting.
That means spending triple the amount of time in a build phase than in a deficit phase.
Why? It takes 3-4x as long to build a pound of muscle as it does to lose a pound of body fat.
You can lose fat quickly, but building muscle tissue is a slow and intentional process, and your timeline should reflect that.
The 2025-2026 Plan:
Find Top End Maintenance: November - December
~4-8 weeks to find top end of maintenance, restore training intensity, and dial in meals for the build.
Muscle Building: January - June
Commit to a 6-month muscle-building phase.
You’ll minimally increase calories, focusing on progressive overload, and aim for a small rate of gain (~0.25% of body weight or ~0.2-0.5 lbs/week).
Fat Loss & Maintenance: July - September
~8 weeks, efficient fat-loss phase, losing ~0.5% of body weight/week, to clean up any body fat gained in the build phase.
4 weeks at maintenance between fat loss and building.
Muscle Building: October onwards
The long game
From here on out, your year should follow this same roughly 3:1 ratio of muscle building to fat loss until you’re happy with your muscle mass (at which point, refer to part 1 of this series, where we discuss how to periodize if you want to maintain your physique).
For most clients, balancing building muscle with summer activities, this looks like:
Muscle Building: September - April
Fat Loss: May - June
Maintenance: July - August
Because when you spend most of your year building, you have more to reveal in every future fat loss phase.
The Prep Matters
Before you go swapping your English muffin for a bagel, make sure you have these nailed down first:
Before starting a build, you should be...
consistently strength training, following a hypertrophy-focused program with progressive overload
able to understand what training to failure is and able to implement RIR or RPE
training all major muscle groups 2x/week
training at least 3.5-4.5 hours per week
feeling confident in your movement form quality
hitting protein intake minimums easily
Why not build for the whole year?
You might have thought we would have told you that you need to build for a year straight, but we didn’t, and here’s why:
Psychological focus - being dialed into your training for that long a period of time can be exhausting, and we also know you want to see what you’ve been up to.
Food fatigue - at some point, you will get tired of eating. Breaking up the build phase with a deficit helps this.
Not gaining too much - while not a “rule” per se, we like our clients to avoid gaining more than 10% body weight in a build (which won’t happen if you maintain a low rate of gain).
This structure of breaking up a 5-6 month build with a ~2-3 month fat loss phase works best for most of our clients.
The takeaway
Ready to do this the right way?
If you’re done spinning your wheels and want a plan that actually works with your body, not against it, this is your sign.
Elevated Base Camp is for the woman who’s tired of chasing quick fixes and ready to build the physique, energy, and confidence that actually last.
We’ll map out your individual plan, help you build a strong foundation in maintenance, and transition you into a muscle-building phase this January, with a training plan included.
You deserve results that actually feel good.
