i want to look leaner (and other things i'm not supposed to say)

what does it really cost to get leaner?

I leave for vacation in a few weeks, and I’m currently in a small caloric deficit. On purpose. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t hesitate before publishing this article, because I write a newsletter about eating more, a newsletter literally named after being hungry.

But here’s my confession: I want to feel good in a swimsuit, so for a few weeks I’m eating a bit less to try to shed a little fat.

And every time I’m about to say that out loud, I feel the urge to soften it. To add disclaimers. To explain that I’m doing it in a healthy way, that I haven’t fallen back into my old habits, that I promise I’m still healed. As if wanting to look leaner was something I needed to apologize for.

This article is me saying it honestly. And then telling you what it actually costs, because contrary to what some people will try to sell you on social media, getting leaner has a price.

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when did wanting to be leaner become controversial?

I have this conversation with my close friends more often than you’d think. At some point someone lowers her voice and asks something like “is it bad that I still want to lose a little?” Like she’s confessing something. Like she needs permission to admit she cares about how she looks.

And I get why. In some spaces, especially the ones trying to undo the damage of diet culture, aesthetic goals have become almost taboo. The acceptable goal is “getting stronger.” Say you want visible abs or leaner legs and you can feel the room shift, like you just outed yourself as not fully healed.

So women end up with two scripts, and honestly, both of them are dishonest.

Script #1: diet culture - You should always want to be leaner, whatever the cost, and the cost will never be mentioned. Just “tone up,” earn your beach body, eat 1,200 calories. I lived inside that script for about twenty years, and I’ve already written about what it did to me, so I won’t retell it here.

Script #2: the correction - If you still want to be leaner, you have healing to do. Your desire is internalized misogyny, train for strength, love your body, and please stop talking about fat loss. It comes from a good place, I really believe that. But look at what it does: someone else is still deciding what you’re allowed to want, just in the opposite direction.

But there’s a third option, and it’s the one I’m trying to live in. You name what you want, out loud, without shame. And then you look at the price without flinching. Both parts matter, the wanting and the receipt.

Wanting to look leaner is morally neutral. It says nothing about your values, your intelligence, or how healed you are.

Aesthetics is what got me through the gym door at 37. Performance is what kept me there for six years. Both of those things were real, and pretending the first one never existed would be rewriting my own story.

YES, BEING IN A CALORIC DEFICIT REQUIRES SOME LEVEL OF RESTRICTION, BUT THAT DOESN'T MEAN YOU HAVE TO BE MISERABLE

wtf "leaner" actually means and the price list

Quick definition before we go any further, because this word tends to create a lot of confusion. Being leaner simply means having more muscle and less fat. There’s no special quality called “toned” that you can train for and, more importantly, there’s no special method designed to tone your body.

What helps you build muscle effectively is, as you probably already know, strength training.

For “leaner” to look like anything, the muscle has to already be there. Otherwise you just become a smaller, flatter version of yourself (I know, because that was me, the original skinny fat girl).

One thing I'd do before chasing it, though: check what you actually mean when you say you want to be leaner. Sometimes it really is about how you look. But sometimes it's code for:

— “I want to feel in control” or
— “I had a rough month and I want to feel like I’m doing something about myself”

Fat loss won’t buy those. Your wants deserve to be taken seriously, and taking them seriously includes checking what they’re made of.

Now the price list. Getting leaner has a price, a real one, and I want to lay it out the same way you’d look at the price of a trip before booking it:

• Hunger. A deficit means giving your body less energy than it burns, and your body notices. If it’s done well, we’re talking about a low-grade hunger that visits regularly, for months. Anyone selling you fat loss without hunger is lying to you.

• Performance. Your lifts stall, or drop a little. Recovery gets slower and training feels heavier. For someone who has learned to love progress, this is the cost that hurts the most.

• Headspace. More planning, more food decisions, more “no thanks” at dinners you’d normally enjoy without thinking. If you read my article about food tracking, you already know how much mental space food management can take.

Add mood, sleep and energy, which all degrade the deeper the deficit goes and the longer you stay in it. That’s normal physiology doing its job, and no amount of discipline exempts you from it.

But the most important thing I can tell you about the price is that it climbs. Going from soft to athletic costs a few months of mild, livable discipline. Going from athletic to visibly shredded costs a completely different life.

What the research says 🔬

Research on weight loss shows that as you lean out, leptin (the hormone that tells your brain you’re fed) drops and ghrelin (the one that makes you hungry) rises, and they stay shifted for a long time. In plain words, the leaner you get, the louder your body protests. The last few kilos cost more than all the others combined.

And there’s a limit.

Stay in a calorie deficit for too long, and the female body starts cutting services. Your menstrual cycle becomes irregular or disappears altogether. Sleep starts falling apart. Bone density declines. Thyroid function slows down. Researchers call this low energy availability, or RED-S. In simple terms, once your body no longer has enough fuel to support all of its systems, it starts making decisions. And repair, recovery, and reproduction suddenly become expenses it can no longer justify.

One last line on the receipt. Being lean comes with maintenance costs. Whatever you did to get there, you’ll need to keep doing, even if it’s a less restrictive version. That’s why “photoshoot lean” and “livable lean” are two completely different products. And they come with two very different price tags.

what my first real bulk-and-cut process taught me

Last year I did my first real bulk. Six months, about six kilos gained, with my dietitian watching the numbers the whole way. And it was a good bulk, honestly. A solid part of those six kilos was muscle, and I stayed relatively lean through the whole thing.

And still, seeing myself bigger affected me mentally. I knew the plan, I understood the numbers, I had a professional in my corner, and my head struggled with the mirror anyway, more days than I expected. I’m telling you this because it kills a very convenient story, the one where doing everything correctly means the mental part follows automatically. It doesn’t always. Twenty years of programming don’t dissolve because your macros are calculated properly.

So after the bulk, I decided to cut. Four months, supervised, structured. A start and end date, a plan, and someone watching the data with me.

I need you to see the difference between that and what I did in my twenties, because on paper they look similar. Both involve eating less. But my old under-eating was just a way of living I never really chose, with no start, no end, and nobody checking whether it was hurting me. The cut was a project. It was the same tool with a completely opposite meaning.

And the cut showed me exactly where my personal line is. The first three months were manageable. Some hunger, some planning, nothing dramatic. Then came the last month, when we lowered calories a bit more to finish the job, and the food noise started. If you’ve never heard the term, food noise is when thoughts about food get louder and more frequent without being invited. You’re in a meeting and part of your brain is negotiating your next snack. That was new information about myself, and now I know where my curve bends.

I’d do it again if I felt the need, though. I want to say that clearly, because that’s the sentence script #2 doesn’t allow.

Fast forward to today, and to the part I hesitated to write.

As I said, I’m in a slight deficit right now because I’m going on vacation and I want to feel good in a swimsuit. I know how that sounds. We’ve spent years, rightfully, repeating that every body is a beach body, and that nobody has to earn the right to wear a swimsuit. I’m not walking any of that back. You can put on a bikini today, exactly as you are.

And at the same time, I feel better in my skin when I know my body will be exposed and I’m at my leanest. Both things are true. Being honest about this means being willing to hold both, instead of only saying the more virtuous one out loud.

That’s what an informed aesthetic choice looks like to me. I know what I want. I know what it costs. I’ve decided I’m willing to pay the price. And, most importantly, I know when the transaction ends.

(When I’m back, my dietitian and I are changing the brief anyway, because I’m running a half marathon next year and my body will have a completely different job to do. Goals rotate like that. An aesthetic phase, a performance phase, maintenance. All of them just have to make sense for me, and for nobody else.)

if getting leaner is on your mind

If you’re sitting with your own version of “I’d like to be leaner,” here’s what I’d want you to know, from someone who’s been on every side of this.

→ Build muscle first. Months of consistent lifting before any cut, because there has to be something under the fat to reveal. You also need to know your maintenance calories, at least roughly, because you can’t create a controlled deficit from an unknown number.

→ A healthy relationship with food. This is what lets you handle a few months of an intentional caloric deficit without old wounds reopening, and it matters more than anything else on this list. If restriction ever owned you, that history is part of YOUR price, and it belongs in the decision.

→ The right timing. A deficit during your most stressful season costs double. Pick a boring stretch of life, one without a calendar full of social events, when you actually have the headspace to plan your meals every day.

→ Set a modest deficit, around 300 to 500 kcal below maintenance, and aim to lose roughly 0.5% of your body weight per week while keeping your protein high and your training heavy. The research is clear that slower rates preserve muscle and performance far better than aggressive ones. And if you can, have a professional run the numbers with you. My bulk and my cut both worked because someone was watching the data with me the whole time.

→ Define the exit before you enter. An end date, plus red lines that stop the cut automatically, with no negotiation: your cycle goes irregular, your sleep breaks, training starts feeling like punishment, or the food noise moves in and won’t leave. Deciding your stop conditions in advance is what separates a project from a spiral.

You’re also allowed to have a price cap.

“Leaner than I am now, but nowhere near shredded” is a perfectly valid goal. You can want some of the look without wanting the full-time job that comes with maintaining it. Getting 80% of the result for 20% of the cost isn’t giving up. It’s just knowing what you’re willing to pay.

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In a few weeks I’ll be on vacation, a little leaner than I am today, eating all the food I love with zero guilt, not training, and feeling really good in my swimsuit. I wanted that, I said it out loud, I knew the price, and I paid a small, deliberate amount of it with my eyes open.

That’s what I want for you too, whatever you end up deciding. Your wants are yours. Nobody gets to assign them to you, and nobody gets to shame you out of them. Just make sure that when you buy, you’ve seen the full receipt first.

If you think this was useful, tap the ❤️, drop a comment, and share it with someone who needs to hear it.

Thanks for reading,
—Glicia

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* sources

• Long-term persistence of hormonal adaptations to weight loss, Sumithran et al., NEJM, 2011

• Effect of two different weight-loss rates on body composition and strength-related performance in elite athletes, Garthe et al., IJSNEM, 2011

• A systematic review of dietary protein during caloric restriction in resistance trained lean athletes, Helms et al., IJSNEM, 2014

• IOC consensus statement on Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S), updated 2023, BJSM

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