Changing Starting strength to lose Fat

Question

Is it possible to alter Starting strength to lose weight ?

Basically I have three questions :

1. In the existing program how can a person lose weight ? There are many success stories available on the Internet where people claim they lost a lot of weight on the original program. How does the body burn fat in the original program ?

2. If I increase the Reps from 5 to 6 and slowly to 7 will I lose body fat OR will this turn into too much volume ?

3. Like in point 2 will adding assistance exercises help me lose Fat ?

I have been doing this program for close to seven months now and have put on a lot of muscle mass on this program. To be honest I love this program and it seems to me the only program that works for me. However now I have started to look Fat :-( So over the last two months I tried a few variations to the program as mentioned on SS Forum like keeping the weights constant + reduce calories + workout twice a week. Sadly I have gained 4 Kgs and the last 4 kgs seem to be fat :-( In fact it seems that I might have lost some muscle.

Some additional points : I can workout only 3 times a week + can't do any sprinting because my left knee hurts. All my lifts are close to body weight apart from overhead press.

Please suggest.

Thanks.

Answer 1

1. A person loses fat in the original program by eating correctly. From "A Clarification":

Eating correctly may mean 6000 calories/day with a gallon of whole milk, or it may mean 3500 calories/day on a paleo-type lower carb no-dairy diet, depending on your initial body composition.

The program should result in:

a 225-245 x 5 x 3 squat workout after 6-7 weeks of training for our novice male, IF HE HAS BEEN EATING CORRECTLY

I'm not in the demographic he's talking about in this article (novice males between the ages of 18 and 35), so my gains have been slower, but they're not far behind. Every time I've failed to increase the weight, I can track it down to not eating properly. I think the idea is that you're continuously trading fat for muscle. It would better for you to track body fat percentage, and keep your lifts increasing on the program.

About question 2, and 3, I think if you just stick to the goal of increasing strength, and eating just enough to do that, you'll end up with a body fat percentage in an acceptable range. If you want even lower body fat percentage, you'll have to do some very close tracking of nutrition needs and intake, but I don't think it changes how you should be lifting.

Answer 2

I've been doing a SS variant for the last month and are trickling down in weight ever so slightly (about 3 pounds @ 215 pounds), despite becoming substantially stronger, looking firmer to the eye (I and others have noticed, no placebo), I've lost a pant size and a couple of % body fat.

Reading Wheat Belly and Why We Get Fat opened me up to weight gain not being about strictly about calories in versus calories out. If you can ensure more of your calories come from fat and protein and regulate carbohydrate intake to avoid blood sugar spikes, the insulin provoked fat storage response can be tamed.

Then I'm following Tom Venuto's Holy Grail Body Transformation which is all about building strength and losing fat at the same time. Basically it's to have a caloric surplus on your workout days and a deficit the other days, but he goes into good ratios of surplus to deficit days depending on your main and secondary goals.

I've only started dropping out foods of high glycemic load this week so can't report too meaningful results yet.

Update: Fat loss definitely starting to accelerate after a good week now, after reducing any food I have with a high GI to an amount where its glycemic loading is low. No longer getting mid-meal cravings.