Jeremy Ethier coaches Cam through a 150-day transformation from 160 lb and 25% body fat to 14.6% body fat with 5 lb of muscle gained. Cam cut calories from 2600 to 2100 kcal, played basketball for cardio, and used auto-adjusting tracking. In 90 days he lost 11 lb and 3.5 cm from his waist.
I feel like I've had this my entire life.
This is Cam, a YouTuber who's been on a big fat loss journey after his wife told him this.
Weren't you doing a video to, like, build the muscle? Well, if I'm being honest, you bulk without the muscle.
So for the next 90 days, I'm going to see if I can use the best sides, back workout and diet strategies.
Oh, my.
To help Karen get six pack abs for the first time in his life.
Damn. Holy. Here we go. Yo, what up, man? You excited to get started?
Ready to rock, dude?
Let's do it. On day one, Cam is starting out at 160 pounds, and according to a DEXA scan, 25 body fat. But to get visible six pack abs, he'll need to get down to at least 15 body fat, a level of leanness achieved by less than 2% of the average population. At these odds, Cam's actually more likely to become a millionaire. But here's the plan. Instead of relying on exercise alone, our first priority is dialing in his diet.
This kind of feels like an intervention, doesn't it?
I know. I was gonna say I feel like I'm, like, in the principal's office or something again.
On average, cam's eaten about 2600 calories a day now. It's not terrible. It's. It's actually pretty close to what someone his size would need to maintain their weight. But it wasn't low enough to start losing fat. To shed around one pound of fat per week, we needed to bring that down to about 2100 calories. But rather than completely overhauling his diet, I wanted to focus on strategic food swaps. This.
Yeah.
210 calories.
Okay.
So you could have the equivalent of four of these guys.
That's crazy.
The goal was to cut calories without making it feel like he was sacrificing the foods you love, especially when it came to snacks. And for that, I had a secret weapon up my sleeve.
So you told me that you like ice cream.
Love ice cream.
Love ice cream. It can take anything, like a bland protein shake and will make it, like.
Into beautiful ice cream.
You're gonna be eating ice cream every single night while getting shredded. That's my dream, man. That's my dream.
With our game plan for Cam's diet in place, it was time to start training.
Engage your abs and use that to round your spine.
Perfect.
That looks really good.
While Cam's goal is to get a six pack, focusing on ab exercises alone won't cut it. See, when you're in a calorie deficit, your body looks for energy, and without proper training, it can burn muscle along with fat. The result? A skinny look instead of a lean, muscular physique. To prevent that, we're implementing a well structured training program that targets all his major muscle groups. And since Cam hasn't trained or dieted properly before, he's in the perfect position to build muscle while losing fat. And by broadening his back and shoulder muscles, we'll create that V taper look to complement his six pack and achieve a truly aesthetic transformation.
So not only am I going to be training with Jeremy on and off every few weeks, but I'm also set up now to test Jeremy's built with Science plus app, which I'm going to be logging all of my nutrition in my weight each morning and every rep and weight that I do as I'm training. So not only do I get Jeremy in person training me, but I get a little, little pocket sized Jeremy to come along with me. Okay, I'm done, I'm done, I'm done. So for my pull ups training, this man has me doing three sets of band assisted pull ups, which I am supposed to take to pretty much failure. On top of that, he has me doing two sets of negatives, which I don't know if you've done that many pull ups, but those negatives, dude, are brutal.
As for the progress on his diet, he was figuring it out.
Moment of truth.
No way, bro. What the heck? This right here is an absolute game changer, bro. That is crazy. What the heck?
With Cam now logging most of his meals into the app, he was staying right on track with a daily target of 2100 calories. And his weight on the scale was quickly moving in the right direction.
I am 30 days into this training program and I am down five pounds. Everything is actually going better than I expected. And I just hope this progress can, like, keep going as I move forward because, yeah, just 30 days in, like, this is going really, really well.
While this is a great start, getting down to 15 body fat means Cam will have to lose more weight than he anticipated. In fact, after crunching the numbers based on his current muscle mass, he'll need to drop all the way down to 139 pounds. That might sound surprisingly light for someone at his height, but the truth is, most of the shredded physiques you see online at heavier body weights are often the result of performance enhancing drugs, genetic advantages, or decades of smart training. For example, my good friend Lee is incredibly muscular, but to achieve Competition level conditioning. He diets down to just £129. So as I'm working with Cam, I'm curious to see just how far he's willing to push before the diet starts to wear him down. One more. Let's go, Cam.
Push all the way down now.
Explode. Explode. Explode.
Nice.
Atta boy.
So what's the biggest difference Training the gym?
It's like, it just feels more intense. Like, every exercise feels like it's harder, but I feel like, in a way, I'm doing less, like, less reps, but it just feels more focused, more controlled, slower, more painful.
Then thrust them forward.
It's good, though. It's good. It's definitely, like, making me work.
It's forward. There you go.
Got you.
That was your best rep so far, dude.
And while Cam was making good progress in the gym and with his diet, you may be thinking there's one thing we've overlooked. Cardio. But think of it like the cherry on top. The weights tell your body to keep your muscle. The diet does most of the hard work of losing the fat, and the cardio can just help speed up the process. And rather than forcing Cam to do grueling cardio sessions, he'd never stick to long term, I wanted to find something he actually enjoyed. So today we're playing basketball, and to measure how many calories he burns, we're gonna put this mask on. I want to show Cam that you.
Can burn a ton of calories without traditional boring cardio in the gym. And you can get a six pack doing stuff you actually enjoy.
Hell, yeah.
So basketball clearly isn't my strong suit, but it was fun. And the best part is you don't even feel like you're working out. In fact, in just 25 minutes of gameplay, Cam burned over 300 calories, which isn't bad at all. But here's the thing. If Cam wanted to rely on cardio alone to lose the same amount of fat he's been losing through his diet, he'd need to play nearly an hour of basketball every single day. So when it comes to fat loss, a combination of both is key. And in Cam's case, it was just enough to speed up his progress without affecting his strength. At the gym.
Every single set improved by one rep this time from last week, which is not a lot. But improvement is improvement, so I will take that.
And when he checked back in after 90 days.
Oh, damn, dude. Look at these guns, dude. The arms are way more defined. Yeah, it's definitely like you got veins, man.
Dude, and as for Cam's progress in trying to get a six pack, dude, you have abs, man. In 90 days, Cam lost 11 pounds and shaved three and a half centimeters off his waistline. But while his progress has been incredible, he's not quite at full six pack abs yet. He's sitting somewhere around 18 to 20% body fat, and that's perfectly fine. Getting lean and staying lean is a marathon, not a sprint. And because we've taken a sustainable approach, Cam was eager to keep pushing to see just how lean he could get. But now that he's proven his dedication, it's time to take things up a notch with my favorite science based exercises to make his abs really pop. So for the abs, we want an.
Exercise where it's hardest when they're fully stretched like this. Right. And what we can do here is instead of facing the this way, when.
You do the crunch, you're just going.
To turn around and do them this way. All right, good. How that feel?
Good? Yeah, that stretch feels good.
And to target his lower abs, we're going with reverse crunches. But rather than doing these with straight legs, we're going to do them with knees bent and focusing on lifting his pelvis off the bench, shifting the focus from his hip flexors to his lower abs.
Try to come up a little bit higher there. Slow on the way down.
Do you feel the difference?
Oh, my gosh. Yeah.
Where do you feel it the most?
Just like tension here.
Nice.
Yeah. Dude, that's nuts.
Okay.
And finally, my favorite ab exercise.
Leg raise.
Nice.
My gosh, we're hitting the stubborn fat away.
Come on.
Come on.
Oh, man.
Okay, so maybe this one isn't science based.
You can take this at home and give it to your wife to dude to smack you around with.
But to make up for my prank on Cam, I wanted to see if I could help him with one of the biggest challenges that he's faced in his fat loss journey.
The biggest thing for me is I feel like you get invited out to, like, a friend's place or like, to event or I do some, like, volunteering where they feed you. And so it's like, huh.
I don't.
Really know what to do with that.
Fortunately, this is a problem my incredible team and I built with science have been working hard to solve.
So it is lunchtime, and my brother just ordered a burrito bowl from Chipotle. So I feel like this is a good time to try this, like meal scanner in the app.
Apparently you just take a photo.
And.
It will, like, recognize what it's supposed to be. How the hell did it know that, bro? That is insane.
That's nuts.
I'm genuinely blown away by that.
With Cam now able to easily log his meals, he was continuing to see progress on the scale, with some strong evidence suggesting the weight he was losing was coming from all the right places.
It's great seeing the number on the scale go down, but, like, there are other areas where the weight loss is just like, like, genuinely mind blowing. For instance, these pants used to fit me. I used to wear these pants without a belt. Now can fit almost like another me in there.
But this is where most people get stuck. They drop to under 20% body fat and then progress all of a sudden stalls. Why? Well, your metabolism adapts as you lose weight. Research shows that losing just 10% of your body weight can cause your body to burn up to 200 to 400 fewer calories per day. So when Cam first started, he needed to eat around 2100 calories per day to lose a pound of fat each week. But now, after losing 15 pounds, we've adjusted his target to 1900 calories to keep the fat loss going. But I didn't have to touch a thing. That's where his Built with Science plus app came in. Its built in diet coach automatically adapts your nutrition plan each week as your metabolism changes. So for Cam, the app could sense whenever his metabolism dropped and would adjust his nutrition plan so he never got stuck. However, as Cam's weight started dropping into the 140s, you started noticing some serious side effects.
I think it's finally happening. Last night, I slept for 10 hours. 10 hours. I don't know when the last time it was that I slept for 10 hours. I wasn't up late, didn't do anything out of the normal 10 hours. The last three workouts that I've done have felt just bad. Man strength going up, going up, going up. And then it drops off, drops off. Like everything is just getting worse.
What Cam's experiencing is actually rooted in our survival. Back in the day, having too little body fat meant you couldn't stay warm and you were at risk of starvation during famines. So if your body senses that your fat levels are getting too low, it fights back. And here's how it works. Your fat cells produce a hormone called leptin. Leptin signals your body, hey, we've got plenty of fat to work with. Feel free to use it for activity. And let's also lower the hunger signals. But as you lose fat, your body produces less leptin. In response, your body cranks up hunger signals and tries to conserve energy by decreasing your desire to move, which can also start to affect your strength in the gym.
But I also just kind of feel like trash. Like just feel trash. Jeremy talked about hitting a wall. At a certain point, I think it's safe to say I've hit the wall because this, this doesn't feel as fun as it used to.
And so after 150 days of Cam's fat loss journey, we decided to stop his diet here. The extra push just wouldn't be worth it, especially if it meant he wouldn't be able to maintain his shape afterwards. But now it's time to check in on his final results.
Oh yeah, dude, you can already see the definition is popping. Just take it off, bro. Damn. Let's go. Holy shit. Look at this. Boom, boom, boom.
So when you started out, you were.
At 25.2% body fat.
Yeah. Today.
It'S 14.6%.
No way, dude.
Let's go, let's go.
In 150 days, Cam lost 17 pounds and saw his total body fat drop by over 10%.
And the best part is, okay, throughout the process you gained five pounds of muscle.
Yeah.
No way.
Let's go, dude.
Dude, that's crazy.
Let's go. I'm so proud of you, man. I'm so proud of you, bro.
And as impressive as the visual change in Cam's appearance is, it's perhaps the reaction he got at home that was his biggest win.
Hillary, can you, can you please just repeat what you just said to me? I said you look like a Greek God.
Wow. This works.
I saw it on TikTok.
Don't fall for the bro science guys getting the six pack or any meaningful transformation. It's a marathon, not a sprint. But the key is a sustainable plan you can actually stick to long term. And what's crazy is I only worked with Cam in person a handful of times throughout his journey. The rest that was all thanks to our brand new app, Built with Science plus. It's just like having me as your personal coach guiding you every step of the way with science backed training, nutrition and progress tracking. And you can try it completely free for two weeks@builtwithscience.com and and see the difference for yourself. And if you're serious about building your abs, watch this video next for a breakdown of the two key exercises that really made Camp Six Pack pop. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time.
