Naked Creatine – Naked Nutrition

Please note that this post contains affiliate links, but I always recommend products that I am absolutely pleased with! 

Naked Nutrition makes some of my favorite products, and this month, I’m doing a deep dive on their Creatine Monohydrate.

I’ve written about creatine before, but just to provide a quick refresher:

Creatine is an extensively studied supplement that has been demonstrated over and over to be safe and effective for improving sports performance. For a long time, I didn’t take creatine because I associated it with the overly-masculine messaging that it had been packaged with for years. But once my own strength coach recommended that I start using it a few years ago, I realized that women benefit from it, too! Unlike caffeine, which delivers a quick boost of energy, creatine helps improve recovery and performance during workouts over the long haul – and this means that you can do harder workouts and bounce back faster. Ultimately, this means that you get better results from your workouts because your intensity is higher and you can handle it. 

But…

Does Creatine Negatively Affect Weight Loss?

Creatine has a bad reputation for causing bloat and weight gain.

But the truth is more nuanced. While there is no evidence that creatine causes fat gain or slows fat loss, it almost certainly creates more “water weight,” which can create the illusion of weight gain or slower weight loss on the scale. But this isn’t a bad thing – it’s a result of the creatine pulling more water into your muscle cells.

Also, the harder you work out, the more likely you are to retain a little water as part of the recovery process.

Watching the scale go up can cause panic – but it’s so crucial to remember that weight gain and fat gain are not the same thing. Using measurements as part of your self-assessment circumvents this problem.

My Experiment

This year, we bought and renovated a 1940’s bungalow, and we tackled many of the projects ourselves (especially the kitchen transformation). The end result was a charming home, but also – unfortunately – a decrease in my own fitness because I had literally just been doing the minimum to be a healthy person… and not much else. Sometimes I only worked out once or twice a week. My creatine had also run out and I had not been taking it for months. So this summer, when Naked Nutrition suggested a creatine collaboration, it felt like perfect timing to use myself as a guinea pig – what would happen with my training and my body composition if I went into a calorie deficit, focused on my lifting, and resumed creatine all at the same time?

My ultimate goal was to get leaner while preserving performance. But would creatine cause me to “not lose weight” as part of this experiment? How would water weight impact my stats overall?

And that’s what this blog post will reveal!

Starting Stats Before Naked Creatine Load

In terms of body composition, I started my creatine load at about 132-133 pounds, and my waist was about 26-27 inches. I calculated my body fat to be at about 26-28%. For me, this range is “sitting high” – I wasn’t overweight by any means, but my body fat was higher than I really like.

I decided for this experiment to focus on two lifts – my barbell front squats and pull-ups. At the start of my creatine load, I could do 3 sets of 6 reps of front squats at 95 pounds, and I could do 6 pull-ups (and sometimes even 6 were hard).

My goal with the combined creatine load and higher focus was on training was to safely get front squats back to about 125 pounds (my prior “normal” performance). I also wanted to get pull-ups back up to 10 reps, which seemed do-able especially if my body was getting relatively lighter.

How I Used Naked Creatine Successfully

Again, creatine is an extensively researched exercise supplement with a good track record of results. Here are the main tips for use:

• Use daily, whether or not you exercise that day. Just take it like a vitamin.
• Blend a powder like Naked Creatine into smoothies or water or milk.
• You can either quickly load creatine by taking 4 doses a day for about 5-7 days and then dropping to one dose per day indefinitely, or you can slowly load creatine by taking one dose per day for at least 30 days. I always do it slowly, and generally recommend the same for my clients. The reason I make this recommendation is that the main (legitimate) complaint about creatine is stomach upset. You can reduce potential digestive distress by splitting up your doses into a half dose in the morning and a half dose in the evening (2.5 grams each time). For me, I just don’t want to mess around with the fast load – if there is even a chance the high dosing would upset my stomach, I just don’t want to deal with it when I’ll have the same results within 30 days anyway.
• Speaking of which, creatine takes time to take effect – either 5-7 days with fast loading, or 30 days with the “maintenance dose.” Creatine is not like caffeine, in that it does not produce instant energy. Creatine improves exercise performance by boosting recovery during and after workouts. This means you can work out at a higher intensity and probably at higher volumes, as well. It takes time to build up the full saturation in your muscles to create these effects.
• We consume creatine naturally when we eat animal products, so creatine is the most important for the people who (in my experience) are probably the least likely to take it – vegetarians and vegans. Even if you’re not strictly plant-based, creatine is a great supplement if your diet is generally “plant-forward “and you don’t eat a lot of meat.
• Finally, creatine does not replace working out. It enhances performance – it does not work miracles. You have to use the improved recovery and energy to actually work harder during your workouts.

How I Approached My Training

To support fat loss, I wanted to build in plenty of movement – walking, running, and stair climbing, especially. But to let the creatine really do its work, I needed to prioritize strength and focus on the two lifts that I wanted to improve the most – my front squat and my pull-up.

So I strength trained three days a week. I did front squats twice a week in the 5-rep range (starting at 95 pounds), and then once per week I did a strength conditioning workout. In terms of pull-ups, I did max reps once per week, and static holds once per week.

Because I set up my training pretty well, it’s almost hard to say which produced the better results – the programming or the creatine. But it’s safe to say that the creatine helped improve my ability to push myself, and also boosted my recovery. Read on to learn more about my final stats.

How I Approached My Nutrition

I was most curious about how creatine would affect my measurements/weight as I went into a calorie deficit.

So when I set up my calories at about a 500-calorie deficit from estimated maintenance, I had balanced expectations of scale weight loss. I knew that the actual pounds that I lost would be “offset” by a slight increase in water weight (which would be at most 2-6 pounds). Ultimately, this means that even though I wanted to lose about 4-5 pounds in 4 weeks, I would be wise to be flexible in my expectations, and to focus more on measurements and clothing fit than on the scale.

However, I reduced the chances of bloating and excessive water retention by doing the following things:

• drinking a lot of water, allllllll the time
• keeping my overall carbohydrate intake in check (not hard to do when your calories are lower) while keeping protein high… my protein was about 130-150 grams per day and my carbohydrates were usually 130 or even under 100
• trying to keep an eye on sodium (especially from dining out or packaged foods)

I also knew that the initial water weight gain from the creatine would certainly level off, or perhaps even diminish – so I knew that I could more confidently project more scale weight loss after 4 week anyway.

Just a reminder that this is a calorie deficit, and not a way of life – this plan is not meant to extend beyond 8-12 weeks. I would not be happy on that calorie level long-term (and no amount of creatine would make up for the diminished performance I would ultimately experience if I kept trying to improve performance in that kind of deficit). I also plan to level off my performance and focus more on fat loss than on improving performance in the upcoming few months.

The Results

After 4 weeks on Naked Creatine, here are the results. Let’s look at sports performance first.

Week 1

• Front squat – 6 x 95
• Pull-ups – 6

Week 4

Again, things were interesting because this was the week before my period, which is typically a low-performance week for me. But my output at the gym was very good! I got the front squats up to 5 reps of 125, and did 1 set of 9 pull-ups!

• Front squat – 5 x 125
• Pull-ups – 9

While my sports performance improved at about the rate I thought it would (although I was just shy of my 10 pull-up goal), something that I found really compelling was that my recovery was so much better. I was much less sore from workouts than usual, and was often ready to train again within a day or two much more quickly than I had been in the months prior.

Plus, my body composition results were verrrrry interesting.

I started out at about 132-133 pounds, and by the fourth week I was down to about 128-129 (for the ladies out there, I compared first day of menstrual cycle to first day of menstrual cycle – this is the best “apples to apples” way to track progress if you have regular cycles). My waist measurement went from 26-27 to 25, and my hip measurement went from 39 to just above 37. In the process, my body fat percentage went from 26-28% to about 23-24%. So although I “only” lost about 3-4 pounds in a month, my fat loss was probably about 6-7 pounds.

The cool thing about this is that yes, the creatine is masking the weight loss on the scale and making it seem slower (and jump around more), but when I tracked measurements, I could see that my body composition improved significantly in just one month. I could also tell in my clothing fit – the scale and my jeans were not matching up in terms of evidence. In other words, if you can be patient with the scale – and not panic – and stay consistent, you can take advantage of the creatine load to work out harder, improve lean body mass, and lose more fat than you might otherwise.

Sure, I’m n=1 (i.e., a small sample size), but in my experiment, creatine absolutely did not mess with my fat loss with a maintenance dose, plenty of hydration, and structured workouts. It didn’t even cause bloating – my digestion was fine and my measurements were down. And ultimately, I’m extremely pleased with creeping back to my “fighting weight.” I’m performing better, I feel better in my clothes again, and workouts truly do feel easier. Even my pesky recurring back pain has been behaving noticeably well.

I have seen many attention-grabbing Instagram reels that all follow the basic script of “I stopped taking creatine because I gained weight / looked so bloated / felt gross.” I’m not dismissing these content creators’ experiences out of hand, but I want to point out that this is not going to be everyone’s experience, and – based on the research – the vast majority of resistance-training people get great results from adding creatine to their supplement game, just like I did.

Have questions about creatine or other sports supplements? Shoot me an e-mail and we can chat. Want to buy the Naked Creatine product I used by Naked Nutrition? Click here (affiliate link)