When starting out in the gym or your fitness journey I think its best if you firstly decide whether you want to bulk or cut (gain size of loose fat.) Your decision can be based on many factors such as: insulin sensitivity ( how well you tolerate carbs and other key nutrients in terms of metabolism, over-all body fat level and your personal goals. But what I think it comes most down to is how you feel within your own body. For instance, if you have a decent amount of muscle (or are athletic) and would consider yourself very lean and thin, then I would bulk up or try and gain muscle mass. But if you’re fairly skinny but don’t have any or a lot of muscle mass (toning/definition) ,then I would firstly loose that bit of extra body fat and then start a lean bulk once your body fat percentage has dropped. Body fat is an important fact to consider not just for how you look but this will effect your health such as blood sugar levels and function of your insulin plus it plays a key role in maximising your performance and recovery time.
‘When starting your fat loss journey, it’s important to make sure that you are eating the right number of calories. Whether your cutting or bulking!’
If your aim is to lose fat, at the start of your cut you don’t want to drastically drop all your calories at once and increase your cardio levels by a big amount. This is for numerous reasons: one of the main being that if and when you hit a plateau the only way to stop this is to increase that energy expenditure therefor doing more cardio or decreasing calories (and if your cardio levels are very high and your calories are very low there’s not a lot you can do to break your plateau.) So, at the start you want to be consistent with your diet and training and slowly start to introduce cardio in. This will help with your metabolism and make sure that you aren’t damaging all the muscle you have worked so hard to get. When you are in a calorie deficit it’s important to maintain all the muscle you have spent so long creating. It’s better to slowly start cutting over a longer period of time so your body gets used to your new diet plan and training and you keep muscle.
So how do I work out my calories?
So first of all, you need to work out your maintenance calories (to maintain your weight) and this can be done by a calculation or easily put into an online calculator that does this for you!
As the online version won’t be as accurate as it’s based on averages it’s still a good way to estimate your calories when you’re first starting out. It works by measuring your TDEE (total daily energy expenditure) against your goals eg: weight gain, weight loss and maintenance.
How do we use this in terms of our goals?…Macro’s
Macro’s are important when it comes to fat loss or even muscle gain as they are able to give your body exactly what it needs in terms of calories and micronutrients. This is great for cutting as it can maximise fat loss and still support muscle maintenance while delivering the best results. Macros are essentially your whole daily calorie intake split into three groups: Fats, Proteins and Carbs and they are all put into percentages according to how many grams of each we are consuming. For example, every gram of carb or protein is four calories and fats are nine calories per gram.
IIFYM / Flexible dieting
‘If it fits your macros…’
This is an unrestrictive diet plan that allows you to eat all food types while hitting your calories for the day and still being able to eat the foods you love. It works by meeting your daily macronutrient targets in terms of carbs, fats and proteins. Lots of people use this flexible dieting plan because you can still eat some of your favourite foods like chocolate and fit it in with your diet plan.
Calculating your macros
(skip this if you don’t want to know that maths)
‘Trying to work out your Macro’s like…’
- First of all, we take our body weight in lb and for every pound of body weight we multiply (x) by 1 gram of protein.
- For example, 120 lb would = 120 grams of protein.
- Your protein would be 120 grams x 4 (4 calories per gram of protein) = 480 calories of protein per day
- Fats can range from anywhere between 0.3 and 0.6. Then this is where personal preference comes in. If your someone who enjoys fatty foods like cheese, bacon, egg yolk, avocado and nuts then a high fat would suit you and then your carbs would decrease so that your macros all add up to an equal number. If you’re just starting out with fat loss I would recommend somewhere around 0.4 to start out with. So, let’s pretend your maintenance calories are 2000, then you would multiply this by 0.9 and this gives you a 10% caloric deficit giving you 1800 calories making you lose fat at a healthy pace.
- Your fats would be 0.4 x 120 g (body weight) = 48 g of fat x 9 (calories per gram of fat)= 432 calories of fat per day
- So… after this we add both of these numbers together (calories of both fats and protein) = 912 calories
- Then we take this away from the original TDEE (total daily energy expenditure) for your cut with a ten percent deficit which was 1800 -912 (total fats and protein calories) = 888 calories of carbs
- Finally you then divide that by four (because each carb is 4 calories) and this gives you 222g of carbs left for your macros!
So how do I go about tracking my macros?
It’s important not to get to obsessed with your calories and macro’s. It’s just a good way to know if your hitting your calories or macros and this then also helps you learn about diet and nutrition at the same time. I love tracking them because I am so much more conscious of what I’m putting in my body and knowing what’s in my food. I track my macros on ‘My fitness pal’ – which is free Jand the features are really helpful as you can just scan barcodes of food and track them. It’s even got a partnership with food company’s so when you go out to eat at ‘Nandos’ you can still track all your macros on the food search tab. With the free version it only allows you to input your Marcos in percentages, so you have to play around with them to try and match the numbers you worked out before. But as long as you know your macros in your head or have a good idea of them you’ll be fine!
Eve-India fitness 