Calories and Macronutrients | PT.2
Dial-in Calories and Macronutrients When You Have the Motivation and Incentive | Nutrition advice PT 2
If you read our first blog post on habits, you are ready to maximize this post. Keep in mind that these habits are your foundation: 52 weeks a year of sleeping, drinking water, eating vegetables, and being mindful with your eating. From time to time you will want to increase the threshold, this may include altering calories or macronutrients to either increase or decrease body mass or body fat. This will require a considerable amount of more focus and attention, which is why this is reserved for only part of the year.
For context there is a physical law termed Thermodynamics - where energy cannot be destroyed it is transformed from form to another. What this means for us is we have to either burn excess energy in the form of heat (calories burned), consume less calories overall, or a combination of both. So if you wanted to lose weight you would have to either burn more calories through exercise, eat less calories relative to your level to maintain body mass, or combine both.
The concept is really simple, the application is the hard part. This is where having a coach that will give you structure and a plan helps. Human nature will be reactive and over compensate in an aggressive and unsustainable way. This looks like too much exercise, eating too little, or both. It is one thing to make wholesale changes to your lifestyle, it is a whole other thing to make long term sustainable changes to your body composition.
For context everyone is different and there is no universally accepted plan we can take. If you have been at a certain body mass or body fat level for an extended period of time, your body will have built in mechanisms to stay at that body mass. If you have been overeating and were sedentary for extended periods of time, you will struggle to eat less and exercise consistently from a psychological standpoint.
Just like we talk about in training - small incremental changes over an extended period of time make the most meaningful difference. So we start by decreasing calories incrementally over time where it does not feel overly impactful. You have to be realistic about expectations, because you are going to be asked to count how many calories you are eating in a day. That will come with planning and tracking - for some this could be a huge challenge. So a small drop in calories with the workload of tracking what and when you eat will be the platform.
We start everyone at this for calories:
Lose Weight - Body Mass x 12-14
Maintain Weight - Body Mass x14-16
Gain Weight - Body Mass x16-18
This will more than likely put you in a deficit or excess in terms of calories. This is then followed by how those calories are broken down. This is where macronutrients (protein, fats, carbs) come in. We want to keep this as simple as possible, but it helps to know how many calories we are getting from what. A gram of carbs and protein are 4 calories, and a gram of fat is 9 calories. This matters a great deal when we are targeting a certain calorie amount if we are getting more than double the amount of calories per gram of fat compared to carbs and protein.
All of our members are strength training 3-4x a week. So with that being said we want to encourage people to eat more protein. Our recommendation is 1g/lb of body mass. We simply subtract that from the total calories you have to eat in a day based on your goal and focus then on adjusting your carb and fat intake. Generally, people that need to lose weight have some glucose dysregulation, so we decrease carbohydrates and raise fat here. People that want to gain weight can benefit from increased carbohydrates and its impact on replenishing glycogen (storage form of glucose in muscle) and increase protein synthesis.
Again, this is all a starting point. There will be a lot of constant revision and tweaks to keep progress going in the right direction. This is never a finished product. If you are on Blueprint at this point, we are in the thick of meeting now weekly. Seeing progress from certain calorie or macronutrient amounts and making adjustments as necessary.
This is also not a year-round strategy. You are focused on Habits year round, and from time to time dialing in how much and what you are eating. This could be a couple times a year or as little as one time a year. The thought with the more times you do it, it will become more second nature and you will do this intuitively without thought. Over a long period of time you will benefit from having control of what you are eating and therefore manage your body mass and body composition.
Dial-in Calories and Macronutrients When You Have the Motivation and Incentive