09/10/2020
Welcome back, let’s talk about diet! A healthy inside makes a healthy outside. One of the most important keys to success in your fitness journey is diet. Like it or not, diet can make or break your results even if you have the greatest workout plan in the world. A high percentage of your fitness progress when trying lose, gain, or maintain weight comes from how well and how much you eat.
Counting calories and measuring how much nutrients you take in daily can be a very tedious task, I definitely agree. But there are many available tools to help keep you on track with your diet and even make these tasks easier. One platform I use and recommend my personal training clients to use is the app “Myfitnesspal”. It has a fairly straight forward sign up process that is quick and it has an easy to use format for keeping up with your caloric intake.
Calories are used to measure the energy value of food. So an important step in determining your diet is to decide how many calories your body burns a day (including physical activity). This measurement is known as your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) and can be calculated using your age, weight, height, daily activity, and body fat percentage. Below I have linked a website that allows you to input those values so that you may find your TDEE, along with other useful information. With TDEE readily available you can now determine how many calories you should intake a day based on your goals. If your goal is to lose weight you should intake less calories than your TDEE, to gain weight you should intake more calories than your TDEE, and to maintain weight you should intake around the same amount of calories as your TDEE.
The question now becomes how many calories you should intake away from your TDEE value. My recommendation is to never consistently go below or above 500 calories from your TDEE. This may dispel many popular fab diets or dieting schemes but my reasoning behind this is purely scientific. A diet that goes below below 500 calories of your TDEE or basal metabolic rate (BMR) can cause malnutrition issues, meaning you are getting the necessary nutrients you need to be healthy. Malnutrition can be the unidentified cause behind many issues in your physical and mental health (you’d be surprised of what a consistent lack of one micronutrient can do). A diet that goes 500 calories above TDEE or BMR can simply be a waste of nutrients. A portion of the nutrients taken in above what the body needs may be stored for later use but the remaining nutrients will be disposed of out of the body providing no extra benefits. Dietary protein for example does not provide any extra benefits beyond what your body can utilize at one point in time.
Disclaimer that this is a basic guideline for the general public so there can be exceptions for particular populations such as ultra athletes or people with special nutritional needs. You should always consult your doctor and a registered dietitian for specific dietary needs.
Hope this gives you some insight into planning your own diet! Feel free to drop any questions, comments, or additional knowledge!
https://tdeecalculator.net/
Peace!
