Soldato
- Joined
- 17 Jun 2010
- Posts
- 12,491
- Location
- London
It's similar to quark - low carb/fat high protein but more like greek Yoghurt.
The quickest way to work out calories for weight loss is bw in lbs x8-10 - the more inactive you are outside the gym (lifting doesn't burn that much anyway) the closer to 8 you'll have to be. Someone who drives to work and sits at a desk all day will have to go lower than someone who is on their feet for their job or even someone who walks as part of their commute all body stats being the same. There are fancy calculators like this one but even then it's just a starting point.
This is the the simplest means of setting macros (don't worry too much about what the calculator says for p/c/f):
Protein = 1-1.4g per lb of lean bodyweight (you should have a rough idea of your body fat %, if not just google some body fat % in pictures tables)
Fat = 15-25% of calories
Carbs = the rest
A 500 calorie deficit off maint. is a good place to start, then you can adjust as necessary based on how quickly/slowly you lose weight. A sensible average is 0.5-1% loss of total bodyweight a week as this will help minimise the chances of any of your losses coming from muscle (although the most important thing is to keep lifting what you were lifting before the diet started). Starting out, aim for 1% then taper down if you're planning on finishing your diet really lean. So if you were 190lbs, 25% bf and had a TDEE of say, 2500 cals (just throwing a figure out of thin air) and were starting your diet on 2000 calories, then it could be something like this:
Protein 140g
Fat 50g
Carbs 245g
IMO most people will do best going for ranges - that is aim to hit whatever calories you've got accurately, but be a little flexible in how you get there by aiming to hit a minimum target for protein/fat. So using the above examples, protein minimum would be 140g and could go as high as 200g, fat 33g-56g (33g sounds low but in reality you'll probably be dieting on more than 2000 cals so it'd be higher). You can also allow a 10g margin for error with protein/carb and maybe 5g for fat because tracking is inherently inaccurate anyway (food labels are allowed to have a margin of error, no two items of the same food will be identical nutrition wise etc). The obvious caveat is that if you go higher on protein you'll end up taking carbs away (a 1-1 swap as both are 4 calories per gram where as fat is 9 cals/gram) and carbs when dieting are always your friend!
What you'll probably find is that due to your own dietary preferences, you will veer towards certain meals and foods so unless you have a day when you're feeling the need to blow a load of your carbs/fat on pizza and have to eat chicken salad and whey you'll end up with similar numbers most days. You'll also find once you've been tracking for a couple of weeks, you get to know what kind of food combinations work for your numbers. Most people I know fall into two camps:
1) they count as they go along
2) they plan ahead
I find 2) less of a headache - it takes me 5-10mins a day to plan for the next day's food and is low stress. Put down the macros for dinner, then lunch as these will have the primary protein sources, then pad out the rest of the carbs/fat/secondary protein sources (e.g. 100g of oats will have 9-10g of protein in). Using things like MyFitnessPal or MyMacros+ makes doing things like this easy since it does all the adding up for you.
Cardio isn't required unless you enjoy doing it. It can be used as a tool to allow you to eat more if that helps with adherence, or as a means of creating a bigger deficit if you find you can't bear the thought of eating even less when results slow/stall.
The quickest way to work out calories for weight loss is bw in lbs x8-10 - the more inactive you are outside the gym (lifting doesn't burn that much anyway) the closer to 8 you'll have to be. Someone who drives to work and sits at a desk all day will have to go lower than someone who is on their feet for their job or even someone who walks as part of their commute all body stats being the same. There are fancy calculators like this one but even then it's just a starting point.
This is the the simplest means of setting macros (don't worry too much about what the calculator says for p/c/f):
Protein = 1-1.4g per lb of lean bodyweight (you should have a rough idea of your body fat %, if not just google some body fat % in pictures tables)
Fat = 15-25% of calories
Carbs = the rest
A 500 calorie deficit off maint. is a good place to start, then you can adjust as necessary based on how quickly/slowly you lose weight. A sensible average is 0.5-1% loss of total bodyweight a week as this will help minimise the chances of any of your losses coming from muscle (although the most important thing is to keep lifting what you were lifting before the diet started). Starting out, aim for 1% then taper down if you're planning on finishing your diet really lean. So if you were 190lbs, 25% bf and had a TDEE of say, 2500 cals (just throwing a figure out of thin air) and were starting your diet on 2000 calories, then it could be something like this:
Protein 140g
Fat 50g
Carbs 245g
IMO most people will do best going for ranges - that is aim to hit whatever calories you've got accurately, but be a little flexible in how you get there by aiming to hit a minimum target for protein/fat. So using the above examples, protein minimum would be 140g and could go as high as 200g, fat 33g-56g (33g sounds low but in reality you'll probably be dieting on more than 2000 cals so it'd be higher). You can also allow a 10g margin for error with protein/carb and maybe 5g for fat because tracking is inherently inaccurate anyway (food labels are allowed to have a margin of error, no two items of the same food will be identical nutrition wise etc). The obvious caveat is that if you go higher on protein you'll end up taking carbs away (a 1-1 swap as both are 4 calories per gram where as fat is 9 cals/gram) and carbs when dieting are always your friend!
What you'll probably find is that due to your own dietary preferences, you will veer towards certain meals and foods so unless you have a day when you're feeling the need to blow a load of your carbs/fat on pizza and have to eat chicken salad and whey you'll end up with similar numbers most days. You'll also find once you've been tracking for a couple of weeks, you get to know what kind of food combinations work for your numbers. Most people I know fall into two camps:
1) they count as they go along
2) they plan ahead
I find 2) less of a headache - it takes me 5-10mins a day to plan for the next day's food and is low stress. Put down the macros for dinner, then lunch as these will have the primary protein sources, then pad out the rest of the carbs/fat/secondary protein sources (e.g. 100g of oats will have 9-10g of protein in). Using things like MyFitnessPal or MyMacros+ makes doing things like this easy since it does all the adding up for you.
Cardio isn't required unless you enjoy doing it. It can be used as a tool to allow you to eat more if that helps with adherence, or as a means of creating a bigger deficit if you find you can't bear the thought of eating even less when results slow/stall.
I'd recommend it to raw benchers, there's so many different ways to use it to help your bench.
will work on it
