Creating your diet
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The first step in personalizing a nutrition plan for yourself is to calculate how many calories you burn in a day. The number of calories you burn in a day is what’s known as your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE). This is known as your "maintenance level", this number will give you a reference point for your diet.
But before we can get that number, we have to calculate your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR). Your BMR is the energy required to maintain vital body functions, including respiration, heart rate, body temperature and blood pressure, while the body is at rest in a post-absorptive state. (That means that the digestive system is inactive, requiring about twelve hours of fasting.) The next step is to adjust your calories to fit your goal. If your goal is to keep your weight at its current level, you should remain at your daily caloric maintenance level. To lose weight, you need to reduce the amount of calories you eat below your maintenance level. (Adding exercise to your routine also helps this calorie deficit) To gain weight, you need to increase your calories above your maintenance level. Whether you are trying to gain or lose weight, it’s important to maintain a balance of nutrients in your diet. To calculate potential weight loss, a caloric deficit of 3,500 calories is equal to one pound weight loss. So this means that if you create a 500 calorie deficit per day you will lose one pound per week. Remember, calories burned during exercise factor into this equation! These calculations for finding your correct caloric intake are just estimates to give you a starting point. You should monitor your progress to make sure that this is the proper level for you. You will know if you’re at the right level by keeping track of your caloric intake, your body weight and your body fat percentage. If you don't see the results you expect, adjust your caloric intake and exercise levels accordingly. The bottom line is that it’s not effective reducing calories to very low levels in order to lose fat. The best approach is to reduce calories only slightly and raise your daily calorie expenditure by increasing your frequency, duration and or intensity of exercise. |
You will find that most diet plans recommend specific proportions of the three macronutrients. Keep in mind that any diet plan proposing extremely low proportions of any of the three macronutrients may be designed for quick weight loss and have little chance of long-term success. People often find that they tire of eating in such extremes and quit, rendering their diet a failure.
For the average person trying to be healthy, lose weight healthy, and have a diet that's long term and not some fad diet that will quickly help you loose weight just to have you fail and fall back and end up worse. This is about lifestyle changes. It took many years to create the bad habits from bad teaching. Don't be mad at your parents, they just believed in the companies and government who allowed the garbage to be put into our foods. We're going to go with a ratio of 30% protein, 50% fat, 20% carbohydrates. In time, you'd like to get it down to 1 gram of protein to every pound of lean muscle weight, get the carbs as low as possible, and the rest is fat. Now, you can get to the end in a couple weeks and you'll be in nutritional ketosis. The only problem is that it can be a tough time for some. I like the idea of introducing a nutritional ketosis state to people slowly. We have been living a high carb diet for too many years and I believe to minimize on irregular body functions and discomfort, take it slow. Okay, it's time to convert your percentages to grams. Once you have determined the macronutrient percentages, it's easy to calculate how many grams of each macronutrient you should be eating. Converting the percentages to grams. Throughout the day, you might eat items that has nutritional facts and you might want to see how many protein, fat, or carb calories there are. |
