Since I get a lot of questions to the tune of “how do I know what to eat?“, I decided to cover the subject again in today’s Newsletter even though I covered this topic at greater length in a previous article I wrote for Muscle & Fitness but this being the age of Facebook & cliff-notes, I’ll summarize it once more.
Beware: This will be a more “tough love” style newsletter, so if you’re feeling a bit on the sensitive side you may want to stop reading now.
First and foremost, let me break down what matters or why people fail:
Fallacy number 1: I watch what I eat… Bullshit! If you do not weigh your foods, you have no idea how many calories you are consuming!
Fallacy number 2: I eat healthy. See above. While I agree that its easier to overeat junk food over healthy foods you can still drown in olive oil (calorically speaking)
Here are the determining factors when trying to look fabulous:
- Calories in vs. calories out: 40%
- Macro nutrient breakdown a.k.a. how many grams of protein, carbs and fat do I need : 40%
- Nutrient timing or when do I eat what?: 10%
- Food quality which would be organic vs. conventionally grown produce, local foods vs. imported etc: 5%
- Supplements: 5%
Most trainees are overly focused on points 4 and 5, thereby setting themselves up for failure.
To Reiterate: if you do not count your calories you will gain body fat even if you only eat organically grown nuts, that where harvested by happy, unionized farmers and from sustainable trees. The end.
How to set up the caloric needs?
It is really simple: Take your goal body weight in lbs (goal weight) times 8 or 9 (if you are more sedentary person or a female) 10-11 (if you are in hard training and/or a male)
+ hours of weekly training.
Example: if you want to weigh 200 lbs as a male and train 4 hours a week =
200x (10+4) = 2800 calories a day
Next step: Macro-nutrients
Protein: Comes in at one gram per pound of body weight, in our example it would be 200 grams at 4 calories a gram = 800 calories.
Carbs: We’ll start with 1.5 grams per lbs body weight, so that would be 300 grams equaling 1200 calories since carbohydrates also come at 4 calories per gram.
800 + 1200 = 2000 calories have been spent. If you are trying to gain weight, you would increase the amount of carbs to 2 grams per lbs of body weight.
The remaining calories will come from fat. For that, we’ll simply divide the 800 calories we have left by 9 (since fat clocks in at nine calories per gram), and our hypothetical athlete gets to eat about 90 grams of fat a day…
Yes, setting up your diet will require some basic math and planning and no you do not have to do it. But be aware that your outcome will be sub par at best if you are not willing to put in the effort.
Lastly, guys I need your help! If you found this information useful please forward or share it with friends, co-workers etc. There is a ton of bad information out there and I am doing my best to dispel it but I can’t do it alone!