So this is where you should be right about now….
There are two main objectives to achieve and work on for the next week:
1. Know your goals and develop a plan.
2. Count your calories and track them in fitday (of course, no one is forcing you but if you don’t track, you can’t figure out where things are going wrong later.
Goals – you now know your starting weight and estimated body fat %.
Lets start out by determining what your daily maintenance calories are by using the link to the right under “Health Calculators” – “Basal Metabolic Rate Calculator” – mine comes up as 1386.65 calories per day assuming a bedridden state. To get the basic estimate of my daily calories needs based on activity use the link for the BMR Multiplier (which is right under the link for Basal Metabolic Rate Calculator.) I would guess my activity matches #2 “lightly active – light exercise 1-3 days per week.” The multiplier at this level is 1.375. 1386.65 * 1.375 = 1906.64. This is what I can eat every day and stay the same as I am now.
Now you need to decide what range of body fat you are going to aim for – 15? 20? (Note: If you think you may want to gain muscle – lose a reasonable amount of fat, say down to 12 for men, and then you want to switch to a bulking diet – roughly a 20% calorie surplus based on your size at that time, then cut again for fat, etc.)This is your end goal (and maybe not doable in 12 weeks, but that’s okay.) I’ll use myself as an example. I am aiming for 20% body fat and have a lean body mass of 90lbs. Using the equation [Goal weight = current lean body mass/(1-goal body fat percentage as a decimal)] I can see my goal is 112 = 90/(1-.20) a difference of 20lbs. Now the maximum I should try to lose is 1% of my total weight of 132lbs per week. That’s 1.32lbs. As we’ve discussed before 1lb = 3500 calories. 1.32 lbs = 3500 * 1.32 = 4620 calorie weekly deficit. Divide by 7 to get a daily deficit = 660.
So my daily maximum intake has already been calculated to be 1906 calories. My daily deficit needs to be 660 calories. So the question is, how do I want to do this? Through diet alone? This leaves me eating 1246 calories per day. This is pretty much what I am doing. Say though, I had a projected larger deficit I needed to meet (based on being taller…). It would make more sense to add in additional activity to free up additional calories I can eat. This is where using the Calories Burned Calculator comes into play. Plug in your info and then think about what you might reasonably commit to doing. Walking 3mph for 30min once per day? That’s 96 calories for me. Just don’t overdo it and don’t over estimate how many calories you are burning.
This is your basic plan.
The next step is to figure out what you can eat to stay in line with your daily calorie requirements. Remember, one serving lean protein and three veggies per meal as a starting option. No matter what you chose, log it all in fitday. Fitday will calculate everything for you and create cool graphs. We like graphs. And data. Charts….mmmmm….
Next week is about fine tuning and getting comfortable with your plan.
