The different Beachbody programs all come with their own Meal Plans. 21 Day Fix in particular has an awesome meal plan, and people have a lot of success with it. In general, I recommend tracking your food with MyFitness Pal. It does a couple things. First, it educates you quickly about the food you’re eating. It’s often surprising what we find when we start tracking the food. Second, as you go through your fitness journey, you’re going to have sticking points. A period where you just don’t feel like you’re seeing the results. Tracking and monitoring your food, will help you to see how to adjust during those sticking points and get the results moving in the direction of your goals again.
Fat Shredder is a name P90X put out with their meal plan for people that want to lose weight. For your macro nutrients, you use a ratio of 50% Proteins, 30% Carbohydrates, and 20% Fat. The idea here is that you’re optimizing the bodies potential to lose weight, but still giving it the energy it needs to handle your workouts and daily activity. There’s different rules of thumb, but here’s some basics to get you started.
These aren’t perfect equations, but hopefully they’ll get you off on the right foot. If you’re a guy and need to lose 20-30lbs, I recommend a 1900 calorie daily budget. If you need to lose 50lbs+ I would recommend 2400 calories. We want to keep your energy levels up, and we want you to be able to sustain the success over a long period of time so you can drop all the weight off and keep it that way. So a 1900 calorie budget for someone who needs to lose 50lbs+ will definitely speed up the weight loss, but we want lasting results here. I would encourage you to try the 2400 calorie budget first and see how you feel.
For ladies, I recommend 1200-1400 calories. I would encourage you to start out at 1400 calories, and see how it goes. You can always scale back if you aren’t seeing the results you want to see.
Wherever you find yourself, the Ratios are the same. 50% protein, 30% carbohydrates, and 20% fat. You would stay on this plan until you’re very near your goal weight, at which time you would transition to a bigger daily calorie budget, and a different ratio of macros. If you’re already super fit, you’ll want a different ratio of macro nutrients. I’ll talk about that in another post, but since most of us want to lose initially, I wanted to start with the Fat Shredder plan.
A word of caution. A lot of people are poor eaters when they start out. Here’s what I mean. They’ll skip breakfast, maybe have an apple for lunch and then eat dinner. If you’re eating 400-500 calories a day right now, which is way too low, then jumping to 1400 calories overnight will cause you to gain weight. You need to give your body time to adapt. I would recommend getting in 3 meals to get your metabolism going again, but slowly increase your calorie intake over several weeks. Say for example you discover you’re currently eating 500 calories a day. Then maybe increase to 700 calories week 1, then to 900 calories in week 2, and so on until you’re comfortably eating 1400 calories.
There’s lots more to this concept, than we have time to dive into today. But you’re body needs time to adapt. If you haven’t been eating a lot you need to give your body a chance to adapt to more food intake. Good luck, and let me know how I can help.
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