If you’re serious about getting in the best shape of your life, this isn’t negotiable. You have to track your food. Yes, you can eat and be healthy without tracking your caloric intake, but if you want to maximize your results then you have to track what you eat.
There’s so many diet/nutrition plans out there, metabolism resets, and meal replacements. It’s tough to make heads or tails of it all and figure out how to get in shape. Weight loss, and weight gain is very simple math. I know that sounds crazy, but it really is.
Calories are simply energy the body gets from food you eat. If you eat more calories than you need, the body stores the calories as fat. If you eat less calories than you need, than the body burns the fat for energy. Sure, there’s more to it, but at a very basic level this is how the body works.
So if you want to lose weight, you need to burn more calories than you eat. See our Fat Shredder post, for advice on starting calorie budgets and Marco Nutrient Ratios. If you consistently burn more calories than you eat, you’ll lose weight.
In MyFitnessPal, it actually tells you after you close your Food Diary each day, ‘if you eat like this every day, you’ll lose xlbs by ‘some future date.’ It’s not glamorous or flashy like some of the things you see on TV, but it works.
The next thing you need to understand is your Macro Nutrients. Proteins, Carbohydrates and Fat. These are the forms of energy that we take in from food. Depending on our fitness goals, we’ll eat a different ratio of Macro Nutrients. On the Fat Shredder, you’ll eat 50% protein, 30% carbohydrates, and 20% fat.
If you’re at your goal weight, but maybe not as shredded as you want to be, you’ll eat at a 40% protein, 40% carbohydrate and 20% fat. If you’re a super charged athlete, trying to maintain peak performance you may eat 50% carbohydrates. Whatever the ratio, the goal is the same; to maximize your fitness results.
If you’re on the Fat Shredder, you may eat 1900 calories, but find that your fat ratio at the end of the day was 40%. My husband hit a sticking point, and was real frustrated. He noticed a couple of the protein sources he was eating that week had unusual fat levels in them. He was well above his fat budget for over a week. He changed to leaner protein sources and started dropping weight again almost immediately.
Lastly, there’s sort of two camps out there. Eat Clean & If It Fits in Your Macros (IIFYM). Paleo is a great example of the Eat Clean camp. Paleo enthusiast argue that if you are eating Paleo you can eat as much as you like, and just let your body tell you when you’re full. The IIFYM camp tends to say, as long as it’s in your macros you’ll hit you goals. I guess, but that doesn’t necessarily create optimism health. I favor a hybrid of both.
I want to make good healthy eating decisions as often as I can. But once in a while, when I have that cookie, or piece of pizza I just adjust my meals the rest of the day to come as close as I can to my Macro goals for the day. I’ve found that to be a good sustainable balance I can stick to for a long time.
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