Alright! 3 posts in and you are well on your way towards the beautiful, lean, muscular physique you desire! Today’s installment will look at interpreting the results of your week long calorie counting experience.
Upon completion of 1-2 weeks of calorie counting, did you find that you either routinely consume more or less than your maintenance caloric needs? Interestingly BOTH could account for a less than lean physique.
EATING MORE THAN MAINTENANCE: Eat less. This is pretty simple; start by cutting your daily calorie intake by 500 calories & track your weight for 1-2 weeks. If still not losing, cut an additional 500 calories per day.
EATING LESS THAN MAINTENANCE: This is a bit more complicated; you’re either overestimating your activity level, underestimating your food intake, or your metabolism needs a tune up. If your goal is weight gain, this becomes easy; eat more!
More often than not, its option 1 or 2 above. People are horrible at estimating their food intake without measurements, and calorie expenditure estimates are way too generous. Go back & weigh/measure everything you eat honestly; don't let a lack of attention to detail derail your fat loss efforts!
If you would classify yourself as a perpetual dieter, someone who is always on/off a diet, or someone who has lost a lot of weight, there is a good chance that you’ve slowed your metabolism somewhat. This doesn’t make it impossible to lose weight, just incredibly difficult!
Even if you don’t meet the above listed criteria, if you’re having trouble losing fat, it’s likely that a metabolic tune up would help. More on Metabolic Tune ups in a future post.
Most of you fell into the eating more than maintenance category if you were honest with yourself & measured/weighed all your food. People ACTUALLY eating less than their estimated maintenance needs and NOT losing weight are rare, very rare. Equally rare are genetic metabolism problems.
So start with your own numbers; decrease your caloric intake 500 calories below maintenance to lose weight, 500 calories above it to gain. Track everything to determine how well this level works & adjust. If two weeks eating 500 calories per day less than maintenance causes no fat loss, try two weeks 750 calories below. Still no loss? Two more weeks 1000 calories below maintenance or 1200 calories, whichever is higher. (I'll explain this next post).
If at this point you truly believe that you’ve been honest with your food intake, measurements & weighing, and have still not lost weight, you fit into the small category of slowed metabolisms & are in need of a metabolic tune up.
That’s all for this post, I want to stop here & pick up next time on how exercise affects all of this, before writing on how to speed up a slowed metabolism, how to use forbidden junk foods to boost fat loss and finally how to plan & implement exercise to get the most outstanding results in your physique transformation.
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