Compare your estimated TDEE to how much you’ve been eating in the past
In order to know where you should begin on your new nutrition program, you need to know how
many calories you were consuming before. Majority of people don't have any idea about how many
calories they eat daily. If you are one of those, then it’s time to start the new positive habit of calorie counting!
Before you make any large changes to the quantity of food you’re currently eating, you need to figure
out exactly how many calories you’ve been eating on average over the past few months. Try to remember
a recent “typical” day of eating and write down everything you ate that day; from the time you got up in
the morning to the time you went to sleep at night. Don’t neglect the little things like sauces, the milk in
your coffee, the sports drink during your exercise, a relaxing beer or late snacks.
Then, go write them down and add everything up. (There are plenty of websites where you can search
a food and keep a good diary of your meals.). If your food intake varies daily and you don’t have a
"normal" day, then you should write down three days worth of recent meals, add them up and divide
by three to get a daily average. After you’ve summed it all up you may be surprised (often unpleasantly)
at the amount you've been eating.
Make it a discipline to learn the calorie values of all the foods you eat on a regularly and memorize them. There are probably only about 10-15 or so of those foods. For foods you eat more rarely, have your
calorie counter site handy to look them up.
Adjust your calories gradually when necessary
It’s not recommended to make dramatic changes to your caloric intake all at once. When you’ve done
all your calorie calculations and found out your optimal calorie level to reach your goals, compare that amount to what you’ve been eating on average over the past few months.
If your current caloric intake has been much higher or lower than your newly established target amount,
then you may need to adjust your calories gradually. For example, if your optimal caloric intake would
be 2600 calories per day, but you’ve only been eating two meals adding only 1500 calories per day for
the past year, your metabolisc rate may be very slow from the low meal frequency and a large calorie
deficit sustained for so long. An immediate hop to 2600 calories per day might cause a gain in body fat because your body has adapted to the low caloric intake. A sudden increase would create a temporary surplus.
The best way to go would be to increase your calories little by little, from 1500 to 2600 over a period of many weeks to allow your metabolic rate to gradually catch up and increase it's rate. Simply said, you
only need to eat the same foods and the same number of meals, but gradually increase your portions to
let your body get accustomed to larger number of calories.
This also works in reverse; if you’re eating much more than your recommended amount, it may be better
to gradually reduce your calories than to drop them suddenly. Cutting too many calories too quickly usually causes diet relapses because the change is too drastic for some people to handle physically and psychologically.
Keeping a nutrition journal: Read the nutrition labels, count calories, and weigh or measure everything…at least once!
When starting your new nutrition program, I strongly suggest you to keep a "daily nutrition journal" in
which you keep track of your calories and foods and other important nutrition information. . Those
calorie counting sites have very good and simple journals to keep track of your calories.
If you’re not so familiar with calories, you may want to keep a detailed nutrition journal at least once for
a period of 1-3 months. After you’ve done this, you've gained a new perspective on calories that will
stay with you for the rest of your life.
Get yourself a good kitchen scale and get a complete set of measuring cups. For any packaged foods
that you don’t know the caloric value of by memory, read the “Nutrition Facts” panel on the label.
For produce and natural foods that don't come with labels (vegetables, fruits, etc), use your calorie
website to look up the food values.
Is all this calorie counting really necessary or could you just count “portions”?
Some people say that calorie counting is not practical. Instead they insist that you should be counting
your “portions.” Controlling portion sizes instead of calories is a good start, but as nutrition expert
Ian King has once said, “Any discussion about optimal calorie intake is really a total waste of time -
unless you are actually counting the calories!”
In his book, “Everything You Need to Know About Fat Loss,” Chris Aceto, one of the top bodybuilding nutritionists in the world, said, “I feel that number crunching is a very important part of learning about nutrition. You will never be able to build an exact diet, one that really works, and one that is built
especially for you without knowing how to count calories, carbohydrates, protein and fat.”
Chris is right. Although genetically gifted bodybuilders and fitness competitors can just guess at
everything and get positive results. But almost every top-level physique athlete in the world
religiously counts calories. They don't leave anything to chance and there's no reason why
you should either. This is especially true during times when you’re working hard on achieving a
major goal, whether it’s a competition or losing 5% body fat for vacation.
If you don’t become familiar with the calorie content of your daily foods and keep a nutrition journal
at least once, then I can safely say you’re not just serious about your goals - you’re just taking guesses! Once you’ve completed your nutrition journal at least once, you’ll be able to at least make an educated estimate of your caloric intake from that point onward.
A simple way to make this process quick and easy is to write out your menu on an Excel spreadsheet
with all your calorie and macronutrient totals calculated, and then tape it to your refrigerator. If you have
the same basic menu every day, or close to it, then there’s no more calorie counting to be done – you
only need to do it just once to set up your initial menu.
Considering from a practical standpoint, eating the same meals every day takes the painstaking daily
calorie counting completely out of the picture. However, looking this from nutritional perspective,
it’s a good idea to eat a wide variety of foods over the course of every week so you'll get
the complete set of vitamins, minerals, fiber and other important nutrients that are necessary
for optimal health and body composition.
With the "exchange system" you will learn about in my future posts (link will be added here later) , you
will discover that substituting food items are quite simple. Using the exchange system guidelines will allow
you to closely and easily monitor your calorie levels even when you differentiate from your regular meals.
If you really enjoy the variety, you can create a few days or even a whole week of menus and rotate them.
I’ve never heard of anyone who got bored or who failed to obtain a sufficient variety of foods by creating three or four days worth of menus. So as you see, calorie counting will require only a little bit of work and discipline in the beginning, but once your menus have been worked up on a spreadsheet, making exchanges is a simple task and there’s really nothing complicated about it!
Counting calories is a discipline that really pays itself!
Although it’s clearly not necessary to write down the calorie amounts of every little crumb that goes
in your mouth every day for the remaining of your life, it’s still important that you understand the law
of calorie balance and you always have at least an estimated figure of your current daily caloric intake.
When you’re only guessing and you don’t have the smallest clue about how much you’re eating, you
could actually be way off in your calories; eiher too much below or too muh above. If you find yourself making no progress, this lack of attention to detail might be the only factor holding you back. Do you
really want to take that chance?
In conclusion, if you decide to track your calories carefully, it should depend on your results. Results are
the ones that count. Counting portions and guessing is fine ONLY if you’re getting the results you want! If you’re losing body fat while maintaining muscle mass even without counting calories, then keep doing what you’re doing. However, most people who neglect to count calories are NOT getting the results they want because they are guessing, which simply suggests a lack of discipline.
You may not consider counting calories and playing with numbers fun or easy, and you might not feel
like doing it. However, calorie counting is a discipline just like anything else related to fat loss and fitness.
The best definition of discipline I’ve ever read was by achievement expert Brian Tracy, who said:
“Discipline is doing what is hard and necessary rather than what is fun and easy and doing it
when it’s necessary, whether you feel like doing it or not.”
So when you are looking for the best results, then get to your preferred calorie counting website and
take out your measuring cups, scale, daily nutrition diary (or spreadsheet) and get counting!
In the future posts to come, get ready to learn about more disciplines you’ll want to adopt in order to cut your body fat levels to ridiculously low, revealing the amazing muscle definition you’ve always wanted!
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