It’s one of the most important yet confusing aspects of the weight loss dilemma…the diet. You can out-diet a bad training program but you can’t out-train a bad diet.
There’s really no way around it, if you want to lose weight you have to diet and you have to stay consistent. People will often seek out trainers and diet gurus to create a plan for them to follow and take out the guess work. That’s fine and dandy but what happens when you either can’t afford a trainer or don’t have time in your hectic schedule and you start to panic? I’ll tell you what happens, you’re going to rev the search engines rabidly looking for a solution. Problem with that is most of the information out there now gives you templated diets to follow or various random tips that may or may not help you on your weight loss journey. Also, the do-it-yourself products that are out there can be really confusing for YOU, the guy or girl just looking to drop weight without any background knowledge on how a diet works and how to set one up properly that will work for you!
That, my friends, is where I come in. I have helped several hundred clients lose weight via a two-pronged protocol of diet and training. In this article I am going to go through each step of how to setup your own weight loss diet that your trainer doesn’t want you to know. So read on and get ready to melt the fat off!
Alright so there are 5 steps to setting up your diet. So let’s jump right into it…
- Find your maintenance level
- Maintenance level is the amount of calories you would need to consume daily to “maintain” your current body weight. To do this you have to…
- Track your food intake for 3-5 days without changing anything! This means eat normally as you have been without thinking about dieting or wanting to diet. The only thing you will be doing is recording what you eat. This data will be invaluable going forward
- Go to myfitnesspal.com, setup an account and start tracking your food for 3 days. I have posted a few screenshots below to help guide you on how to do this…
- Track your food intake for 3-5 days without changing anything! This means eat normally as you have been without thinking about dieting or wanting to diet. The only thing you will be doing is recording what you eat. This data will be invaluable going forward
- Maintenance level is the amount of calories you would need to consume daily to “maintain” your current body weight. To do this you have to…
Sign-up
- Go to the Food tab once sign-up
Click on “Add Food” to input your food that you ate for the given meals listed
When done should look something like this
Note my total calories and macronutrients (carbs, protein, fats)-will discuss this more later…
Do this for 3-5days and you will be able to move on to step 2
- Average your daily calorie to find maintenance level
- So let’s say that you tracked your food for 3 days and day 1 was like the one in the photos. Day 2 was a Sunday lunch with friends so a bit higher in calories (2300) and day 3 was very low due to busy day at work on Monday (1700).
- Next up is to average them out to find your maintenance level. 2100+2300+1700= 6100. Divide this by how many days you tracked for (in this case 3). 6100/3 = 2033 calories. So your average caloric intake is 2000 calories so this means you would need to eat this amount to maintain your weight.
- Determine your Macro-Ratio
- Macros are your carbs, protein and fats. A macro ratio is the %’s of these components that make up your total daily calories. For example in the photos, our macros were roughly 200g carbs, 200g protein and 60g fat. If scientifically, a gram of carbs and protein = 4 calories and a gram of fat is = 9calories you can do some basic math with a calculator. 200g carbs x 4 calories/g = 800 calories of carbs that make up the 2000 total calories. Same goes for the protein as it is also 4 calories per gram. For fat 60g fat x 9 calories/g = 540 calories that make up the 2000 calories.
- Step a) explains how the macros make up the calories but now we will look at how to figure out the % and thus the ratios
- 800 calories of carbs / 2000 total calories = 0.4 or 40% carbs. Same goes for protein since carbs and protein are both 800 calories in this example. The fats are however, 540 calories of fats/ 2000 total calories = 0.27 or 27% (I know, I know, 27+40+40 doesn’t = 100. I rounded for the calories and macros so in a perfect world this would be 20%)
- So there you have it. A 40C/40P/20F macro ratio. This is the most typical and common ratio for a fitness diet so we will move on to step 4.
- Enter into a caloric deficit to start losing weight
- Now we have your maintenance level and macro ratio: 2000 calories @ 40% carbs, 40% protein, 20% fats. Next up reduce calories to initiate weight loss.
- I recommend reducing calories by 10% to see if you can lose weight off of that. The goal is to reduce as few calories as possible to avoid slowing the metabolism due to too eating too little.
- In this example 10% of 2000 is 200 so we will drop our calories to 1800 to begin the diet.
- I also recommend staying at the same macro ratio for as long as possible due to the fact your body is accustomed to partitioning nutrients in such a portioned way and changing too drastically too fast could hurt more than help.
- Move on to the last step. Step 5
- Use My Fitness Pal to track your diet so you can systematically and accurately record your progress.
- If you hit a plateau here’s what to do
- If at the same weight for 2 weeks, simply reduce your calories by another 10-20% from where they currently are and try again
- Slightly re-adjust your macro ratio to a more efficient fat-burning ratio. ONLY do this if you hit a plateau.
- Ex: 40c/40p/20f to a 35c/45p/20f. This can be done inside the my fitness pal app under the “Goals” tab.
- If you hit a plateau here’s what to do
- I recommend reducing calories by 10% to see if you can lose weight off of that. The goal is to reduce as few calories as possible to avoid slowing the metabolism due to too eating too little.
- Now we have your maintenance level and macro ratio: 2000 calories @ 40% carbs, 40% protein, 20% fats. Next up reduce calories to initiate weight loss.
- 800 calories of carbs / 2000 total calories = 0.4 or 40% carbs. Same goes for protein since carbs and protein are both 800 calories in this example. The fats are however, 540 calories of fats/ 2000 total calories = 0.27 or 27% (I know, I know, 27+40+40 doesn’t = 100. I rounded for the calories and macros so in a perfect world this would be 20%)
- Ask me for help! That is why I am here to help you so feel free to leave a comment, or send me a message.
- Hire a diet coach. I do offer online diet coaching which will easily help you melt off the weight so long as you are willing to stick to the diet and remain consistent
- Take a 2-3 day diet break to give your metabolism a kick start. Don’t go overboard and feast on everything in sight but do eat an extra serving or decent sized meal to re-energize the system as a whole.
So there you have it! A systematic, simple yet highly effective way to set up your own diet plan. The type of satisfaction you will get from doing it yourself and getting the results you want will be priceless. However, you are not alone. Feel free to engage with others and motivate one another or ask me for help and I’d be glad to help you out
Make your day great Fit-Edgers!
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