Tired of counting calories? Tried many different diets and failing because they are simply too tough? Too many rules to follow in your diet? This article is for you!
1. The Calorie Budget
Good ol' budgeting, often takes us back to our childhood when we skipped meals to buy that toy or that father's day present. The same concept applies as well. As weight loss is an equation between calories in and calories out, you can be sure that by fixing your calorie intake, you will hit your goals! Whether you are trying to lose fat, build lean muscle, or both lose weight and gain muscle, the budget method is for you!
Here is how it works:
Calculate your daily caloric intake (Include protein intake if building muscle)
Eg. The daily maintenance caloric intake for a 70kg man is about 2000 calories.
Step 1: To lose weight aim for about a 10% Caloric Cut
Step 2: With an 1800 calorie budget, eat whatever you want in 24h
Step 3: Check-in weekly to look at weight loss, increasing or decreasing the budget based on the need to lose more or less weight.
*Add in a protein target if aiming to build muscle.
Eg. To lose weight and build muscle, this man would have 1800 calories to consume in a day, with a target of about 1.6g of protein/kg of body weight.
2. The Cheat Meal
Let's face it. There are two types of people. People who can eat healthy foods all the time, and people who do not. Most of us, unfortunately, fall in the latter category.
How can we succeed in our diets then?
If we fight our hunger and emotions, it is not likely that we will win. Rather, let us focus on the percentage of meals we eat well!
How does that work?
Say we eat 3 meals a day and 21 meals a week.
So we can allocate, 3 unhealthy meals a week, and the rest healthy, giving us an 85% healthy diet.
Try that for a week, and monitor 2 things, your overall satisfaction with your diet in terms of happiness, and your weight loss. At the end of the day, if we want to make lifestyle changes that leave us both happy and fulfilled, we have to find our personal balance between happiness with meals and fitness progress too!
References:
A Systematic Review, Meta-Analysis and Meta-Regression of the Effect of Protein Supplementation on Resistance Training-Induced Gains in Muscle Mass and Strength in Healthy Adults Robert W Morton
Estimation of Basal Metabolic Rate in Chinese: Are the Current Prediction Equations Applicable? Stefan G Camps