As both prep coach and university lecturer, two of the most common questions I receive on a daily basis with regards to nutrition are:
What should I be eating?
How much should I be eating?
My responses to both of these questions:
What you eat, to a certain extent, is not as important as how much you’re eating. You can be following great dietary practices and consuming the bulk of your nutrition from lean complete protein sources, complex carbohydrate sources and consuming the correct ratios of monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats, but if your “overdoing” or “overconsuming” those macronutrients (as evidenced by a poor level of body composition) what good is it doing you? You can have too much of a good thing, and the concept of “more is better” should not be applied to the realm of nutrition (again to a certain extent – over the course of your lifting career you should be looking to increase calories, but this is done in a systematic approach). For more on this topic check out my article on bulking.
How much are you currently consuming on a daily basis? Are you consuming a consistent amount of each macronutrient daily or is your daily calorie intake highly variable and fluctuates from day to day?
Open any nutrition text book, read any nutrition based article, or listen to any podcast on the topic and you’ll find a number of recommendations on daily intake, but at the end of the day, only one thing matters: How much have you been consuming per day up until this point? If you’re serious about making body composition changes, increasing exercise based performance, or just looking to take charge of your own nutrition you may want to start by keeping a detailed log of your daily intake.
Enter Technology
Technology has made this super easy for us. There’s tons of free downloadable apps you can get on your smart phones that will help you to keep yourself accountable in the nutrition department for how many calories/ grams of each macronutrient you are consuming daily. The best part is that they are pretty much free. You don’t have to get fancy and purchase all the additional functions that may be available over the free versions. I personally use the myfitnesspal app and typically recommend this app to be used by my clients as well. This is a pretty good starting place to help you log in all of your food for the day. Initially when you set up the account with this app, you will be required to enter in some preliminary data, and through this data, a recommended intake is prescribed for you based off of your goals. Forgo following those recommendations, simply use the app for tracking purposes of food items.
In addition to this, I highly recommend investing in a food scale with my clients. They are relatively cheap and give you proper measurement for food portions (grams, ounces, fluid ounces, etc..). You may be surprised to find that with certain food items, you may be overshooting or undershooting your macronutrient requirements if you are just eye balling food portions.
The last two tools of trade which can be very helpful in tracking your progress are a digital weight scale, preferably one that measures in 0.2lbs increments, and progress picture selfies. The progress pictures will really help give that visual sense of accomplishment and keep you on track to reach your goals if your goals involve changing your overall body composition to look a certain way.
The Plan
Here’s a simple plan of attack before making any sort of dietary modifications:
Step 1 – Track Intake
Don’t just track for 1 day, aim to track for at least a week
Under no circumstances should you modify the way you eat (types of foods/ portion sizes) during this initial time period in an effort to make your dietary habits look better. Simply track.
By not modifying you will give yourself a true representation of your usual daily caloric intake and macro nutrient distribution
track every single calorie containing food or beverage you consume
Try to be as exact as possible/ for the athletes we work with this includes using a digital food scale to know exact portion sizes
Also while we don’t want to foster any sort of negative connotations or illicit any inappropriate mental habits/ body image issues, it’s not a bad idea to take your fasted scale weight each morning during this initial phase.
This also allows us to see how your weight fluctuates on a daily basis based off of the composition of your macro intake and calories you consumed that day
Step 2 – Set an Average For Yourself
Chances are if you haven’t tracked your daily total intake before you may find that you may be consuming an inconsistent amount of calories each day
Take your total grams of carbohydrates, protein and fat and add up the totals from each day
Once you have taken the totals simply average them for the week
The averages you obtain should be daily goals for you to hit the following week
Take an entire week to hit these averages and continue to track your fasted scale weight each morning and see how you respond to those averages
Step – 3 Adjust for Individual Goals
If kcals are too low and cause you to drop weight excessively quick from day to day bring them up
If your hunger levels or exercise performance is severely diminished bring kcals up
If you add weight too quickly on those new calories aim to reduce them
Essentially the goal of your second week is to determine your maintenance level of calories where you’re not dropping or gaining weight
Step – 4 Weekly Modifications
Based off of your goals, hunger levels, exercise performance, and overall intake of calories you’re set to adjust based off of your needs
Know where you stand. If your calories averaged out to something ridiculously low and you want to lose weight, unfortunately you won’t have many reserves to cut from so you may have to start by increasing your caloric intake to build upon your reserves so you have calories to cut from when you do move into a cutting phase
If the list seems too complex or confusing, or you would rather look into hiring a coach to take all of the guess work out, keep you accountable, answer all of your questions/explain the weekly process and adjustments, or to progress you in the most optimal manner, shoot me an email and join the team!
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