Nutritional Advice – What Should You Eat For Fat Loss?
First of all, one day of eating well for your goal will be good, but far from sufficient to attain it (in case you needed that clearing up!). You will need to face up to committing yourself to being consistently good for at least weeks and probably months.
The idea of having the same meals over and over can be pretty soul destroying so it helps to get an understanding of the bigger picture of what you are trying to do so that you can better plan a sustainable approach.
‘Dieting’ doesn’t need to be restrictive. Your approach will only be restricted if you don’t yet understand things like what makes for a good source of protein, fats and carbs and the amounts of each that you need. Speak with your trainer, nutritional advisor or try Google or YouTube. A lot of info can be obtained from these sources if you ask the right questions.
My advice would be to first of all establish your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR). This can be done online or again a pro (like me!) can help establish this. For the sake of an example, I will use a 27 year old female that is 5’6”, currently weighs 12 stone and has an office based job and wishes to perform metabolic resistance training 3x a week to help lose body fat but gain muscle ‘tone’. Their BMR will come out around 1800-2000 calories a day to maintain themselves. Whether that is the perfect range for them or not is irrelevant for the message I am about to convey so to make things easier, let’s use 1850 as the figure we’ll go with.
From this figure, I would then advise subtracting up to 500 calories from this in an attempt to create a calorie deficit to aid with the loss of mass, so 1350. 500 calories is quite a significant amount to reduce and there is a real risk of losing valuable tissue for maintaining health and shape if you do not balance your amounts of proteins, fats and carbs in favour of preserving lean mass.
It is possible to maintain and even slightly gain muscle in a calorie deficit should an individual keep their levels of protein intake high enough. In this case, I would recommend around about 110-135g of absorbed protein daily (based upon protein intake accounting for around 35-40% of total calories of 1350). Warning! This will keep your weight on the scale fairly stationary as your body will hold onto lean mass if you are resistance training and keeping protein at recommended levels.
From there, it’s time to address fats and carbs. I have found so far that around 40-50% (60-75g) of calories from fat and about 10-20% (>60g) from carbohydrates works well for most when wanting to lose body fat. I would adopt this approach for as long as felt necessary to get to initial targets.
Check out next weeks blog post to finally see what Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner could look like to fit those demands!