Tracking Your Nutrients

Tracking your macro nutrients consists of setting your total daily calories in a deficit, maintenance, or surplus by using an online calorie or macro nutrient calculator. Being in a caloric deficit helps with fat loss, maintenance is the place to be if you want to measure where your body is and how it responds, and a surplus will help you gain weight. Then, you must track what they eat after it is calculated. The macro nutrients you need to worry about are proteins, carbohydrates, and fats. Protein and carbohydrates have 4 calories per gram and fats contain 9 calories per gram, meaning they are higher in calories than the other two macro nutrients. As long as you track your macro nutrients each day and reach your targets, you can be successful in your fitness journey without meal plans. One must never forget that nutrition is a tool, not a restraint. Pick the foods you like while reaching your body composition goals with this method by tracking your macro nutrients and calories.

Post: February 4th, 2018. 8:01pm.

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First Step: Calorie Calculator

Since you have an overview of what the general principles of flexible dieting are, let's start with this link and setup your daily caloric intake. Calorie Calculator The idea here is to get a sense of where you will be on a day-to-day basis. We will have to look at how much energy your body uses in order to support it with the needed calories to reach your goal. Enter your age, gender, weight, height, exercise level, and press calculate. Your maintenance and fat loss calories will be calculated. If your goal is to gain weight and eventually muscle, add 250-500 calories and taper up calories depending on how your body responds in three to four weeks time. In the next post, we will be using the macro nutrient calculator to finally find the targets of what you are able to eat every day. Post: February 4th, 2018. 9:50pm.

Second Step: Macro Calculator

Continuing on in our journey to calculate what our body needs, click the link below to get started on finding your macro nutrient targets. I have decided to choose the "maintenance" calorie option as I'd like to maintain my current body weight. With this in mind, I calculated 2,400 calories that I should consume each day to maintain my size. By using this Macro calculator, my results came out to 270g Carbohydrates, 180g Protein, and 66g Fat per day that I need to eat. How I get to those numbers is up to me, based on the foods I consume. A general rule of thumb is to keep "junk" foods to about 20-30% of your daily caloric intake. In the case of flexible dieting, "junk foods" consist of foods that offer little or no macro nutrient benefit to your body. This is where it gets the name "flexible dieting" because most of the foods you consume each day should be of a higher macro nutrient dense foods and the rest can be up to your choosing. Down bel...

Are Meal Plans Effective?

Well, it depends on the person. Meal plans are a great way to ensure you're reaching your calorie and macro nutrient goal each day with planned meals. They are often not too successful for the average gym goer in the long-run. I'm looking for a long-term flexible approach that yields results. For those who can be consistent on eating similar macro-dense foods on a daily basis, go for meal plans. My thoughts on the subject are to ditch your meal plan and develop a diet that combines sound nutrition with the foods you enjoy. One should eat what you see fit in the portions that allow you to achieve your macro nutrient and caloric needs while providing sufficient micro nutrients, energy, and satiety. We shall dive into flexible dieting also known as if it fits your macros in my next post. Posted: February 4th, 2018. 7:27pm.

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