I have good news.
You can look and feel great without breaking out a calculator every time you eat. Getting proper nutrition is a precise science, but it doesn't have to be agonizing. In fact, I recommended a more laid-bac approach. If you make planning or tacking meals too complocated, you'll have trouble sticking with it.
That being said, in order to lose fat, you must keep your body burning more energy than you're feeding it, and the energy potential of food is measured in calories. Eat too many Calories - give your body more potential energy than it needs - and it has no incentive to burn fat.
In order to gain muscle, your body needs a surplus of energy to repair and rebuild itself (along with plenty of protein). Thus, you need to eat slightly more than your body burns to get bigger. In this chapter i'm going to share some simple rules that you can follow to eat right. Just by following these rules, you'll find that you can lose or gain weight when you want to and that you'll feel healthy and vital.
1.MAKE SURE YOU EAT ENOUGH
A Calorie is a measurement of the potential energy found in food, and your body burns quite a bit of energy every day. Everything from the beating of your heart to the digestion of your food requires energy, and your body has to get it from the food you eat. Thus, it's important that you feed your body enough, and that's especially true when your work out. If you underfeed your body, don't be suprised if you don't have the energy to train hard or if you fell generally exhausted.
If you exercise at least three times per week, use the following formula to ensure you're feeding your body enough to repair itself.
- Eat 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight per day.
- Eat 1.5 gram of carbs per pound of body weight per day.
- Eat 1 gram of healthy fats per 4 pounds of body weight per day.
That's where you start. For a 200 lb man, it would look like this:
- 200 grams of protein in per day
- 300 grams of carbs per day
- 50 grams of fat per day
That's about 2,500 calories per day, which sould work for making slow, steady muscle and strength gains without any fat added along the way (which really should be the goal of "maintenance" - not staying exactly the same).
If your priority is to gain muscle, then you need to add about 500 calories per day to your "maintenance" diet. The easiest way to do this is to bump up your carbs by about 50 grams per day, and your fats by about 30 grams per day.
If you're trying to lose fat, then you need to subtract about 500 calories per day from your maintenance diet. To do this, drop your carbs by about 100 grams per day and your fats by about 10 grams per day.
It's also important that you consume high-quality calories. Junk food calories, such as white bread, pastas, chips, juice and soda, will make you look and feel like crap, while good calories, such as fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and lean proteins, will kee[ ypu in tip-top shape.