When you start a diet,determining how much to eatcan feel a bit like playing calorie roulette.
Heres how to calculate your own target.
Step One: Find Your Caloric Maintenance
Weight loss revolves around the concept of calories.
Simply put, a calorie is a unit of energy.
You consume calories when you eat or drink calorie-containing foods.
There are two ways that you’re free to determine your caloric maintenance.
The first is a calorie calculator.
This is partially because they dont take into account the amount of muscleor lean body massthat you currently have.
I recommend theexrx calculator, which is more accurate than most calculators since it includes lean body mass.
So, for best results, be sure to input your approximate body fat percentage.
Alternatively, you could also usethese handy lookup tablesthat I modeled from client data.
In fact, you might use both methods to make a reasonable guessjust average the two numbers together.
Step Two: Set Your Protein and Caloric Targets
Now comes the easy part.
Its also the macronutrient that will keep you themost satiated while youre dieting.
Take your maintenance calories from the previous step and subtract 20% from it.
That will be the number of calories youll be targeting each day.
For example, if your maintenance is 2,000 calories, youll be aiming to eat about 1,600 calories.
Next, well use nutritionistAlan Aragons methodto figure out your protein target.
Decide your goal weight and strive to eat that amount in grams of protein.
Do your best, and hit it as closely as possible.
If you dont mind supplements, adding whey or casein protein may help you reach this number.
By the end of this process, youll have all of your necessary targets to begin your diet.
This doesnt mean automatic success, obviously.
Images byopenclips,epsos,Michell Joyce, and16:9clue.
