How to measure, what success actually looks like and how to tweak things if we are plateauing.
Understanding our maintenance calories and our target will help to guide how much of a deficit to be in, whilst not depleting our energy stores and keeping workouts enjoyable.
With the plethora of social media posts offering abs in 30 days and 5kg lost in 12 days, anything less can seem ineffective, taking too long or that we aren’t doing it right.
It’s a constant battle, and having been on the opposite side of that fence is hard work, it can feel like butting your head against a brick wall.
Understanding how our bodies work with calories, how much of a deficit we should be in and what weight lose actually looks like are key to helping us stick with our plan.
So how do we measure what our calories should be?
We would normally start with understanding our maintenance calories, how many calories do we need to eat to stay at the weight. If we know this, then creating a deficit is fairly straight forward, as always though, this number isn’t always readily available.
What can we do?
The first step is to understand where we are, how much are we consuming, this might be a little daunting and its super important to remember this is only a measure of now, we have already made an amazing step in searching for a change.
This can be as simple as writing down what we consume (both food and liquid), there is an upside as writing down what we consume. We will naturally not want to commit some of the less favourable items to paper (or notes app etc), this helps with our self governing and creation of a better relationship with our diet.
Ideally we should do this over a complete week, this will give us a complete picture including our none working days.
Once we have the list we can get it all tallied up, or if we have used an app we’ll know what the average figure for a day is.
It gets a little tricky from here as everyone is going to vary by a large amount, here’s where we use example person!
If we were consuming 2200 calories a day, a good starting point would be to create a deficit of 100, taking our intake down to 2100 and run with that for the next few weeks, take measurements, preferably both weight and body fat.
Look at the numbers after 3-4 weeks and see what’s happened.
Now we need to be truthful with ourselves, no one is perfect and there will be times where it might not be on point and that’s ok. We do though need to bear this in mind when looking at the results, no point in slating the deficit if we only hit it 15/40 days….
In the same vain, it’s entirely possible that we might need to increase the deficit, if our consumption was in the high bounds a 100 calorie deficit might not be enough.
Weight and (or) body fat
Down – keep at 2100
Same – drop another 100
Gained – drop another 100
Then repeat the 3-4 week cycle again, it takes time, the weight didn’t jump on over night and it’s not likely to leave like that either.
After that 3-4 weeks repeat the same process, it might seem like a long time, but slow and steady wins the race and the bonus is that we won’t be undercutting our performance in our fitness activities.
What about the sites that say 500 calorie deficit is needed as that means 1lbs per week?
Ok, here that there are roughly 3500 calories in a 1lbs of fat, however trying to drop that much is a big ask and maybe for 1-2 weeks we can do it, then temptation starts as we have cut large amounts out.
With a smaller drop we can quite easily still manage to do everything else whilst gently adjusting our body to where we need it for results.
Once we are nearing our goal weight or body fat, we need to slowly up our calories to get us into maintenance mode, for this blocks of 50 calories per day extra work well, it is also normal to have a fluctuation or 1-3lbs when we first add in a few extra calories, this will stabilise and with a 3-4 week window we’ll have plenty of time to slowly adjust as needed.
I’m reminded of an olympic sprinter who got paid £10 dollars for breaking the world record the article said “over a million a minute” we could look at it like that, sure. The truth though – that was 10 years of consistency and 1 million a year doesn’t sound anywhere near as spectacular!
Very few goals are achieved in weeks, small steps everyday lead to big changes.
Need some guidance on calories? Give a member of Team SF a message to help you out info@spikefitness.co.uk or 07597215652.