Happy Sunday!
Calories are everything. I've been doing this fitness stuff
for 10+ years and mostttttt successful people really understand calories, understand how to track them and understand how our body uses them. Without calories, we would die...literally.
Here's an easy and effective way to calculate
the daily allotted calories you need for your body. If you've followed my posts, you know you burn calories every single day, even if you didn't get off your butt that day. Your Basal Metabolic Rate or BMR, is the number of calories your body needs to accomplish basic life sustaining tasks all day. When you blink, digest, grow hair, talk, organs function, so many things your body does that you don't even know about...those all require calories.
Heres an easy way to breakdown your daily needs of protein, carbohydrates and fats. Yes, your body needs all three to function optimally. Carbs are not an enemy.
For reference, each gram of macronutrient contains these calories:
- 4 calories per gram of protein
- 4 calories per gram of carbs
- 9 calories per gram of fats
1.) Set grams of protein to desired body weight in lbs.
Ex: If you would like to weigh 180lbs, you should aim to consume 180g of protein each day.
2.) A good macronutrient ratio is a 40,30,30 split. 40% from carbs, 30% from protein, 30% from fats. If
we already know our protein is 180g per day, we can calculate our total calories, carbs and fats based off of that number.
Ex: 180g of protein per day
180 x 4 calories per gram of protein = 720 calories from protein
720 / .30 = 2,400 total calories/day
Carbs:
2,400 x .40 = 960 calories
960 calories / 4 = 240g of carbs
Fats:
2,400 x .30 =
720 calories
720 calories / 9 = 80g of fats
Total daily:
2,400 calories
180g protein
240g
carbohydrates
80g fats
If this is hard for you, reach out to me and I will break them
down for you. Depending on your activity level, goals and other factors, we may need adjust total daily calories. An example of that would be me. I weigh around 180lbs... based on the calculations above, my total daily calories would be around 2,500. Although, I'm super active and have a lot of muscle on my body, so I consume around 3,500-4,000 calories...depending on the day.
And remember, most people want the "look" of an athlete (I think) so you need to eat like one of them. You cannot build muscle on 1,000 calories per day or 1,500 calories. Its science. Trust the science, right😉😉😉.
