InstagramWhadup whadup! How you guys doing?
If you’re here. You are most likely someone who is interested in learning more about nutrition and taking charge of your own fitness and for that, I respect you! You’re awesome!
So, let’s jump right into it. I’m not going to give you the whole calorie deficit/surplus speech for fat loss/muscle gain. You already know that. So, let’s talk about how to set up your own calories.
When we talk about finding out our maintenance calories we’re basically talking about TDEE or total daily energy expenditure. In short, we’re trying to find out how many calories our body burns based on our own individual body stats like weight, age, height, activity level. Once we have that we can logically decide what our deficit or surplus calories should be!
Now, there are about 100 different ways to calculate your TDEE, all of which will give you roughly the same answer.
Note: None of them are 100% accurate because energy balance is a dynamic continuous process but these formulas will give you a fairly good starting point.
So, the TDEE formulae that I like to use is:
Men = (10 x Weight in kgs) + (6.25 x Height in cm) – (5 x Age) + 5
Women = (10 x Weight in kgs) + (6.25 x Height in cm) – (5 x Age) – 161
There are far simpler formulas – So, Why do I use this one? No scientific reason, it just makes me feel like I’m putting the math I learned in school to use.
Okay, jokes apart. We’re not done yet. Once we have the answer to the above. We need to multiply that into an activity level meter. There are certain ranges depending of how active of an individual you are. This is what it looks like!
1.2 = Sedentary (Doesn’t train at all)
1.375 = Trains 1-3 days per week + No activity apart from the gym
1.55 = 3-5 days per week + Decently active outside the gym
1.725 = 6 days per week + Highly active outside the gym
These numbers are also not set in stone. You can mess around with them. For example: I train 6 days a week but I am not extremely active outside the gym so I multiplied my answer with 1.6 instead of 1.725. I hope you get the point.
Now, once you have found your number. It’s time to decide how much of a deficit or a surplus to begin with.
Fat loss: For those of you who want to be in a calorie deficit. You can start with anywhere between a 200 to 500 calorie deficit per day depending on how aggressive you want to be with losing weight. I’d recommend starting with a 200-300 calorie deficit only, especially if you’re just starting with a fat loss phase. You want to keep your deficit as small as possible because that’s how you will make sustainable.
Muscle gain: As for those of you who want to go into a surplus. Stick with a 200-300 calorie surplus. You do not want to add in a tonne of calorie for no reason because that will lead to unnecessary fat gain! You just need a 200-300 calorie surplus to build muscle, nothing more!
That’s pretty much it!
Stay tuned for the next blog in which we’ll speak about setting up our macronutrients!
Stay safe!
Much love,
Coach Dhruv
