Now that you have an estimate of the total amount of energy your body needs on a daily basis you can adjust your daily intake based on your goals. If you aim is to keep your bodyweight at the current level you should try to stay close to your total energy needs and monitor regularly to make sure your body weight stays around the level it is at currently.
This article is part of a series of articles. Make sure to read the complete series to completely understand the content.
This article is part of a series of articles. Make sure to read the complete series to completely understand the content.
In case your goal is to lose weight you should try to limit your calorie intake to about 85% of your total energy needs. Of course you should combine this with exercises or sports. The difference between the total energy needs your body has and the energy your body gets from your daily nutrition is supposed to come from stored energy reserves: fatty tissue. It is important to notice that while I recommend eating about 85% of your total energy needs on average on a daily basis, I do not recommend dropping much lower. Common perception is that going even lower in the intake of calories will result in a larger amount of the energy deficit coming from fatty tissue; unfortunately that is not true. When your body notices large deficits on a regular basis it will try to protect itself by using less energy on a daily basis to avoid complete depletion of reserve energy (fatty tissue). Your total energy needs will therefore drop to possibly the same level as your daily energy intake resulting in a stable body weight. This is what a lot of people who have vigorous diets often experience: in the start they lose a lot of weight but after a few weeks or months their bodyweight becomes stable or even starts to increase. And as soon as they go back to their old eating habits the weight they just lost will come back in no-time. By keeping your energy intake below your energy needs, but not too far below it, you will keep your energy use at a high level resulting in weight loss which can be sustained in the long-run. If you notice that the diet has no effect, not even after a month, you can consider limiting your intake a little more as your estimate of your daily energy needs might have been too high.
In case you aim at gaining weight you should try to increase your energy intake to above your daily energy needs. If you combine this with exercises most of your weight gains will be reached by increasing the size and density of your muscles which in turn will result in a more sporty physic or increased stamina and strength depending on the type of exercises you do. For a start you can increase your calorie intake to about 200-300 calories above your basic energy needs to see how your body reacts in the weeks after that. In case you see limited change you can add another 100-200 calories and keep increasing till you notice an increase in body weight. Keep in mind that your body needs time to react to the increase in daily calories and results can therefore come slow in the beginning. In almost every case an increase in muscles will go hand in hand with an increase in fatty tissue. To increase lean body weight you will need to have periods of weight gains, where you eat more than your daily energy needs, followed by a period where you lose weight by eating below your daily energy needs.
Now that you know the amount of calories you should eat on a daily basis we can take a look at how we can compose a diet in such a way that it best benefits your goals.
This article is part of a series of articles:
VIA : ( ThailandFit )
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