Beginning this past Monday I have begun a new experiment as I have stated in a few previous blogs, but now I want to talk a little bit more about my goals as far as what I’m shooting for and what I want to accomplish over the coming months with regard to my weight, my body composition, and how I feel. I weighed in after the weekend at right around 261.5, gaining 5-6 lbs over the weekend which is about what I expected for what I ate and what I drank. For the record I ate out twice, once for a breakfast having a sausage and egg biscuit from McDonald’s with a small coke and then again I had HyVee’s Chinese Buffet, having 2.5 plates of rice, chicken, egg rolls, and a few crab rangoons.
I have devised a meal plan which is much looser in composition, allowing me more freedom to enjoy cooking the things I enjoy to cook and allowing for the possibility of fast food or a soda from time to time. The goal is to keep my daily intake in a certain interval for the nutritional facts of calories, fat, carbs, and protein. In doing this I will keep a spreadsheet of what I’m eating daily and it will help me reevaluate where I’m at and if I’m losing/maintaining/gaining weight should help me find a place to tweak my diet to something I would better prefer. Here are some intervals of values I’ve settled on:
- Calories: 2150-2500
- Fat: 50g-80g
- Carbs: 250g-350g
- Protein: 120g-160g
The reason I want my calories around this is because I was playing around with a maintenance calculator which suggests an amount of calories you should have to maintain weight based on your current weight, your body fat, and how active you are. I’m not exactly pinpoint accurate with what my body fat is but I had an idea, and juggling a few different kinds of active (I thought I was in the middle of lightly active and moderately active) I came up that I needed around 2550-2900ish calories to maintain my weight. Since I’d still like to drop weight they suggest your cutting calories be 500 less or so. Now, I’m not going to go nuts if I don’t hit this 500 less mark right away this week because the calculator could still be different than my body make up so either way if I hit certain numbers it will take a bit to see how I do with my weight and then I’ll have to readjust accordingly. If I find I’m not dropping weight like I want I can increase activity and/or I can cut a few more calories.
I am still fairly active, playing basketball a few times a week and refereeing once a week, but the city basketball league is almost to an end (and we’re finishing strong). After this I’ll have to make a more conscious effort to get into my college’s rec center to play some pick up games there and/or get into the gym to run more (damn it’s cold outside to be running there as of now).
A few side notes, I’ve read in a forum that if you’re counting calories not to count a majority of the fruits/vegetables because they have too many positive effects on your diet and on top of this are largely composed of water. I plan to be eating quite a bit of fruits and vegetables incorporated with my meals I fix on a daily basis (salads, stir frys, pizzas, etc), but take for instance yesterday where I had around 2/3 of a small bag of carrots, this would’ve equaled approximately 110-130 calories. Again, a few people on forums suggested this because as people do weight/fat loss diets they tend to still not get enough nutrients from fruits/vegetables, and especially people for some reason are worried about the amount of sugar in fruits. They encourage you to not count these to supplement the idea that these things are by far and above more healthy than they are ever harmful (and are rarely counterproductive to your goals) and that we should all be eating more of them.
Here is my spreadsheet of the first two days I’ve counted calories:
