Strategies For Weight Loss or Maintenance

Nutrition

Aug. 21

Let’s talk nutrition this week.

I am a movement specialist, I LOVE guiding people through healthy movement patterns. As a Precision Nutrition coach, I also know how important healthy nutrition is for clients to reach their goals.

I created this handy reference with four effective strategies to either lose weight or maintain your current weight:

Shift Mindset: Try not to view your workouts as how many “calories” you burn or to punish yourself by performing endless cardio for one evening of overeating. Instead, shift your mindset to focus on 2-3 resistance training sessions per week to gain strength, increase energy and vitality, and build balance within your body to stay injury-free. Think of your workouts as enabling you to feel good and strong, as opposed to helping you lose weight. This way you can focus on the positives of working out long term.
Cardio Minimums and Focus on Resistance: Never starve yourself or perform too many cardio sessions. This has been proven over and over again to be counter-productive. The national guidelines for cardiovascular activity recommend a minimum of 150 minutes of moderate intensity or 75 minutes of vigorous intensity per week. That is only 21 minutes moderate or 11 minutes vigorous intensity of cardio every day. My suggestion? Go for a daily brisk walk or hop on your indoor bike for a quick HIIT and prioritize resistance training.
Gain Strength: The national guidelines for resistance recommend 2-3 strength training sessions per week (per muscle group). Do what feels best for your body: Pilates equipment, barre, weight training, etc. It’s important to challenge your muscles to near fatigue to gain strength and lean muscle.
Monitor Your Food Intake from time to time: This can seem tedious at first, but it’s 100% better than restrictive dieting. Logging your food intake helps with understanding size of portions. I wrote an article a few years back about the National Weight Control Registry who tracks participants who successfully kept their weight off fore more than a year, and it demonstrates the importance of logging food. Below I guide you step by step on how to calculate your recommended daily food intake. You only need to do this when you have a specific goal in mind.

Step by step guide:

Step 1: weight (lbs) x 10 = basal metabolic rate (BMR)
Step 2: BMR x activity factor = total energy expenditure (TEE) . Daily activity factor: very light 1.2 (desk job, not exercising), low active 1.5 (desk job, light exercise), active 1.7 (desk job, exercises most days of the week), heavy 1.9-2.1 (physical labour, athlete, vigorous exercise).
Step 3: If you are hoping to lose weight, only cut out 250 calories per day, or dieting will simply slow down your metabolism. TEE - 250= weight loss calories.
Step 4: Macros. It’s recommended for people who resistance train 2-3x weekly to ingest 0.8g-1g of protein per 1 pound of ideal body weight. After calculating your protein grams, figure out how much that is in percentage of total calories (4g x total grams = protein calories x 100 = protein %). Then figure out your fat (25%) intake (total calories x 25%/9g). The rest of your calories are carbs: total calories - fat calories and protein calories = carb calories/4g = carb grams.

Example: I weigh 128lbs.

Step 1: 128x10 = 1280 calories is my BMR.

Step 2: 1280x1.7 = 2176 calories. This number is quite accurate to what I have found to maintain my current weight.

Step 3: If I wanted to lose weight 2176 - 250 = 1926 daily calories for weight loss with my current activity level. But I want to maintain current weight, so I don’t minus 250.

Step 4: To calculate my recommended protein: 0.8g x 128 = 102g or 1g x 128 = 128g. 128g x 4g = 512 protein calories. For fat, I aim to consume roughly 25%: 2176 (total calories) x 0.25 = 544 calories from fat. 544 calories/ 9 grams = 60g of fat. Lastly the rest for my intake is from carbs. If 128g x 4c = 512 calories of protein and 544 calories from fat, that means 1056 calories is for carbs/ 4g = 264g of carbs.

So my daily macros are: