DIY diet to chisel your body

When most people hear the word, fitness, it’s natural to immediately think about dieting or exercising. And that’s fair! Workout goes hand in hand with diet.

Often, I’ve been asked what my diet looks like and how much time will it take them to become fit and build a good physique with chiseled abs.

In this blog, I want to offer a simple plan as well as a few thoughts about how to make a diet plan for yourself that suits your personal routine and is aligned to your goals as well. This is something I’ve been doing for a few years now. The only prerequisites to this are that you must be well versed with the following stuff:

• Your current height.
• Your current weight.
• Your current age.
• Your body fat % you’re currently at.
• What you eat daily on a usual day.

Take the body fat % from any online source and see where you stand.

Next thing you need is to know your Basal metabollic rate(BMR) which you can get by putting the above values in the formula:

For men: BMR = 10W + 6.25H — 5A + 5

For women: BMR = 10W + 6.25H — 5A — 161

where:

W is body weight in kg
H is body height in cm
A is age

BMR is the amount of energy expended while at rest in a neutrally temperate environment, and in a post-absorptive state (meaning that the digestive system is inactive, which requires about 12 hours of fasting). So this won’t give you the total energy expended throughout the day, for that you need to multiply a factor to this value according to your activity level.

• Completely Paralyzed, Comatose, Unable to Move Without the Aid of Others (1.0)
• Immobile, Stationary with Some Arm Movement, Bedridden or Partially Paralyzed (1.05)
• Constricted Lifestyle, Movement is Limited to a Confined Space, Almost Always Sitting or Laying (1.1)
• Working From Home with Little to No Travel, No Exercise, Some Walking, Mostly Sitting or Laying (1.16)
• Sedentary Lifestyle, Little or No Exercise, Moderate Walking, Desk Job (Away from Home) (1.2)
• Slightly Active, Exercise or Light Sports 1 to 3 Days a Week, Light Jogging or Walking 3 to 4 Days a Week (1.375)
• Lightly Active, Exercise or Moderate Sports 2 to 3 Days a Week, Light Jogging or Walking 5 to 7 Days a Week (1.425)
• Moderately Active, Physical Work, Exercise, or Sports 4 to 5 Days a Week, Construction Laborer (1.55)
• Very Active, Heavy Physical Work, Exercise, or Sports 6 to 7 Days a Week, Hard Laborer (1.75)
• Extremely Active, Very Heavy Physical Work or Exercise Every Day, Professional/Olympic Athlete (1.9)

The calories that you get from here is your maintenance calorie(the total amount of calories required on a daily basis to maintain your body weight with no gains or losses in fat and/or muscle tissue) and this is what you would get at an ideal condition, but these values are just an estimate from where you should start and it will be different for many based on their body composition. For now, you can take this as a benchmark and progress upon it, as you go forward you’ll be able to know your maintenance calorie range and set goals accordingly.

Once you have your maintenance calorie noted, according to your goals you can decrease 200–300 calories from it if you want fat loss and similarly increase 200–300 calories from it for muscle gain to find your daily calorie intake. This should be a good calorie range to start with and based on the progress result you can either increase or decrease your calorie intake but don’t go too low on it otherwise you’ll feel low in energy or going too high might cause an enormous fat gain(because muscle gain doesn’t happen in a few weeks or months).

Maintenance calorie keeps on fluctuating +- 200 depending on what you do in the day that you didn’t account into your average day. So take it as a range.

Once you have your daily calorie intake noted down the next step is to split it into macros(fats, carbs and proteins) so that we can get some definite numbers on the scale to put in our plate.

Protein requirement totally depends on the individual but has to be bare minimum kept at 1–1.2g/kg of your lean body weight(fat free mass) in case of a person who is not active and doesn’t indulge himself in any sports and if you are into resistance training or an active athlete than my recommendation would be to keep it at 2–2.2g/kg of your lean body weight. From this, you can derive the protein requirement for the day and calorie consumed by simply multiplying 4 to the grams of protein you’re having, as a single gram of protein gives you 4 calories. Remaining calories need to be split into carbs and fats which have 4 and 9 calories per gram respectively. The ratio that you can start of for now would be to keep 60% of remaining calories from carbs and 40% from fats, there are many other diet patterns(macros ratio) which can be followed apart from this but this is the basic that you can go ahead with. If you’re good with numbers and variables this should serve as a summary to whatever I wrote above:

Let x be the total amount of calories you consume throughout the day and y be the total amount of protein in gm you consume, then -

(x — 4y) is the total amount of calories left for carbs and fats.

(x — 4y) X 0.6 is the total calories from carbs, divide by 4 to get value in gms.

(x — 4y) X 0.4 is the total calories from fats, divide by 9 to get value in gms.

In the above equation, you can simply put the value of x(daily calorie intake) and y(protein in gms) and get your macros ready.🙂

On an ending note I would just conclude by saying that you can always cheat your diet or meal but you can never cheat the calorie and science. In case you didn’t understand any of the stuff or have any suggestions, do let me know🙂. If you find this article interesting enough you can follow me for articles with similar interests and do support me in spreading the idea of fitness throughout a wide domain.

JUNK FOOD SATISFIES YOU FOR A MINUTE, BEING FIT SATISFIES YOU FOR LIFE.