The role your daily calorie intake plays on your results.
Eating in an extremely high-calorie deficit could lead to plateauing or even GAINING weight.
Calculating your own personal daily calorie needs (and macros) can be a great way to achieve results faster and safer. There’s no such thing as the perfect workout routine, especially when the nutrition side of your training doesn’t go hand in hand with it. One of the most common issues is that people under-eat for their daily needs. You will believe you are losing weight, the chances are that you’re simply eating into tissue (muscle) as an energy source because your body is in a starvation mode. Not only that, your body will also slow down it’s metabolic rate, burning less calories per day and leave you feeling tired, lethargic and drained. This can cause a BIG dip in your overall motivation too!
Notice a dip in your strength too?
While your strength may naturally take a little dip during dieting, eating in too much of a deficit can make your strength take an even bigger hit. This is simply due to the fact that you’re dropping weight quickly and there’s less cushioning around your joints as you drop fat.
The Problem?
By dropping your calorie intake right down, you make yourself hungrier and increase your cravings, leading to people most often than not, binging on food at some point in the week. In smaller calorie deficits you’ll better control your willpower, but when your deficit is too big, your need for more food will sky rocket as your body will cry out for extra calories to help it survive.
Say for example you needed 2,000 calories per day to lose weight, but you’re only sticking to 1,000 calories per day:
1,000 calories x 7 days = 7,000 calorie deficit.
Over the course of the week, you’ve put yourself into a 7,000 calorie deficit, where in reality, an ideal calorie deficit, you’d need to take between 400 and 700 calories per day away from your maintenance calorie intake to lose weight…resulting in a 2,800 to 4,900 deficit per week. Simply put, you’ve under-ate by about 2,000–4,000 calories.
What To Do?
If you find you’re dropping weight, getting weaker, feeling really run down, hungry and losing MORE than 1–2% of your bodyweight per week, it’s likely you’re under-eating, so up those calories a little to re-ignite that metabolism and improve your results.
But remember…there’s a difference between a small to moderate calorie deficit of 400–700 calories per day, and a large calorie deficit where you’re likely to diminish your results.
Don’t be scared of the calories!
