This is an article written by an extremely knowledgable member of fitforum.co.uk called CTP. It is an extremely indepth article on how you can build a diet plan to suit your needs from the ground up. building a nutritional plan to best suit your gains is the most important factor in achieving your physical goals so read carefully and take in the information.

Ok, so everyone talks about their nutritional plan and most the time you get to see the output. It’ll be included in people’s blogs, or fat loss logs as a long list of random ingredients with times allocated to the meals, then somewhere at the bottom they’ll be a summary of what the calorific value and protein content is. What you don’t get to see if how people get to that final stage, nor why they made the decisions along the way.

This blog looks at my current nutrition (and hopefully) goes all the way from flash to bang, or zero to hero so that you can then take the concepts and apply them to your training regime.

First thing is first if you want to be successful then you have to be pro-active. There is the time old saying with the 7 P’s – “Proper Preparation and Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance”. I cannot think of a sport where this is more applicable than in body building. More often than not a poor nutritional plan is why your not seeing the gains you deserve.

So back to basics quickly – Lets just clear up a few points about why we do certain things. If we understand the intent of those actions we should best be able to incorporate those principles into our diet.

Macronutrients and Calories – What are these things?

Proteins – essential to growth and repair of muscle and other body tissues

Fats – one source of energy and important in relation to fat soluble vitamins

Carbohydrates – our main source of energy

Minerals – those inorganic elements occurring in the body and which are critical to its normal functions

Vitamins – water and fat soluble vitamins play important roles in many chemical processes in the body

Water – essential to normal body function – as a vehicle for carrying other nutrients and because 60% of the human body is water

For fuel, the easiest source is Carbs, then Protein, and lastly fat

How many calories do I need?

The amount of calories you need to eat every day depends on 2 things; the first is your lean weight, the second is how active you are. It goes without saying that the bigger you are the more you need to eat to stay the same size, likewise, if you play sports 3 times a week you will burn more calories than someone who doesn’t – so you’ll need to eat more.

First thing is first then, you need to either measure (or best guess) your % body fat. You can do this using callipers, or most gyms will have contact scales you can stand on and then they will tell you.

Im about 24% body fat (that makes me pretty cuddily), and I weigh 215lbs. So this means that actually my weight is split as follows; My lean mass (without any fat) is 163.4lbs, and I am carrying 51.6lbs fat. To check my maths is right (51.6 + 163.4 = 215).

Don’t be off put by this value because for most people, their aims tend to be to get down to 10% or so fat, so there isn’t as much to shift as you would initially think.

Using my lean mass, i can then work out how many calories a day I need. This is know more commonly as your BMR or Basic Metabolic Weight. It is what you would need to eat to maintain your weight if you did nothing but sleep for a day.

The simplest way is to calculate your BMR is by multiplying your lean mass by 10. Therefore mine would ne 163 x 10 = 1630kcals per day.

Don’t look so devasted, thankfully every day you walk about, brush your teeth, talk, burp, fart …. all of these processes require energy. This is where we tailor the calculation to your needs. In order to increase the value we are going to multiply it by an ‘activity factor’. This simply increases the value.

My activity factor is 1.5. Therefore ill times my BMR by this value. 1630 x 1.5 = 2445kcal / day. So this is the value that I am going to use to do everything else.

So this is where the story splits. Your body can do 1 of 3 things. It can grow, stay the same, or get smaller.

1) For your body to grow you need to be in a calorie surplus – this is when you eat more calories than you need to a day. These extra calories are used to build muscle, or, if your not using them, they are stored as fat.

2) For your body to stay the same size, you need to break even on your calorie intake – This quite literally involves eating just enough calories, not too many, not too few. For me, with the amount of exercise I do this would be 2445kcals a day

3) For your body to get smaller, you need to be in calorie deficit. This is where you eat less energy than you need. In order to then support what you are doing, your body is forced to convert either stored fat, or muscle into energy.

As I am leaning (getting smaller – loosing fat without losing muscle) this is what I am going to focus on in my example.

So, I have to eat less than 2445kcals/day to lose weight…. but how much less? Well, 1lb fat is equal to a loss of 3500kcals. So For every 3500kcals I am deficit, I will lose a pound of fat. In order to be sensible, I am aiming to lose between 1 and 2 lbs of fat a week. This will require me to be between 3500-7000kcals short every week. 3500 / 7 days in a week means I should always be aiming to be short by 500kcals per day. With this in mind, my calorie requirements drop from 2445 to 1945kcals.

So how much of each should I have?

1945 kcals per day – how is that best spent in order for me to make sure I lose as much fat as possible and hold onto as much muscle as possible?

Different people say different things, they’ll tell you to eat your food in ratios i.e 30/20/50 Protein/ Fat / Carbs, or to eat so many grams of Protein / Fat / Carbs per kg of body weight. Ultimately they all give similar values. For the sake of leaning, I tend to aim for 250g Protein, 100g(or less) of Carbs, and 100g Fat.

As above, Carbohydrates are your primary source of fuel, so you have to decrease your intake of these. Most people tend to consume around 200g a day. In order to combat this, I have a high protein intake – this provides the building blocks required to prevent any muscle loss. This the only leaves one fuel source for your body to look to for energy – STORED FAT!

Its important to remember that calories are calories, it doesn’t matter what form they come in, if you eat too many you’ll get bigger, if you eat to few you’ll get smaller. If you only need 2000kcals per day, and you religiously eat 2500kcals of pure protein, the surplus energy will still be converted to fat and stored.

How should I be eating it?

Well, my limits are

Calories: 1945kcals
Protein: 250g
Carbs: 100g
Fat: 100g

Traditionally you would have ‘Three square meals a day’. This conforms with working life where your constrained by your job. This doesn’t mean it is the best way to approach eating though – it is just the easyist.

When you eat food, your body needs to process it – everything from chewing it, to it moving though your stomach, and then the intestines, and then out the hole at the end. It can only process so much food in one go. If there is too much food being processed at any one time instead of getting rid of it your body begins to save it for one of those rainy day occasions – it does this through storing it as fat.

Therefore, to prevent your body having the opportunity to do this, the idea is to eat little and often. Little and often means your body will never have any surplus food, adn will therefore never have the opportunity to store it as fat. Also, constantly feeding will keep your metabolism ticking over at a higher rate. This will burn more energy over all.

Little and often – for most people this means 5-6 meals a day. If you can achivieve more than this then that is fantastic. Hugh Jackman in preparations for the Wolverine film was eating 9 meals a day – this involved waking at 4am to drink raw egg whites!

My day lends itself to eating at:

0700, 1100, 1300, 1600, 1800, 2100

So I’m quite lucky. If I am going to eat 6 meals as above, I know that each meal should contain 1/6th of the Calories and 1/6th of the nutritional break down calculated earlier. Therefore

Calories: 1945kcals which means each meal should have 325 kcals
Protein: 250g which means each meal should have 40g
Carbs: 100g which means each meal should have 17g
Fat: 100g which means each meal should have 17g

This isn’t a hard and fast rule – it is just a guide so don’t go getting too worried if you cant quite get teh values you want. If your up on carbs one day, then aim to be a little lower than normal on another. It’s not an art, it is just about doing whats best with the resources you have.

The best bit …. Picking your foods.

MMMMNNN, picking what your going to eat. This is most definitely the best bit. Aiming for 5-6 meals a day puts you in such a better position than any ‘Normal’ person. It means you get to eat twice as often  It means you get to experience twice the amount of flavour  It means you only have to wait half as long to have your favourite meal, It means you should never be hungry … like I said it doesn’t get better than that.

When I am drawing up a food diary I tend to do it a week or so in advance. I’ll sit down for an hour or so and experiment with different foods until I come up with a menu I’m happy with. Over the months of the competition I developed a range of key meals that I tend to have frequently – this means I have to spend less time planning.

By planning your meals before you eat them you can ensure your body is getting the nutrients it needs when it needs them. You can make sure it never has too many or too few. It lets you be in control!

So what do I mean by a meal plan. The concept is simple, it is just a record of what you are going to eat, how much of it you are going to eat, and when you are going to eat it. Below you can see the ‘tidy’ template from last weeks training diary. When I first started though I used to do it on scraps of paper. The key thing to note is I’m writing down everything that goes in my mouth – sugar when I have a hot drink, milk when I have a tea, ketchup, supplements, it all gets written down and the values get recorded. The things that help me do this are:

i) Nutritional Book (£3) – Just like a dictionary
ii) Scales (£10) – I removes the liberty of my guessing

“I promise you now that if you asked me to gauge a 100g portion of rice after I had been for a 10 mile run and was ravenously hungry, and if you asked me to do it after eating my cheat meal the portion sizes would be very different. That is why I remove the variable of perception.”
For beginners if your new to writing a nutritional plan then don’t try to make all the changes in one go – if you do, it probably won’t last, and you won’t feel it is sustainable.

Start by aiming to eat the right amount of calories (don’t worry about where they are coming from), just worry about eating the right amount. Once you have got that sorted, aim to try and meet the protein requirements every day whilst staying in your calorific boundaries. Finally, look at reducing your Carb intake to your values, and finally adjust your fat levels.

If you aim to adjust 1 variable a week, it should take you a month to get there. In this month you’ll be constantly learning about foods, as well as finding out what does and doesn’t work for you. Every one is different so be patient.

How do I pick my meals?

Well, I always start with my core meals – this varies from person to person, but I hate preparing food, especially at night after the gym – so I always aim to eat a meal that’s quick to prepare in the evening. As a result my evening meals tend to be stir frys, or egg based – such as omelettes. My day time meals tend to take longer to prepare – ill make them up every few days and freeze them down, then I just take them out the freezer the night before and microwave them at work.

Below you can see a copy of todays meal plan:

You can see that I’m a little over on calories, and that I’m eating more of my calories towards the end of the day which isn’t ideal as I wont have chance to burn them all off.

You notice that the meals are roughly balanced, and that my final meal of the day has no carbs in.

The most important thing I will do is this – looking back at what I have eaten. I don’t quite get enough fats today, and my calories are a little over so I know tomorrow I need to adjust this. What I could do is have the olive oil I normally have with my evening shake with my tuna at brunch – this means Ill be getting more calories towards the start of the day. Alternatively I could look at maybe having some butter on my chicken and reducing my calorie intake from another meal.

You’ll see very quickly that there isn’t a science to this; you just need to be patient.

The Cheat Meal;

For most people this is their saviour. I suggest that if your viewing this as your saviour then you adjust your plan to make it enjoyable. The cheat meal should be that extra reqard for having done so well. How often should I have my cheat meal? Well that depends on your training regime, I would aim for once a week – thats not so far away it seems unachievable, but at the same time, its not every other day so the novelty wont wear off.

How badly can I cheat? That again is down to you, you’ve worked so hard in the last week you should be conservative and tactful in my opinion. The best cheat days are those where you eat what you want, and don’t differ to much from your desired nutritional values.

I have my cheat days on a Wednesday, I do this because my longest run is on the Wednesday morning, and then I have my shortest gym session Wednesday evening. This means I can order the takeaway as I leave the gym, it’s at home for me when I get there and I can eat whilst my metabolism is still racing from the gym.

My cheat meal is always the last meal of the day – this prevents me re-offending again. I also reduce the size of my meals during that day so that I can carry over soem of the calories to compensate in the evening. All these things add up and in the end, your cheat day isn’t as much of a cheat as you might think.

For the record my cheat meal is a can of coke (or something else that’s sweet and fizzy) a large mixed kebab drowned in garlic mayo and ketchup, and then if there is room a mars bar ice cream! I still sit down to eat the meal, drink atleast 1 pint of water with the meal, and do nothing else whilst eating.

So that is how I do it, with time, you’ll develop your own tricks and routines that work for you. Leaning is like running a marathon – in the long run, whether you sprint the last 100m or jog it then it isn’t particularly going to make a big difference. The moral being, if you fall off the band wagon, get back on it as soon as possible. Don’t wait until Monday, and don’t do that whole “Ill have one more meal” and start tomorrow. The quicker you start the quicker it’ll be time for that cheat meal.

So a closing point – How to gauge your progress and how to keep losing:

If you look in the mirror every day to see your progress you won’t notice anything. If you take pictures fortnightly you’ll begin to notice subtle changes – the moral is change takes time its not an over night cure. My suggesting when gauging your progress is to consider something more specific, waist size, body fat. If you are going to use your weight to chart your success then make sure you do it in the same conditions every week, and make sure you only do it once a week. Your weight will fluctuate depending on the last time you went to the toilet, and the last time you ate. I weigh in once a week on a Monday morning. Ill do it after my shower once I have had a poo, and I don’t drink until after I have weighed in. This way my body is in the same state every week.

TJ, the winner of the monster comp provides a fantastic example of why it is so critical that you remain consistent. Just a few weeks later he won the competition.

ENTRY 1:

http://fitforum.co.uk/entry.php?558-Week-8-Back-Workout

ENTRY 2:

http://fitforum.co.uk/entry.php?562-Quick-Update

Finally:

As you lean you’ll be getting smaller, I would suggest that you recalculate your body’s calorific and nutritional needs every month because as you get lighter, you need less energy to support you. The difference of 5 lbs is the same as 75kcal per day.

I hope this helps, I have tried to get as much information down as I can, and for beginners I hope this clears up a few points and provides a little guidance.

to see the original article log onto www.fitforum.co.uk and check out the blog section