The calorie is simply a unit of measurement we use to know how much energy the food we eat contains. We also burn calories by just existing! Your body needs calories to perform all its daily tasks, not just for exercising but also normal function of the body! Even the eating and digesting the food we eat burns calories. Your very existence requires the consumption and utilisation of these little guys.
Knowing the calorie content of the food we consume can be an extremely beneficial exercise!
It teaches us which foods contain more energy as well as those that contain less. This way we can make educated food choices, particularly if we have a goal in mind.
Before we start lets define the calorie states.
BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate)-The number of calories needed to be consumed for your body to perform normal bodily functions (Like thinking and breathing!).
Maintenance- When we are eating (roughly) as many calories as we burn, resulting in our weight staying the same over an extended period, if activity levels or the amount of muscle we carry changes, the number of calories can go up or down.
Surplus-When we are eating above our maintenance calories (more calories than we are burning) resulting in weight gain (not just fat, muscle when resistance training is incorporated.
Deficit-When we eating below our maintenance, resulting in weight loss.
Application- We recommends small changes to intake (no more than 300 calories above or below maintenance) and patience!
It’s important to remember that the states above (besides BMR) are dynamic and change with you! If you become more active or add muscle your maintenance will increase and vice versa!
Before setting a goal, we want to find out where we’re at with our caloric intake, this can be done with a calorie tracker installed on your smart phone (MyFitnessPal is my go to). When you open the app, it will ask you for stats like height, weight and activity level, it will then likely ask you what your goal is. By all means fill this stuff out, but ignore the intake suggestion it gives you, the app is having its best guess at what you should be consuming. It’s extremely inaccurate and is not useful for this first stage of our calorie journey.
So, we have our app installed and we’ve filled out the information, what’s next?
The fun part… Tracking the food!
To figure out maintenance we need your current weight so record your weight at the start of the journey, then we will record it again at the end to figure out what calorie state we’re in! (Usually ends up being maintenance).
We recommend tracking food for a two week period, that’s everything that goes in your mouth (including beverages) as a diary entry in the app. This gives us a great look at what our habits are on different days of the week!
MyFitnessPal has a barcode scanner which can make life super easy for tracking things out of packets (just be aware of the serving size on the label). It also has generic entries for foods like fresh fruit; just typing medium apple should give you an entry fairly close to what you’re consuming.
It gets a bit more complicated when making meals with several items but tracking items individually is the way to get the most accurate reading. When eating out save yourself some time/stress and use a generic entry on the app. For example if at your favourite Mexican place and you order a beef burrito, simply type beef burrito into MyFitnessPal and some options will pop up, use your best guess to choose the option that suits the burrito in front of you, if it’s a big boy, go with a higher calorie selection!
After tracking for two weeks you have learned not just a huge amount about what the calorie content is of food, but also a thing or two about your eating habits!
If your weight has remained the same (within a kg) you have found your maintenance!
But wait! We haven’t been eating the same number of calories every day?
How do we figure that out?
That’s easy, add up the total calories of the 14 days, and then divide that by 14!
You have that magic number!
Before you go putting yourself in a new calorie state, let’s try some consistency with daily intake and see how we go!
Try eating that magic number of calories every day. If you are doing some form of resistance training or feel like you want to get some more protein in (it helps you recover and keeps you fuller for longer) we recommend between 1.2 and 2 grams per kilo of bodyweight.
Just eating consistently can be a fantastic first step. So try for a week and see how you feel.
Follow the aforementioned application to change your calorie state. But remember start slow and be patient, sometimes just a small drop or increase in calories can make a difference, 150 calories is a great number.
Good luck on your calorie journey!
