Goal: improve body composition by reducing body fat while retaining or gaining muscle mass.
Method: create a reasonable calorie deficit each day through sensible and healthy eating, paired with cardio and resistance training. How-To:
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Note that 1 pound of body fat equals roughly 3500 calories. So if you create a 500 calorie deficit each day, you should lose about 1 pound of body fat per week.
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We do this by measuring and tracking calories in and calories out. I can’t emphasize how important is to no-shit measure and track everything you do and everything you eat. Yes, it may sound a bit OCD but a goal without a measurable, objective process to achieve that goal is much less likely to be accomplished vs following a process that focuses on tracking objective metrics.
Over the years I’ve executed many, many fat loss cycles and tracking your diet and activity simply works.
- Get a bathroom scale that measures (estimates) body composition. I use a Renpho scale. Don’t know how accurate it is, but it’s been dead on consistent for years. I then weigh myself, every morning, under the exact same conditions – bathroom, coffee, bathroom, weigh-in. Weighing myself everyday just makes me more aware of my choices across the day and dramatically reduces the likelihood that I’ll go off the rails and wake up a week later in a place I didn’t want to be.
Tracking:
Calories In: I’ve used the free version of MyFitnessPal for years.
This is how I set it up:
- Enter your age, weight, and activity level in your profile.
- For Activity Level choose Sedentary. I do this because I then log all of my activity across the day and this is added to my Sedentary calorie expenditure levels. That is, I’m not beginning the day with an estimation of my activity level, because all of my activity is logged across the day.
- Somewhere in the app you set your goal body weight and choose how many pounds per week you want to lose. In my experience:
- .5lb per week is completely doable, and is probably the best for maintaining or slightly increasing muscle mass. But you have to be playing the long, disciplined game and you may find yourself becoming impatient with how slowly the scale is moving.
- 2lb per week – your dog or cat may start looking like a pork chop by about Day 3 or 4. More below on food choices to help with this. Therefore, setting a goal of 1-1.5lb/wk, and then possibly changing this from week to week depending on how you feel, maybe a good place to start. The app will then give you a daily calorie budget, based on your height, weight, age, activity level (Sedentary) and the lb/wk weight loss goal you set. Then, each day, food you eat is subtracted from that budget and activity is added to the budget. In my experience, as long as you accurately (within reason) track your diet and activity, and stay within budget, you WILL lose body fat. At the end of the day, it’s physics and math.
Calories Out: I use a Garmin bike computer when cycling, I wear a Garmin watch that tracks my steps and general activity level, and I’ll manually log other activities in Garmin Connect. This then syncs to MyFitnessPal, logging my activity level against my diet.
Food Choices, given your daily calorie deficit:
Protein – this is the most important metric to track, by far, as a masters athlete. Our #1 goal during this body composition improvement cycle is to retain muscle mass. We do this by eating .75 to 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight . So even though you are likely eating less than usual to create tha daily calorie deficit, do not eat below this protein guidance .
Fat and Carbs – after this protein focus, I don’t really both tracking my carb and fat intake, other than logging what I eat and staying within my budget. If this is your first time logging your diet, you’ll very quickly learn how many calories are in high carb foods and how little satiating these foods are. The net is that try to focus on choosing nutrient dense vs calorie dense foods. IE, an orange and an apple vs a bagel. A massive salad vs a bowl of pasta.
That’s about it. Again
- Track and hit your protien goal, everyday.
- Choose nutrient dense over calorie dense foods
A typical day may look like this:
- Weigh in via Renpho, then manually enter this weight into Garmin Connect, which syncs to MyFitnessPal
- Log coffee + handful of nuts
- Walk to gym = 10 min = 20 min there and back. Manually enter this into Garmin Connect, it estimates calories burned and syncs to MyFitnessPal
- Gym session: I track my workout routine (exercises, sets, reps, weight, etc) in the Strong app. After my workout I’ll manually create it in Garmin Connect as Strength Training. It estimates calories burned and pushes this into MFP. Is it accurate? Dunno. But it’s a “good enough” number that’s logged.
I then simply log everything I eat across the day in MFP
Afternoon ride: is automatically uploaded from my bike computer and into Garmin Connect, it estimates calories burned and tosses this into MFP, logging it towards my calorie budget.
Log my dinner and anything else I eat and then click “Finish Log” (or somesuch) before I got to bed, which then says something like “if everyday were like today you’d weigh xxx.xx lb in 5 weeks”…which I find kinda motivating.
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This is awesome. Anyone who has met me in person knows I will not be doing the calorie deficit piece of this program. I already eat like my athlete wifey, and have nothing to give the universe in terms of weight, fat, or calories.
For those reading, this method of logging calories in, logging calories out (exercise) and creating a calorie deficit every day, 100% absolutely works. It’s simple thermodynamics.
Yes, it requires discipline (weighing, measuring, logging, etc), extra steps but it absolutely does work, when executed properly and consistently
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