How to set up a nutrition plan – Part 5.2

What this person would then do is follow this intake for roughly 2-3 weeks and track their results. The important thing is to make sure this person is following these numbers consistently and eating similar amounts, closely approximating to these numbers every single day. This is when certain apps can be very useful. An app I find to be very useful is called  Cronometer, this app allows for a more user-friendly experience, and will give you more data in terms of micronutrients.

All that you would  have do is track this and see what kind of results you’d get. If this person actually was at their maintenance intake and they were maintaining their bodyweight with these numbers while their goal was to actually burn fat or fat loss, they would have to then decrease their food to create a calorie deficit.

Let’s now look at how we’d go about adjusting the nutrition plan. Let’s pretend that this person is wanting fat loss. When it comes to fat loss, we need to create some kind of deficit or decrease in calories.

Daily Intake = 1,881Calories

Weekly Intake = 13,167 Calories

What we’ve done here is taken 10% decrease in this person’s intake. When it comes to making adjustments, it is good to start out with a 10% increase or decreases depending on the goal. This adjustment will be large enough to see some kind of change, but small enough to not be too disruptive to a person’s lifestyle and their adherence to the nutrition plan. With having 10%  been taken off their daily/weekly intake. The decrease has come evenly from carbohydrates and fats, once again this type of person would track for another 2-3 weeks and see how their results go. They should notice that their bodyweight and preferably the body fat that was aimed to drop has added to this result. However, if it doesn’t then its worth looking at what has happened to their energy expenditure, or define how close they are with tracking their macronutrients.

There are many other ways we can look at changing this nutrition plan.

In this example this person is going through some very intensive training 5 days a week. Maybe this person didn’t want a big decrease in their carbohydrates, maybe they wanted an increase. This person is still having the same weekly intake of 13,167 calories, but instead of having it spread out evenly across the week we’ve taken all the carbohydrates out of Saturday and Sunday when they’re not training, and we have put it all onto the training days. This will allow for a bit more recovery, with a little bit higher performance on those training days.

It may also provide a little bit of digestive benefits on the weekend because we are not eating anywhere near as much food. This could be where you want to explore things like intermitted fasting. Not because it’s a magically protocol but more so it means for on the weekend this type of person can condense their meals into a smaller time span to make them feel like they are having larger meals despite eating less calories.

There may also be good days for this type of person to not be so tied to the kitchen doing meal prep day in and day out, instead they can go out and enjoy their weekend due to the fact that they are only having 2-3 meals not 4-5 meals a day. This is how we start looking at personalising nutrition based on your own context and your own lifestyle, and based on your own goals in and out of the gym. There are many ways you can manipulate this throughout the entire week. Of course while keeping in mind this could also be for muscle gain goals as well, not just fat loss.