Calorie deficit, surplus, or maintenance?
The ultimate question I get from clients, is how much should I be eating? To do this, lets break this down into several components.
Your body needs calories, to turn into fuel for energy to move, breathe, and function. There are 3 main different types that we use for energy, Carbohydrates, Proteins, and Fats. How your body uses this is on an individual basis, and there are people who will use more fat, and others who will use more Carbs.
Your Basal Metabolic Rate is very important in fitness. This tells you how many calories your body burns, at rest. Without doing any activity at all. Aka, I am 5’5, and I weigh 64kg. My basal metabolic rate is 1,444kcl. There are calculators online that help you to find your figure, or you can find a body composition machine and use that.
(https://www.calculator.net/bmr-calculator.html)
Once you have your figure, you then need to find how much additional energy you use per day. So for me, I am very active, and I could easily burn an additional 500kcl in a day in between clients. Therefore my total figure, would be 1444kcl + 500kcl = 1,944kcl, nearly 2,000kcl which is the recommended amount from NHS for women. Of course, this figure can be slightly higher or lower depending on your height and weight.
Now the above, would be your maintanance. The amount of calories that you eat, and should eat, every day, to keep your current weight and continue to build muscle.
Deficit
When we talk about losing weight, this is when it gets interesting. So to lose weight, ideally, if you have been eating above your maintenance you then want to go into a calorie deficit, so minus 500kcl from whatever you are eating. To calculate how much you eat in a day, you can use an app like my fitness pal. This is a calorie counting app. Once you have a guide of how much you are consuming, you will need to slowly drop it down. If you try to cut too much, you risk having excess skin, adverse health effects or simply binging and failing and the cycle continues. The best way is really to reduce slowly, and make it realistic and manageable.
You do not want to be in a deficit for longer than 16 weeks initially, this is to prevent your body adapting to a lower calorie intake and stagnating your progress.
Surplus
A calorie surplus would be the opposite of the above, eating in a larger amount of what you would normally eat. You may have heard of the term, ‘bulking’ which is where you put on excess weight with the intent of building a large amount of muscle, then cutting ‘losing fat’ to show the muscle. Calorie surplus’s are really beneficial when you are training for something, like the building phase of a bodybuilding show.
For more nutrition advice, I recommend contacting a registered dietician or nutritional body. Always speak to your GP before starting a weight loss journey.