Posts Tagged ‘fat’

Week 3 Progress

Sunday, July 19th, 2009

For the last week I’ve been tracking what I’ve been eating to a degree that I’ve never done before.  I usually hate calorie counting but for some reason this week has been fun.

The outcome…

The graph above is normalised so that what I’m aiming for is that 100% line for all the other lines.  Basically I’ve been tracking calorie, carbohydrate, protein and fat intake.  I’m aiming for 2800 calories per day which is 15% less than maintenance calorie level for someone my size.  Then I’m aiming to get 60% of my calories from carbohydrate, I’m aiming for 160g of protein intake a day and then the rest of the calorie, about 17% of my intake, should come from fat.

The increased protein is because I’m doing more weight-training and need the extra protein to help build and maintain muscle.

Over the last week I didn’t eat much differently than I normally would, I just kept track of it.  The numbers are as close as I could get based on the information on the packets of food I used and what’s online for all the things that weren’t in a packet.

You can see from the graph above there is a general trend.  Calories, carbohydrate and protein are all on the low side while fat is always on the high side.  So it looks like I’m going to be changing a bunch of stuff.  The fat has to come down and the protein and carb has to go up.

For the fat it means cutting out pretty much everything that is the least bit unhealthy.  Cakes, biscuits, any form of treat is out the window.  To give you an idea…a tuna and sweetcorn sandwich with a bit of mayo has about 50% of my daily fat allowance.  That isn’t a lot.

For carbs it basically means eating more cereals etc and for the protein I ordered some whey protein from www.myprotein.co.uk.  I didn’t particularly want to supplement my protein but there’s o other way I can figure out to get the extra 60g of prtein without stuffing my face with aduki beans, chicken or tuna.

Next week I’m going to have a week off tracking but I’ll track food intake again in a couple of weeks to see if I’ve made the necessary adjustment.

The good news is that I’ve lost weight since last week but the bad news is I’m not sure whether it’s fat or muscle.  I think the measurements I’m taking this time round are subject to a lot more variation.  You can check them out on my google spreadsheet page.

Wish me luck.

Sid.

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Posted in Phase 2 Progress, food | No Comments »

Nutrition

Monday, July 6th, 2009

Today I ordered myself a little set of digital scales to weigh my food.  I’ve decided to take a step up when it comes to watching what I eat, now it’s not about eating less but weirdly about eating more, just more of the right stuff.

As I’ve mentioned already I’m less concerned with losing weight this time round and more concerned with losing body fat.  That means I need to get my nutrition right so I stand less chance of losing muscle.  To that end I bought a book a fair while ago called “The Complete Guide to Sports Nutrition” by Anita Bean.  I have a few of her books already and find them fairly easy to read and understand.  For some it may be a bit technical but with a  science background I tend to understand the talk about complex carbs and energy delivery systems.

In the book it talks about calculating your daily calorie expenditure and dropping it by 15% to ensure decent weight loss whilst maintaining enough energy to be able to perform exercise well.  When I calculated my daily calorie expenditure I was a bit shocked.  After measuring it for a day with a heart-rate monitor a while ago I thought it would be much lower than what I calculated.  I haven’t got the book to hand at the minute so I can’t recount the equations but I come out with a resting metabolic expenditure of 2209 calories per day.  That means if I just lie around all day and eat 2209 calories then I’ll pretty much stay the same.  It’s what I need to keep ticking over.  Then when I take into account that I live a fairly sedentary lifestyle, sitting at a desk most of the day etc etc, then I figure my daily energy expenditure is about 3093 calories.  Add to that my exercise over the week and it works out to be about 3300 calories a day.  So I can eat 3300 calories a day at my current rate of exercise and remain the same weight.  I’m a bit dubious about that considering I’ve been eating more like 2000 a day and not losing as much weight as you would expect.

But I guess that’s where the whole starvation mode comes into it so I’m willing to give this increased calorie intake a go.

That means if I drop 15% off of the 3300 calories I’m aiming for 2800 calories a day.

At this point last time I would’ve stopped there and just aimed for 2800 per day.  This time though I’m taking it a step further and working out my food composition.  There’s plenty of recommendations in the book, all of which I can’t really recount here but generally to lose weight it suggest cutting fat and increasing protein.  This means the amount I eat per day comes to…

420g of carbohydrate or 60% of calorie intake
160g of protein or 23% of calorie intake
53 g of fat or 17% of calorie intake

I also figured out I should be aiming to drink close to 3L of water a day.

Right now I don’t think I’m close to 2800 calories a day so I’m gradually building up to it.  Once my scales arrive I’ll be keeping a detailed food diary so I can see how I’m doing.  That’s probably going to be in week 3.  Then I’ll start adjusting it as need to get as close to the above amounts as I can without becoming overly obsessive.

It’s a big change for me and I feel like I’m taking a risk in eating so many more calories than I’m used to.  One thing for sure is that I need to be more disciplined with my workouts.  Another Anita Bean book recommends weights 3 times a week with 3 light CV sessions a week too.  Still, the aim is not about weight but about fat loss and muscle gain.  Let’s see how it goes.

Sid

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Posted in calories, food, goals, kitchen | No Comments »

Improving the Shed – PHASE 2

Monday, June 29th, 2009

So after a successful Phase 1 it’s time to move into Phase 2.

Phase 1 was all about losing weight.  Just dropping as much as I could.  I didn’t really care much about the finer points of losing weight, such as whether it was muscle or fat and I generally didn’t think much further on nutrition than just cutting calories.  It worked for me but I’m still not happy with my body.  It’s a lot fitter and a lot more mobile but it doesn’t quite look good enough in a suit yet.  Some people may say I’m just being vain but I’m not hurting anyone and after-all what’s wrong with wanting to look good.

So Phase 2 is more about body composition.  Still losing weight overall but more losing fat and gaining muscle.  Since I’ll be trying to gain muscle the scales aren’t the best choice of tool to keep track of how I’m doing.  That’s why I’m switching to a skin-fold measurement.  The skin fold measurement, or pinch test, is that old-skool thing that was usually the source of embarrassment during school PE lessons.  It involves  gathering a fold of skin just above the right hip and measuring it, using calipers, to see how thick it is.  The theory is that from the measurement you can then get an idea of how much total body fat you have.  Since one of the areas I most want to lose fat from is my abdomen the skin-fold measurement is pretty much ideal for me.

As well as the skin-fold measurement I’ll be measuring the circumference of various body parts.  Biceps, chest, waist, hips, thighs and calves will all come under scrutiny but I’ll be paying most attention to skin-fold, weight, how I look in a mirror and how I feel generally.

Over on the progress page there’s 3 graphs.  They’re published straight from google docs so some people in a corporate environment may have trouble seeing them.  The top one covers all that I mentioned above, starting at a point of 100%,  Hopefully you should see arms, thighs and calves increase, chest stay about the same and hips and waist measurements go down.  Most importantly though the skin-fold graph needs to go down.  As I said, that’s my focus.  Along with that though I’ll keep an eye on my overall weight.  That will go down too.  For those who can’t view the graphs, don’t worry, I’ll post pictures etc in the main blog thread as I go along.

So my starting point is a skin fold measurement of 32mm.  That puts me around the 25% body fat mark.  My aim is to get my body fat percentage down to an ideal level, around 15%.  That means I need to achieve a skin-fold measurement of 13mm.  That means I have 26 weeks, starting today, to lose 19mm of fat from my skin-fold.

I have a feeling that this is going to be much more difficult than just losing weight.  There’s already a lot more to think about in terms of nutrition and getting the right balance of carb vs protein vs fat.  Combined with that I’ve switched to a different exercise routine focussed more on weights and resistance training than on CV work.  I think I’m in for a tough time.

Anyway, wish me luck and I hope you keep reading.

Sid.

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Posted in baseline, goals, motivations, skin fold tracker | No Comments »