Whether you are training for muscle gain, fat loss or just want to overall improve your body composition you will need to establish the amount of calories you will be required to consume each day.

If you are wanting to reduce body fat you will need to consume less calories than you expend. If you are wanting to increase muscle mass you will need to consume more calories than you expend.

In order to do this you will need to work out your Base Metabolic Rate or BMR. This is the energy you would expend at rest all day.

You will then need to work out your Total Daily Energy Expenditure or TDEE. This includes training, energy expended eating and incidental movement.

I have included a link below to help you calculate both your BMR and TDEE.

If you are looking to drop body fat then you should look to created a calorie deficit of approximately 300-500 calories per day. If you are looking to gain muscle you then should look to increase calories by 300-500 over your TDEE.

Once you have calculated your daily energy requirements then you need to calculate your macronutrient distribution, ie protein, carbs and fats.

For this example we’ll say our calorie target is 1800 calories per day.

Protein is the first priority. A rough guide can be your weight in kgs x 2. So for a 60kg female roughly 120g of protein. You can however adjust this accordingly. There are 4 calories per gram of protein. 120 x 4 = 480 calories.

You then want to calculate your fat requirements. For fat a common rule is body weight in kgs x 0.77. For our 60kg female this will equate to 48g of fat. There are 9 calories per gram of fat. 9 x 48 = 432 calories.

The remainder of your calories you can then allocate to carbs. So 1800 – 480 – 432 = 888. 888 / 4 = 222g of carbs.

120g protein
222g carbs
48g of fat

At this point you may want to adjust your proportions as you may prefer higher protein and fat and less carbs which could look like this:

140g of protein = 580 calories
180g of carbs = 720 calories
55g of fat = 495 calories
Total = 1795 rounded to 1800

This isn’t an exact science however it is a good starting point which you can then adjust accordingly.

Another good rule of thumb is to keep calories as high as possible when you are dropping body fat. This gives you more wiggle room. If you start on say 1200 calories then your fat loss stalls you don’t have a lot of room to move. If you start higher you can gradually drop as you go.

If tracking your calorie intake is too tedious a better option maybe portion control which we will discuss in our next email.

Here is the link for our calorie requirements calculator.
https://www.nickhallbodytransformations.com/calculate-your-bmr/

What if you don’t want to track calories – this will be discussed in the next blog post which you can access here.