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Designing a Meal Plan for Fat Loss

By designing a meal plan, you can bring structure to your diet which will help you reach your goals.

One pound of fat contains 3500 calories. In order to preserve muscle, you will want to limit your fat loss to a maximum of 0.5 - 1% of your body weight per week. This amounts to 1-2 pounds for a 200 pound person. At 200 pounds bodyweight, to lose 1-2 pounds a week, you would have to burn 500-1000 more calories than you are taking in. If you are within 15 pounds of your goal weight, I suggest aiming for the smaller number. This is because the leaner you are, the greater risk of losing lean body mass.

Also, remember, you have to eat at least enough to sustain your basal metabolic rate (BMR - calories burned if you slept all day) or you risk losing lean body mass. So this sets a lower bound on calories as well. You can calculate your BMR here.

To determine how many calories you will need to intake, you first calculate the calories you need to maintain your weight using the calculator here. Then subtract 500-1000 calories depending on your fat loss goals. Take the maximum of that number and your BMR.

Note that you may have an initial fat loss that seems too large for the first week or two. This will be due to water loss and is not something to worry about.



Counting Calories and Tracking Macronutrients

Is it necessary?

Calorie counting is simply a method for tracking nutritional intake. Several benefits to counting calories are:

  • The ability to determine that you are getting optimal protein intake for your goals.
  • You can track and limit fat intake.
  • You can ensure that you are eating enough and/or not eating too much. This is crucial to lean body mass retention.
  • You can tweak the amount of food you are eating based on results - ie. eat more if losing weight too fast, or less if not losing fast enough.
  • You can try out different macronutrient ratios (ie. lower fat, higher protein, lower carbs) and see how it affects your fat loss.

However, many people can lose fat fine without being strict and counting calories. If what you are doing is working for you, there is no need to start counting calories. On the other hand, if you are getting softer (losing lean body mass), or not losing fast enough, counting calories is the way to go.

Macronutrients

The three macronutrients are protein, carbohydrates and fats. Protein has 4 calories per gram, carbohydrates have 4 calories per gram, and fats have 9 calories per gram. Fiber contains between 0 and 2 calories per gram but we don't explicitly take this into account when doing ratios (just use total carbs, it will be close enough). Alcohol contains 7 calories per gram.

Macronutrient Ratios

A macronutrient ratio gives the percent of calories coming from carbohydrates, protein or fat.

There is no need to be strict with a particular ratio, and the one you favour will be dependent on you. There is also no need to switch ratios when switching from cutting to bulking (although, you may wish to make changes for increased satiety when cutting, or decreased fullness when bulking). A macronutrient ratio gives you the percent of calories from each nutrient in your diet. Here are a few suggestions (again, no need to be strict):

  • 45% carbs, 35% protein, and 20% fat (higher carb)
  • 40% carbs, 35% protein, and 25% fat (higher fat)
  • 40% carbs, 40% protein, and 20% fat (higher protein)

Note that keeping your protein lower than 40% of your total calories could lead to low protein intake. Ideally, you want to get 1g of protein per pound of "goal" bodyweight. So if you would like to weigh 200 lbs, then you would want at least 200 g of protein. For this reason, the 40% carbs, 40% protein and 20% fat ratio has become popular.

Example

Suppose you need 2500 calories, and you are using a 40% carbohydrates, 40% protein, and 20% fat ratio (often written 40c/40p/20f), then you calculate the grams of each by the following calculation:

Carb grams = 0.4 * 2500/4 = 250
Protein grams = 0.4 * 2500/4 = 250
Fat grams = 0.2 * 2500/9 = 56

So in this case, you would be aiming for 250 grams of carbohydrates, 250 grams of protein, and 56 grams of fat per day. Assuming you are aiming for 5 meals a day, the easiest way to determine approximately what to intake per meal, is by dividing these numbers by 5. Your average meal should then have:

500 calories
50 g carbs
50 g protein
11 g fat

How to count calories

The simplest way to count calories and track macronutrients (protein, carbohydrates and fat) is through the use of free calorie tracking software such as Nutridiary. You simply add the foods in that you ate that day or, preferably, plan in advance by skipping ahead to the next day(s), and entering ahead of time.

I prefer Nutridiary for the ability to design meals that you can easily tweak to get desired nutritional amounts. Another website that is helpful is NutritionData. NutritionData is good for quick searching of nutrition info, and for calculating calories from recipes.

Advance Planning of Meals

Using Nutridiary you can plan meals based on your desired caloric and macronutrient content. Then you can either add the meals the day before, or you can use a word processor or spreadsheet program to write up week long meal plans in advance. Planning in advance will help with compliance to the meal plan as there are no "last minute" decisions to be made, and you can precook or tupperware meals in advance. Most meats last 3-4 days in the refrigerator, so advance cooking requires cooking twice per week or freezing of some meals.



 

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