I am a male 25 years old, 90kg 185cm. 30 days ago I decided to get rid of some belly fat so I started counting my calories and doing weight training. Since I am not new to this(I trained for 2 years 5-6 years ago) first thing I did was finding two or three calorie calculators to estimate my daily caloric needs. For my case that would be somewhere around 2300 ±100 to lose 0.5kg per week. I train every day around 6 pm where Mon/Tu and Thr/Fri are days for upper/lower split and abs every day except Thursday-each training is around 90min except from Wed and weekend when I do only abs.
During the last 30 days I went even lower with my daily intake, somewhere between 2000-2100 split into 4 meals(7 am 12pm 3pm 8pm). When I cook I literally weigh every single ingredient so there should be no error regarding that. I didn’t eat fast food or sweets. All calories came from meat like beef, veal, chicken and fish with a lot of vegetables, not so much fruits, eggs and a little bit of low fat dairy products. Twice a week I took protein shakes once per day when my meals for that day couldn’t provide enough protein. There wasn’t a part of a day when I felt hungry, not even at night since I go to bed between 11 11 30 pm. Only thing I drank was water.
And the results are not satisfying. I lost around 0.5kg for the whole month. Now one could assume that I gained muscle which I certainly did a little bit( although with my caloric deficit it shouldn’t be happening, I was aiming for preservation) but my stomach circumference did not get smaller at all like I didn’t burn any fat.
Now my question is: Is it possible that my bad nutrition and sedentary lifestyle for the last 5 years made my metabolism so slow that even with all this training ~2000kcal is too much to start fat burning? Im a bit puzzled. Not sure should I go even lower with calories which in end effect could be more harming than beneficial. Last spring I lost 15 kg for 45 days with a “crash diet” where I ate ~1200 kcal daily and trained a little(from 97kg to 83kg) but since it was unsustainable somewhere around august I stopped dieting and gained it almost all back and decided now to do it slowly.
I do make sauces but I weigh literally everything. Oil too. Even the spices although they don’t contribute that much.
I measure every ingredient before cooking. That way I get the amount of calories per gram of the end product. After cooking I measure my portion, so when I consider that meat looses some of the weight through evaporation of water I can only overestimate which in the end effect makes my intake even smaller.
Short example: 200g chopped onion(~80 kcal) fried on 20g of sunflower oil(~180 kcal) than add 800g of chopped chicken breast(~1350 kcal) after meat is almost finished add 400 g of tomato extract(~250kcal) and add a little bit of water. Let it cook until enough water evaporates so that it is creamy. So the final calculation is 1420g of this meal is ~1860 kcal That means 1860/1420 = 1.3 kcal per gram or 130kcal per 100g. Am I doing this wrong?
and 4) not in the last 30 days. I try to stay consistent.
Didn’t know that 1700 would still be acceptable. I will try to lower the intake for extra 100 200 kcal to see how it goes for the next 30 days. Thanks for the advice.
I believe after the cooking you would need to weight the entire meal again and then divide the calories of the meal by the weight of the cooked version?
In the example above if the meal lost some weight due to cooking - lets say down to 1200g then it would look like:
1860 kcal from all the food put in / 1200g for the final weight = 1.55 kcal per cooked g
So a 100g portion of your cooked meal would be 155 kcal not 130.
Thanks MJones, it makes sense. Will consider it in the future.
Anyway after lowering my calories even further I started seeing results. I did some research on those calorie calculators and activity levels.
I came to a conclusion that I overestimated calorie needs because of the wrong activity level. Even tho I train every day at least abs I should still choose sedentary activity level because apart from those 45-90 min that I do train I spend my working day in a chair on a computer. So when I choose activity level exercise 5-6 times a week I get a number ~2300 kcal for desired weight loss. With choosing sedentary the number reduces to ~1800 which actually works pretty well.
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