Cross Training Diet – Calculating Your Calories for Muscle Gain and Fat Loss
When you hear of macros and calories and the tracking that needs to go into it, you may feel as if you are being taken through a torturous journey of CrossFit Diet into achieving your fitness goals. The reality is, your attitude and approach will determine how easy and boring these exercises can be.
Remember, CrossFit nutrition is not just what you eat and when rather it is an important tool to help you boost your CrossFit performance as you integrate the essential workouts.
Macros are simply macronutrients. If you have heard about protein, fat, and carbohydrate, then you already have a foundational knowledge of what macros are.
Each of these nutrients has a specific number of calories per gram. For instance, protein has 4 calories per gram, fat has 9 calories per gram, and carbohydrate has 4 calories per gram.
Determining Your Goal
The first step in the macro counting and calorie tracking business is to set up a goal. The goal usually has 2 components, the first being losing weight and the second gaining muscle. In order to achieve these goals, you must find out as the baseline the much you are eating currently. You can know this by tracking your food intake continuously for 2 to 4 weeks.
Always take your weight measurements before and after. If you find that you lost weight, then it means you are not eating as much, if you gained weight then you are eating more than your system needs. Add the calories you have consumed and then divide them by the number of days to get the daily average of your CrossFit diet.
Total Daily Energy Expenditure and the Basic Metabolic Rate
The BMR refers to the energy your body needs in order to function each day. For your heart to beat, nails to grow, your system to digest, and even for you to breath, you need energy. To add to this foundational energy requirement, you need more energy to support activities such as walking, running, and weightlifting.
This is taken care of by the total daily energy expenditure. There are several tools you can use to calculate your BMR and total daily energy expenditure.
Calculating Your Macros
Depending on whether your goal is to lose weight or gain muscle, your CrossFit diet needs to adapt to this. Having put your goal into context, you need to establish the percentage of energy that you either need to add or subtract from your total daily energy expenditure so as to meet your goal.
For gaining muscle, you will go through the gradual process of lean massing while for losing fat you will gradually experience weight loss.
Keeping Track and Measuring Progress
After you input the desired protein, carbohydrate, fats, and targeted calories, it is now your responsibility to keep check of whatever meal you take including snacks. It may be difficult at first, but just like CrossFit workouts, with time it becomes a habit. A kitchen scale is an important tool to make this tracking as accurate as possible. Keep on tweaking your food intake as you progress.
Measuring progress is important and should be determined from the word go what specific indicators will be used. In as much as the scale is a logical instrument to check progress, before and after pictures as well as muscle tissue measurements can tell you how well you are doing. You can also measure body fat using calipers.
