Getting Started on Your Fitness Journey- The Basics

 

While starting the process of getting fit may seem daunting, with a little know-how and determination, you can make lots of progress in even the first month. I like to break fitness into three main parts, nutrition, training, and recovery. This week’s post should serve to give a brief outline of nutrition.

To begin, you need to assess your goals, most people either want to lose body fat, or gain muscle mass. While it’s possible to do both at the same time, I’ve found it’s more efficient to prioritize one of the two since the physiological processes can be antagonistic at times. After you’ve decided on your goal you then need to find out how many calories you need to consume to gain or lose weight respectively. This is because if you eat more calories than your body needs, you will lose weight, and vice versa. The best way to do this is by going to an online calculator that will give you this information after you input some basic information about yourself.

The one that I personally use has the following link:

https://www.calculator.net/calorie-calculator.html

The results for me are found in the image on the right:

              Based on this information, if I wanted to lose weight, I would choose to eat 2604 calories per day, yielding one pound of weight loss weekly. If I wanted to gain weight, I would choose to eat 500 calories more than what’s required to maintain my weight. The next step is to break these calories into macro-nutrient ratios. All that means is deciding how much protein, carbohydrate, and fat you’ll eat. This is important because your body needs a given amount of protein to maintain muscle mass, and a given amount of fat to promote healthy bodily function. Carbs are used to provide your body with short term energy and will serve to fuel your workouts, which I’ll speak about in a separate post.

              While there’s a way to manually calculate how much of each macronutrient is needed, the easier way is to use a free app such as MyFitnessPal that will do the hard parts for you. After you are given your macronutrient needs you can begin to structure your eating so that you can achieve your goals. Next post, I’ll speak on the types of foods that are ideal to meet your macro nutrient needs. If anything from this post is unclear, a great resource for me has always been YouTube, a specific channel I find helpful is "Reniassance Periodization" . It’s easy to get discouraged while starting out but with time, all can be made simple.