As I mentioned in a comment I made a few days ago, I’ve been tracking my caloric intake at www.fitday.com. Now that I’ve reverted to an athlete-like diet, I’ve learned several things that I wasn’t aware of. First, a word on how many calories I’m trying to squeeze my diet into. According to this, a male with my physical characteristics needs to take in around 2400 kcal/day in order to maintain bodyweight. Since my goal is to lose about a pound of bodyfat per week, I subtracted 500 kcal from this and have made my daily goal to stay around 1900 kcal/day. Over the past week, I’ve found this exceedingly difficult to do. Not because I’m eating too much, but too little.
There are essentially two constraints that I’m trying to balance: caloric intake and sources of calories. I’ve eliminated most processed starches (e.g., breads, pasta, etc.) and have found that hitting 1900 kcal/day is somewhat difficult. In particular, the real problem has been protein intake. I’ve read that I should be trying to take in something like .88g of protein for every pound of bodyweight, which means that I need around 180g of protein per day. Unfortunately, I’ve only been getting about 100-120g and my calorie intake is about 1,700 kcal/day. I’m going to spend the next few weeks playing around with my diet to see if I can find a way to jockey all of the numbers into the right place before I consider adding something like a protein shake. I think it’s just a matter of coming up with another way to introduce more protein without pushing my caloric intake too high.
A lot of this seems to come down to balance. I’m aiming for 33/33/33 percentages of fats/proteins/carbs. Thus far, I’ve been getting around 30/25/45, which isn’t bad, but I need to get my protein intake up to make sure that I can stay healthy and not get injured or sick.
Anyway, I’m off for a ride. I’ll be posting tonights picture and stats when I get back. Thanks for following along.
