Need to learn how to budget my calories

Lupitac33

Hello I'm new here and I want to go back down to my original 120-125 but I have never budgeted my calories before. Can anyone help me out with this?

badwolf4

Hi! My process is like this
1. Make time every afternoon/evening to plan the next day. I take it one day at a time.
2. Pick a meal you fancy for the next day. For me I eat the same thing for breakfast everyday so that's an easy building block, but just saying "hey I want two servings of ice cream at x time tomorrow because my friends are over" or whatever is just as valid. Just start with a building block.
3. It's also super helpful to have set meals/meal times. I eat 6x per day (breakfast, morning snack, lunch, afternoon snack, dinner, and after dinner snack which sometimes is dessert). If you're finding it hard to spread out your calories over 6 meals 5 meals also works.
4. So once I have my starting block (breakfast: oatmeal, blueberries, banana, coffee for 269 kcalories) I know I have 1731 to 'spend' for the rest of the day. I know for tomorrow I have friends spending the night who like ice cream, so I'd planned a sundae bar for them. I KNOW I always like to eat a LOT of ice cream so I'll actually porition out *4* servings for myself. I eat special ice cream for dietary restrictions so it's actually fairly low calories. For 2 cups of ice cream it comes to 400.
5. Now I have the tippy top of my chart and the bottom filled out leaving me 1331 for the middle. This middle comprises of 4 meals for me. Pick the next one, lunch. I'll be out so something portable! Vegetarian chili sounds awesome, so I'll do that. 1 cup chili from Trader Joes is 280. Plus some carbs so a slice of whole wheat bread is another 90. How about some fruit? A little cooler and fresher. A peach sounds amazing, so another 51 (I find it super helpful to weigh your fruit, this one was 131g). And a drink. I carry unsweetened vanilla almond milk in a single serving for 40 kcals. This makes my total for lunch 461.
6. 1331 - 461= 870. Awesome! 2 snacks and dinner for 870. Crackers and hummus are one of my favorite fall-back snacks, and that sounds great when I get home in the afternoon. 2tbs hummus is 50 and 8 Reduced guilt woven wheat wafers from trader joes is 120 for a total of 170.
7. 870 - 170 = 700 for dinner and morning snack. I usually like big dinners so lets do that and use the left over for snack. It's a busy day,so I'll fall back (again) on a known food I like. American Flatbread vegan harvest. The whole thing for 520.
8. 700 - 520 = 180. Also a consideration is I never get enough protein, so how about a hard boiled egg in here. That 60 calories. The rest of the 120 I should be able to cover with a large apple.

Great! Thank you, I've planned out tomorrow. I hope this helps! I generally sit down in a quiet spot (no TV or other people) and take time to think what will work for me based on what I like. Sometimes I like to do this with my afternoon snack. I take a piece of paper and a pencil and 'sketch' it out, then enter it into my journal a meal at a time to check my macros out. I'm not the best at that part, haha, but tomorrow is a chaotic day well worth planning.

I think maybe I'll do a general post on my process and tactics in the future. Particularly incorporating macro planning. I know my dinner was severely lacking in balance!