Balancing diet and exercise - fueling properly

caimay199

Hi everyone,

I've been working on getting rid of some bad habits and replacing them with healthy ones, such as cutting out junk food, and not snacking after dinner apart from 1-2 squares of dark chocolate. Now I feel like I'm ready to start tracking my calories.

I really just wanted to hear from people about how you've managed to eat in a deficit and keep evergy levels up while working out. My BMR is 1791, and my TDEE is 2547. I want to lower my calories as much as possible, but without feeling tired during my workouts. I have rehearsals for a dance show nearly every day, and they are intense. Normally 2-3 hours, and the warm up is a couple of laps around a field, an 1 minute each of burpees, press ups, plank, climbers, repeated 3 or 4 times, and then intense hip hop choreography for the remainder. It's a lot! on top of that I have to fit in yoga and gymnastics once each during the week.

I'm wondering how low I should go calorie wise. If I ate 1400, would it be a terrible idea? Should I bump it up even as much as 1800?

kommodevaran

Are you aiming to lose weight? How much do you have to lose - what's your height and weight? You can safely lose up to 1% of your body weight per week as long as you have fat to lose. As one kilo of fatty tissue equals 7000 calories, that number of grams would correspond to your optimal calorie deficit. So, let's say you weigh 80 kilos. 1% of that is 800 grams. 2547-800=1747. Lower than that will not give you any results you would want (muscle loss, hunger, fatigue, thoughts about sabotage).

GauchoMark

You have a decent amount of calories to work with. If you have cut out junk food, you will probably see that you can actually eat a fair amount of food.

As for getting through workouts on a deficit, the best thing you can do is eat something about 30-45 minutes before you go work out. I usually try to target something that is low fat and has 2x more carbs than protein. A rule of thumb is to eat 0.25g carbs/lb LBM when in a deficit.

So, for example, my LBM is 161lbs. I would eat a snack that has about 0.25*161=40g carbs and carbs/2=20g protein. For me, I eat a Clif Builder bar which has about 30g carbs and 20g protein - close enough for my purposes and easy to find, plus the carbs are a good mix of simple and complex. If you are small, you could eat half before and half after.

trigden1991

You need to decide which is more important; losing fat or performing your activity optimally. Being in a deficit will never allow one to perform at their optimum.

caimay199

Thanks everyone. I'm 5'8 and 225lbs. I'm focusing right now on getting out of the 200s as it wasn't too long ago that I was there and I know that 30lbs makes a real difference. So I'm thinking I might split my calories into 4 and make sure one of those meals is about an hour before my workout. I know from experience that i won't be able to lose on over 2000 calories, so I'll lower it some more, definitely. Like gauchomark said it's a lot of food!