Aim for more or less calories

brisnick

I'm a 50yr-old male and I am trying to bring my % body fat down (I don't believe in weight goals).

I take part in HIIT 5-6 times per week for 45 minutes per session and sometimes also fit in an occasional jog. I also cycle to work (26km round trip) twice per week, but I work in an office and am sedentary during the day.

I am confused as to whether:

* I should be lowering my calorie intake, which concerns me that with the exercise I am doing my muscle will reduce, and my metabolism will go down also
* I should be increasing my calorie intake to build the muscle to raise metabolism and burn the fat quicker
* What my macros should look like

I'm not into fads, I eat healthy foods, I am just not sure I have macros/calorie intake right.

AnnPT77

You should be doing exercise suited to your goals and getting enough protein.

To decrease body fat percent, you either need to increase muscle mass, decrease fat mass, or both. (There's a narrow-ish range for reasonable probability of doing both at the same time, but doing them sequentially, in cycles, is an option.)

HIIT, cycling, and jogging are not optimal exercise for increasing muscle mass. A good, progressive, full body strength training program is the more efficient method to increase muscle mass. Find such a program from resources like this:

http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10332083/which-lifting-program-is-the-best-for-you/p1

While doing such a program, you have options that can influence your stated goals: Eating close to maintenance calories (weight stability) can enable some muscle mass gain, but probably not at maximum speed. If you lose weight slowly (half a pound a week or less), you may sacrifice some potential muscle gain, but lose a little fat slowly; if you gain weight slowly, you may gain muscle faster but also add some fat you'll eventually need to lose later.

Losing fat fast(er) doesn't help so much with muscle gain (not impossible, but at least slower). Gaining weight faster tends to tilt toward a bulk and cut approach.

Unsolicited rant: For either maximizing fitness or maximizing body composition improvement (muscle gain) or losing fat, most things recently called HIIT are usually not optimal exercise. If the HIIT is fun, and a person is more likely to do it than some other exercise, it can still be worth doing. It can have benefits. But it's trendy, and oversold, in most current forms.

If you decrease your calorie intake, but lose weight only quite slowly, you're unlikely to slow your metabolism or lose muscle that you're challenging via progressive exercise. (You might not gain muscle as fast.) Taking some breaks periodically at maintenance calories would maybe further avoid those risks.

It's improbable that increasing calories will increase your metabolism to any meaningful extent (unless you're currently dramatically undereating to the point of fatigue), nor will it burn fat quicker. It might build muscle quicker.

Macros, try this reference:

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/819055/setting-your-calorie-and-macro-targets/p1