IIFYM help

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emsavluk
emsavluk Posts: 5
in Food and Nutrition
So for basically all of my life, I've played sports and exercised regularly. Even though I lifted weights and exercised everyday throughout high school, I was maintaining a pudgy 170 lb frame. Two summers ago, I decided to do Insanity. I did the workouts everyday, but ate the same food that I normally ate. I ended up losing about 10 lbs and slimmed down and toned up quite a bit. During my freshman year of college, I continued to lose weight. Once last summer hit, I decided to start eating what I thought was healthier to increase my results. I basically stopped eating anything that was fattening or had a lot of carbs in it. Now, I've dropped to about 134 lbs and I'm looking to gain weight.

So this semester, I downloaded the myfitness pal app and started actually counting my calories. To my disbelief, I have only been consuming about 1500-1800 calories per day. Now that I am trying to gain lean mass back, I have been researching numerous ways to do so. The best way seems to be the IIFYM system of flexible dieting. So I've used several calculators and they've all told me that I should be eating about 3000 calories per day to gain weight.

So my question is, should I make the jump from 1800 to 3000 immediately, or gradually work my way up to it? Also, It says that i should be eating a ton more carbs than I do now. Should I eat more carbs or keep them low?

Additional info: My workouts currently follow along with the MP45 program. I'm not sure how many calories I burn in a day, but It is a vigorous daily program with lifting and HIIT cardio.

Thanks

Replies

  • robert5891
    robert5891 Posts: 29
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    Work your way up to 3000 over the course of a couple of weeks. Increase your caloric intake by 200-300 cals to around 2100 this week, then next week go up to 2400, and so on until you hit your desired calorie goal.
  • Chrisparadise579
    Chrisparadise579 Posts: 411 Member
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    Hey man I went through almost the exact same thing, Im 19 as well, I was around 175lbs in high school and was always athletic but slightly chubby. I did p90x to start losing the weight about 9 months ago and went to 150lbs. You can can definitely make your way up to 3000 but increase it by about 200 calorie a day every 2 weeks and that will let you increase your calories with minimal weight gain. It took me about 2 months to get from 2000 to 3200 and I am now bulking as well, if you want to talk about it more feel free to message me.
  • BusyRaeNOTBusty
    BusyRaeNOTBusty Posts: 7,166 Member
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    Yes. Increase gradually. Increasing carbs is fine too as long as you are getting enough protein and fat (and don't avoid fat, it's good for you).
  • csuhar
    csuhar Posts: 779 Member
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    Could you make the jump in one move? Sure. But I think it will be easier for you to take it incremental steps. Just like eating fewer calories, eating larger amounts of calories works when changes are made with attention paid to sustainability. And that's easier to do if you don't have to greatly modify your current habits.

    So start by making easy changes to what you're already doing, like eating more calorically dense or full-fat versions of things, etc. Then, once that's done, you can look to adding more meals / snacks, or doing whatever additional eating you need to do to meet your goal.
  • Sam_I_Am77
    Sam_I_Am77 Posts: 2,093 Member
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    You could but it would probably be more tolerable to increment slowly, maybe start with the 2000, judge your performance and results, and then add in 10% increments.

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