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Our girl Laurie King spits the truth for you.....
Maintenance calories are defined as the total calories required on a daily basis to maintain body weight with no gains/losses to fat/muscle tissue. What does eating at maintenance calories feel like? Idk – like life doesn’t suck? In case no one reminded ya lately, just about EVERYTHING gets better with more food.
Indicators You May Not Be Consuming Adequate Calories:
- Low Energy
- Blood Sugar Crashes
- Not Feeling Hungry
- Chronically Being Hungry
- Poor Sleep/ Inability to Stay Awake
- Inability to Gain Muscle
- Inability to Hit PRs (personal records)
- Inability to Lose Weight
- Poor Mood
- Sub-clinical Thyroid Labs (Hypothyroidism)
- Chronically Feeling Cold
- Hair Loss
- ....
Women Specific Indicators:
- Lack of Period
- Extremely Light/ Extremely Painful Menstrual Cycles
- Inability to Get Pregnant
The list could go on forever....
There’s Typically 2 Types of People:
- People that just don’t eat & literally average something sad like 800-1000 cals
- People that cycle between overeating & undereating (this might look like 2000 cals, 2800 the next, 2200 the next)
Your body doesn’tttt really dig that sh*t. “Exercise more & eat less” might be the most generic, poor advice EVER & is probably an effective way to NOT lose fat. Think of it this way: If you were on an island with only a backpack of food – You would ration EVERY last ounce morsel of food. Similarly, if your body doesn’t know when it’ll get fed next, it’s going to down-regulate metabolism & hang onto anything we give it in order to survive
Doublecheck Your Caloric Intake:
- Snag a Food Scale & Download MyFitnessPal: Track all the food you eat for the next 7 days. Avoid generic entries like ‘medium apple’ & weigh/measure everything (ex: 100g apple)
- Throw your deets into a TDEE Calculator (bonus points if include bodyfat %) – worth noting this is JUST a generic reference that may/may not be accurate
- Then compare food log totals to projected TDEE
Ex: 28 y/o, 5’3 female, 15% BF, @bryanboorstein bodybuilding
4x week ‘moderate exercise’ = 2200 calories
5x week ‘heavy exercise’ = 2450 calories
Logged intake -> 130p 300c 75f = 2395 cal
Pretty spot on! Still unsure? Drastically undereating? Still suffering symptoms? Consider hiring an experienced coach.
Love these types of nutrition tips and guides?
Check out our girl Laurie's website for more or stay tuned as we work with her weekly for nutritional words of wisdom.
She's also got her boss ebook (The Badass Nutrition Guide) which is the ULTIMATE guide to your BEST you & has 125 pages of nutritional education, macro cheat sheets, information on how much to eat, tips on fat loss, deets on hormones, guides on cooking, macros, & SO much more!
Need workout advice? Check Paragon Training for 30 - 60 min training programs to fit your life!