[PART5]
How much should I eat?
Are you too skinny, too fat, or just right? If you really want to show off your muscles, you should aim to get below 10 percent body fat (as a man) or 25 percent body fat (if you’re a woman).
You can buy a pair of inexpensive skin calipers to get a reading of your own fat percentage and track it over time, but even that method is fairly inaccurate. It’s just difficult (without spending a ton of money) to get an accurate assessment of your body fat percentage. A better method is just to use a camera to track your progress.
The human eye can detect changes in body fat percentage better than skin calipers (in our opinion). And it’s how you look that really matters anyway, right?
To give you a sense of what various body fat percentages look like, I’ve included several pictures below along with an estimate of the body fat percentage for each individual shown.
Generally speaking, the more muscular you are, the more your muscles will show through even when you have a significant amount of body fat. And the less body fat you have, the more your muscles will show through. Obviously, the best situation is to have well-developed muscles and a low body fat percentage.
If you are currently above 10 percent body fat, start our nutrition plan by cutting your calories down to 90 percent of your basic metabolic need. You can find a free online calculator for estimating your daily caloric needs.
https://manytools.org/handy/bmr-calculator/
Men are considered obese at 30 percent body fat (35 percent for women). To look extremely lean (ripped) it is possible to get down to 3 to 6 percent body fat for men (9 to 12 percent for women). But that’s hard to maintain long-term. We recommend you go for very lean, which would be anything below nine percent for men or below 15 percent for women.
You cannot go for zero percent body fat. Your body goes through all kinds of dysfunctional reactions when you have no body fat. It’s just not healthy, so don’t think of it as an option to aim for.
Here are some general guidelines to figure out where you are at now in terms of body fat percentage. If you have love handle spillover (a manly muffin top) you’re probably close to the 20-25-ish% range.
At around 10% body fat, men start to see abdominal definition (in other words, you have nice abs). The definition of your abdominal muscles may not be very deep at that level, but you can see your ab muscles without flexing them. You’ll also be able to see the distinct anatomy of muscles where your shoulders tie in with your biceps.
When you hit the single digits, you start to look crazy ripped. Those are the guys you see on muscle building magazine covers. Muscle stands out with obvious separation in the quads and triceps even without getting a pump from working out.
If a lean, muscular physique is your goal, don’t stress out about trying to get to a certain body fat percentage. Instead, just keep a log of photos labeled with the date. Use your phone to take pictures if you have a phone with that function.
A tape measure circumference of your waist will also be helpful if you have a bit of a potbelly right now. Photos and a tape measure will help you monitor your progress.
Determine Your Caloric Needs
The first step to making any change in your physique is to figure out how many calories you need just to maintain your current body mass.
Use an online calculator. There are a lot of good, free calculators available online, or the Link Above.
But keep in mind, this is only an estimate to use as a starting point. Use a scale to watch your weight across the course of a week. Then adjust your calorie intake up or down based on what is (or isn’t) happening.
During the weight gain phase you should be gaining about two pounds per week. During the calorie restriction phase you should be losing between one and two pounds per week. At the other side of one of these cycles, more of your body weight will be muscle and less of it fat.
Also, if you put on a lot of muscle fast with our Bar Brothers workout system, don’t forget that this new muscle mass means your basic calorie needs will increase. That’s because muscles burn calories all day long.
You’ll occasionally need to increase your calorie intake as you gain lean muscle mass. Make small adjustments and monitor for at least a week before deciding if you need to adjust calories up or down again.
The reason you should wait a week is because your actual weight shown on a scale will go up or down a few pounds every day due to factors that are not actually related to true weight gain. For example, the amount of carbohydrate and sodium you consume one day to the next will impact how much water retention is going on in your body. That can cause a change of two pounds or more.
Be sure to weigh yourself around the same time each day. Also keep in mind that even the most expensive scales have an error margin of about plus or minus 2 pounds. That’s why it’s best to take an average of your daily weight across seven days and use that as an indicator of whether you are actually gaining or losing weight.
Make Calorie Counting More Convenient
At first, keeping track of your calories may feel difficult. That’s because you’re starting from scratch and you haven’t yet developed the ability to estimate calories yet. But in time, it goes much faster.
Even so, it can be time-consuming to keep track of everything you eat. You have to write everything down. You have to repeatedly stop to look up how many calories there are in the foods you eat.
Fortunately, we have a better solution for you.
Count your calories in advance. Here’s how that works.
Manufacturers are required to put nutrition facts on packages, which makes it much easier to figure out what you’re eating. The exception is when you’re eating food you’ve cooked from scratch like potatoes, chicken, or homemade bread. I’ll explain how to deal with those types of ingredients in a minute. But first, let’s discuss the most important general principle.
Whether you are cooking from scratch or using packaged foods, you can count your calories a week in advance. You do that by dividing up the correct portions into single-serving containers that are ready to eat at a moment’s notice.
So for example, let’s say you want to have spaghetti with pasta sauce and ground beef mixed in. Look at the back of the box. How many calories are there per serving? And how many servings does it say the whole box contains? Multiply those two numbers to get the total calories in the box of spaghetti noodles.
Let’s say there are 800 calories in the whole box. But when you’re done cooking, you divide the spaghetti into four different bowls. If you split 800 four ways, it comes to 200 calories. So the spaghetti part of this meal is 200 calories.
You’ll use the same method to figure out how many calories you’re adding from spaghetti sauce and ground beef. Once each serving is in its own dish, freeze or refrigerate your meals. Write the total calories of the meal on a piece of masking tape and stick it on each container.
A key to making this simple and easy is having plenty of identical containers that are microwave safe and freezer safe. Microwave-safe just means it’s a container that won’t melt or release chemicals into your food when heated in the microwave. Glass containers with rubber or plastic lids are best for that.
Freezer safe just means a container that won’t crack or be too difficult to open after freezing. Sometimes plastic containers stick to frozen liquids and then crack when you’re trying to get the food out. Again, glass containers with rubber or plastic lids as shown in the image below will be your best option. Glass won’t release any toxic chemicals into your food when you microwave it.
The reason you want to have lots of the same kind of container is because it will save you time. It will stop you from having to search for the right lid.
It will also stop you from wasting time on things like transferring food from Tupperware into something that is microwave-safe when you are ready to warm it up. You can just pull it straight out of the freezer, pop it in the microwave, and your meal is ready to eat.
And the best part is you already know exactly how many calories are in it. Just grab some masking tape and write the calories on the tape that you then stick on the glass container.
Once you have a set of meals you’re used to making, you will no longer need to do this because you already remember how many calories are in each meal. But if you follow our plan completely, you won’t even have to think about those calories because it will all be planned out a week in advance. This reduces the stress of trying to decide whether you’ve eaten the right amount.
I recommend you use glass containers with well-fitting plastic lids.
What if you don’t want to use an entire box of spaghetti? How do you figure out the total calories in that situation? The easiest way is to use a food scale. A food scale lets you see exactly how many grams you are about to cook or eat. Then multiply that by the number of grams per calorie.
You don’t have to use a scale, but it’s much more accurate than trying to eyeball it. You can order a scale like this at Amazon.com. (Be sure to use the “tare” function to neutralize the weight of your container before adding the food you want to weigh.)
So how do you calculate the number of grams per calorie? It’s really easy. Look at the back of the box. Find the place where it tells you how many calories there are in one serving. Now divide that by the number of grams in one serving.
So it’s calories per serving divided by grams per serving. That tells you how many calories there are per gram of this particular food.
When looking at the back of a container of almonds, you can calculate the exact number of calories per almond. That way you’re not restricted to the “serving size” listed on the label.
You do that by first calculating the number of calories per gram. Let’s look at how to do this calculation with an example. Here is the nutrition label for some roasted almonds.
View attachment 34080 * picture won't get inserted
Here's Manual Nutrition facts..
Amount Per 1 cup whole kernels (138g)
Calories 821
% Daily Value*
Total Fat 72g 110%
Saturdated fat 6g 30%
Polyunsaturated fat 18g
Monounsaturated fat 45g
Trans fat 0g
Cholesterol 0 mg 0%
Sodium 4 mg 0%
Potassium 983 mg 28%
Total Carbohydrate 29g 9%
Dietary fiber 15g 60%
Sugar 7g
Protein 29g 58%
Vitamin A 0% Vitamin C 0%
Looking at the top of this label, we can see the nutrition information is based on one cup of almonds, which is 138 grams. It says there are 821 calories in that serving. So we divide calories per serving (821) by the number of grams in a serving (138).
821/138 = 6.02 calories per gram
So there are approximately 6 calories per gram of almonds. Let’s say you want to pack a 200 calorie snack. How many grams do you need? Well, since each gram has 6 calories, we just divide 200 by 6 to see how many grams it takes.
200/6 = 33.33
So to get 200 calories of almonds, you just pour some onto your food scale until it reaches 33 grams. Then you know you have 200 calories of almonds.
If you buy whole foods like raw chicken, carrots, or potatoes, there may not be any nutrition label. For those kinds of foods, you can easily look up the nutrition information online. The best website I have found for this purpose is calorieking.com. They also have an app if you use a smart phone.
Here’s the real key to making calorie counting easy. Prepare meals in advance.
Separate your meals into the right calorie proportions and plan a menu for the next seven days. This causes you to automatically eat the right number of calories without having to think about it the rest of the week when you’re busy.
Do all your cooking and meal preparation on one day each week. Choose whichever day works best for you. Then don’t think about it the rest of the week.
Here’s how to really speed things up. When you have a rotating list of high-protein, nutritious meals you eat on a regular basis, they start to take you less and less time to prepare. That’s because you develop systems that allow you to prepare those meals more quickly.
The first time you plan a new meal, it seems to take forever. But if you make the same set of meals over and over, it gets much faster.
You don’t have to think about which pan to use to cook it, because you’ve done it 10 times before. You don’t have to check the box to remember how long to cook it. Everything just gets faster when you have a go-to list of meals that repeats every week or two. If you want more variety, make your meals repeat every three weeks instead of every seven days. It just depends on how much variety you need to feel satisfied.
If you’d rather not mess with trying to figure out the best meals that fit our recommended nutrition plan, use a meal from the seven day meal plan we’ve designed for you.
A “good enough” Calorie Counting Shortcut
If calorie counting sounds too complicated to you, I’ve got good news. There’s a shortcut that works pretty well as a substitute. It’s not quite as good, but it’s “good enough.” You’ll get most of the benefits you would get from actual calorie counting.
It’s a method based on one simple idea. The idea is that if you eat enough protein, you will be getting the basic building blocks you need for muscle growth and you will be unlikely to overeat since protein is so filling.
Protein fills up your stomach a lot more than other foods. For example, 100 calories of baked chicken is much bigger and heavier than 100 calories of bread.
If you ate as much bread as you felt like eating, you would probably eat too many calories and start to get fat. But if you make sure every meal contains enough grams of protein, you will be unlikely to overeat. That’s because the protein will make you feel full.
You are unlikely to over eat carbs and fats if your meals are centered around getting enough protein. So you can just count the number of grams of protein and forget about measuring everything else. But there is one thing you do have to measure to make this shortcut work. You have to measure yourself.
The second part of this shortcut method is to weigh yourself every day.
Be consistent and weigh yourself each day. Also use a picture log (pictures of yourself) to make sure you are moving in the right direction for your current goal.
Here’s why this is important. If you’re not actually measuring the number of calories you’re eating, you might start to gain weight or lose weight when you did not mean to. But by measuring yourself and keeping a log with pictures, you get feedback that lets you adjust how much you eat.
For example, people with high metabolisms often don’t eat enough calories when on a high-protein diet. The protein makes them feel too full. So they eat fewer carbs and fats. As a result, their body does not get enough calories to trigger muscle building.
Weight gain can actually be just as difficult as weight loss when you have a very high metabolism. Eating healthy food when you’re not hungry is no fun. But if you’re serious about transforming a scrawny physique into a muscular one, it is necessary. So if you use this method, make sure you gain at least half a pound each week. If you’re not gaining any weight, force yourself to eat more.
If the scale shows you’re staying at the same weight, or losing weight, you’ll need to be more conscious about deliberately adding calories beyond your protein calories. We’ll talk about how to do that in the section titled Too Skinny below.
For those of you who have a bit of extra fat to lose, there’s one thing you might want to add to this basic shortcut method. You might want to also keep track of the total number of grams of carbohydrate you consume each day.
Try to keep your total carbs below 50 grams per day and you’ll be amazed how quickly you shed the fat. Eating high-protein and low-carb allows you to keep your muscles while burning off the fact. It creates the right environment for preserving muscle mass gains while you’re in your low calorie phase.