Calories
People need calories to stay alive, even the laziest couch potato does. The barest minimum of calories that you need to stay alivewithout any exertion whatsoeveris called your BMR.
Now, if you exercise, you need to take in more calories than your BMR, of course. How much more? That depends upon the amount of calories burned, e. g. your activity levels. Add together that amount, with the BMR, and a couple of other things that burn your calories, and you get the so-called TDEE - which is your total daily energy expenditure.
How do I calculate all then?
There are numerous complicated calculations out there, but really no one needs to manually calculate anything when there are sites that calculates everything for you:
http://www.1percentedge.com/ifcalc/
Input height, weight, age, gender, and (optional, but helpful) bodyfat percentage (BF%) and/or waist. The calculator will give you both the BMR, TDEE, as well as an estimation of your muscle/fat mass.
Remember that all of this is blanket estimation of exacting processes going on in your body - incorrect estimations can be corrected, but the important thing is that you are
consistent in your measurement and approach so you are always moving towards your goals.
Before we move on to the next step in the calculator supplied above, let's take a lot at the all-important "macros".
Protein, Carbs, Fat
Proteins are essential in the
anabolic (muscle-building) processes in the body. The opposite of anabolic is
catabolic (muscle-burning). If youre interested in gaining muscle, you should make sure your protein intake is sufficient. In general it is recommended to eat around 0.6 to 1.0 grams of protein per lbs of bodyweight daily.
Hormones play an important role speeding up and slowing down anabolic and catabolic processes.
Insulin is one of the hormones that tells the body to store stuffboth in the form of muscle and in the form of fat. This insulin spike is why there is near-unaminous support for consuming carbs after training!
Cortisol is one of the hormones that tells the body to use its storageagain, both muscle and fat.
Go back to the calculator now, and you'll see on the right-hand side of the screen a big pie chart of the carb-fat-protein ratio that you can alter through a set of slides. Some people swear by a 40-30-30 diet. This means that 40% of your daily calorie intake comes from protein, 30% from carbs, and 30% from fat (this was popularized under the name The Zone Diet), and for a beginner this is a great start unless you're interested in a more specialized diet for various reasons.
Do remember to ensure that you have at least 0.6-1.0g of protein per pound of bodyweight, even if this means you get more than 40% of your daily calorie intake from your protein.
Example: We have a 160 lb individual who would like to be 180 lbs. Ignoring everything but protein, we can safely conclude he should eat between 96g (0.6x) to 160g (1.0x) of protein a day.
How to hit your calorie and macro guideline
You might have noticed that you can select your activity level under the calculator, so let me explain to you what that's all about.
Normally, you'd essentially guess what your activity levels are (as they're quite vague and really not that reflective of the exercises most people do), but we're going to do something altogether different that will give you a much more accurate calorie guideline to hit each day you're working out or resting.
First of all, you'll need to use the following food diary site (or any other food diary site, so long as it allows for input of exercise), in which you can input what you're eating to see how many calories/carbs/fats/protein it contains - so you know whether or not you're hitting those calories and macros:
http://www.myfitnesspal.com/ with the
net carb script (computer only).
Next I want you to select "Sedentary" under activity levels in the first calculator. Then, as you do actually go to the gym or go for a jog, you input that activity into Myfitnesspal (Tab: Exercise, click on Add Exercise under the Cardiovascular section, and search for "Strength training",) and it'll automatically give you extra calories you can consume on those days you're actually working out.
Just remember not to trick either yourself or the calculator - if you're consuming a snicker bar, then it will go into your food diary. If you're cooking a lot at home, you'll get a lot more accurate calorie/macro estimates of what you eat by using a food scale to weigh everything that goes into your belly.