5-6 meals a day routine + calorie counting

duckson

As I usually skip breakfast and have the standard "large" evening meal I'm going to try the 5-6 meals a day routine, starting with a larger breakfast and subsequent meals getting smaller as the day goes on. I'm also thinking of calorie counting to make sure i dont overeat!
Can anyone recommend any websites with info on example daily meals?

I'd probably start with porridge and a protein drink (Whey Isolate)
Mid morning a couple of pieces of fruit + handful of nuts.
Lunch a couple of small wholemeal tcakes with tuna.
Mid afternoon - fruit?
Evening - salad or veg and tuna/salmon steak or pasta and tomatoe sauce stir in / mushroom / onion etc.

I usually exercise before my evening meal but i may start doing a run before breakfast.

Regarding calorie counting, I read your approx daily limit is 29xweight in kg which would be 29x73kg = 2117 for me plus then add on any calorie's burnt by exercise. Now i have no way of knowing what i burn during exercise....would a HRM or some such watch tell me this or can you work off approximations? eg 30 mins run @ normal pace is 400calories?
I would be looking to run a calorie deficit to lose some weight, what deficit is recommended for a healthy constant weight loss?

LJAR

The best way to work out you calorie requirements is to calculate your basal metabolic rate and then multiply by a particular factor depending on how active you are and your gender and age.

Do a search on Google and loads of calculators will come up.

As for the 5-6 meals per day routine, it can work fine. I'd just eat healthy food and split the calories evenly between all the meals. To manage my weight I spread about 2500 calories over 4-5 meals per day.

If you want to have a healthy and permanent weight loss then you need to go for a 500 calorie deficit per day; this will lead to roughly 1lb per week loss. If you go much quicker the danger is that you'll just put it back on again when you stop dieting.

Louis

bahzob

Try this site.

http://www.fitday.com/

There's a standalone version which costs $30. Bought it a while back and in terms of losing/controlling weight was best money I've spent.

duckson

Thanks.
Signed up to fitday.com and started filling in my details. Base calorie burn has come out as ~2400 a day, i picked the "sitting with some movement" option (office job but i do walk and stuff during the day, weekend will be less sitting and more walking!) and obviously then you need to add sleep on each day which brings the calorie burn down a bit.
Set my target weight loss as 10lb in 2 months and its calced a calorie deficit of 700 a day to achieve this (lose ~1.4lb week) so on a non-exercise day thats ~1700 calories to take on board rising when i'm either on the bike or running.
I've also started to try and eat similar calorie amounts over breakfast, lunch and dinner and a couple of instances of fruit/nuts etc inbetween so there is a constant 3hr top up of some food intake to keep my metabolism at a more constant rate.

Will see how it goes!!

bahzob

Good luck. One tip re a good food (if not veg and dont mind eating Bambi) is venison steak. High protein helps keep appetite at bay and low in fat (less than half beef steak).

duckson

Does the 2400 cals a day for just "living" sound about right with an office job and 6-7hrs sleep planned in? i'm 33 and in the "right weight" band according to the fitday.com graph.

Is there any easy way for me to find a more accurate figure by monitoring my daily routine, a specific watch or something?

EDIT

Polar F4 any good?
http://www.fitgadgetz.co.uk/servlet/the ... tor/Detail

bahzob

It sounds about right, its pretty much the same as me for similar profile. though people will vary.

I'd suggest starting by using Fitday for a couple of weeks or so to see if any trend appears. I found it to be pretty consistent. If I had several days where cals burned greater than cals eaten weight starts to go down and vice versa. Link below shows this (though also shows exceptions that show need to keep a long view. High start due to Xmas xcess and a blip at start of Feb due to high fluid consumption on a couple of slightly heavy nights out....)

http://picasaweb.google.com/bahzob/SharedPictures#5299717086585647858

The biggest learning overall I have had was not so much that my activity was out of the ordinary, rather it was just how many calories were really in the food I was eating.

Havent used the watch you mention myself, but if you think it will help with motivation I'd give it a try.

duckson

Do you monitor the % of carbs, fat, protein etc intake against the calories your having each day?
ie x% for carbs, x% is fats etc. The fitday RDA levels seems a little low compared to what google turns up! ie carbs = 130g
I know you can put min and max custom levels in although this is in grams and not %, is there a recommended % level i should use as a guideline?

bahzob

Don't especially monitor %s. What I use are figures from a post here a while back (think it was Alex, not sure) with advice as follows

Fat 0.8-1.4 g per lb body weight
Carb 5.7- 9.8 g per lb
Protein 1.3 - 2.3 g per lb
+
No more than 20g saturated fat per day
Target 35g fibre.

I've found that to be not bad. If not in peak season and trying to control weight increasing protein a bit over carb helps avoiding hunger. In lead up to peak event bias more towards carb.

duckson

Surely its per kg of body weight or else i should be having at least 128g a day fat for example.....? (160lb * 0.8g = 128g)

Bodhbh

http://www.caloriesperhour.com/index_burn.php

Found it pretty accurate overall, if you work out your whole daily requirent and count your intake. Managed to maintain a 1000 a day defict using it and loose weight as fast as I expected (i.e. 1kg per week).

I'm sure there's inaccuracy in all the counting methods, but if they get results you want more or less who cares.

bahzob

duckson wrote:

Surely its per kg of body weight or else i should be having at least 128g a day fat for example.....? (160lb * 0.8g = 128g)

My mistake, yes kg.