How To Determine Your Dcml
There are two ways to determine your daily calorie maintenance level, or DCML.
How Should You Exercise To Gain Muscle & Lose Weight
The most effective method of building muscle is through strength training. Adding bodyweight exercises and weight lifting to your workout regimen can help you gain strength and increase muscle mass.
You dont need any equipment or just a few to start a strength routine. Consider kicking off your strength training journey with a bodyweight circuit at home meant for beginners. A workout that consists of pushups, squats, lunges, mountain climbers, and planks can be a highly effective strength-building strategy. Build your muscle by incorporating all of these moves into your routine.
Elevate your bodyweight workout by using low-weight dumbbells. You can do a squat exercise as you hold dumbbells at shoulder height. You could also perform a lunge with dumbbells at your side. With that said, its always prudent to proceed with moderation.
Go Easy on Yourself!
Theres no need to go through guilt cycles with food. Our brains and bodies dont respond well to workouts as punishment. Doing hours of cardio or highly restricting your caloric consumption to make up for indulgences prevents muscle development and might lead to emotional and physical stress.
Dont forget that one less nutritious meal cant make you tip the scale. In reality, its what we do consistently that determines our general body composition.
Dont Forget About Carbs And Healthy Fats
Carbohydrates and dietary fat are just as important as protein when following a muscle-building diet for women.
The Institute of Medicine Recommends at least 130 grams of carbohydrates per day for adults.
Aim to consume about 25% of your daily calories from fat when muscle building and fat loss are your goals.
Choose healthy fats like avocados, plant oils, nuts, seeds, olives, and nut butters to stay healthy and lower heart disease and other chronic disease risks.
Excellent sources of fiber-rich carbs for muscle building in women are quinoa, fruit, sweet potatoes, corn, peas, other legumes, brown rice, wild rice, oatmeal, and whole-grain breads, and cereals.
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Macronutrients Ratio According To Your Fitness Goals
During this women’s nutrition plan we will define a general macronutrient ratio for each fitness goal: toning, burning fat and maintaining weight. Like said earlier, we all have different body types, so it will be your job to slightly change this ratio if your body doesn’t respond to it.The macronutrient ratios are:
Put It All Together: Calorie Cycling
It sounds confusing that you have to eat fewer calories than you burn to lose fat, but you have to eat more calories than you burn to build muscle. Its actually pretty simple when you learn about the concept of calorie cycling: modifying your calorie and macronutrient intake to match your goal for the day.
The first thing you need to do is figure out your maintenance calories, or how many calories you burn on a day you dont exercise. You can see a certified personal trainer, dietitian or other health professional to find this number, or you can use an online calorie calculator. This one from Mayo Clinic uses the Mifflin-St. Jeor equation, which pros consider the gold standard.
On days that you do cardio exercise, you should consume enough calories to meet your maintenance number. Consuming maintenance calories on a cardio day ensures that youre in a slight deficit to promote fat loss, but not in a deficit so large that your body starts using muscle tissue as fuel. We want the muscle!
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Eat Frequently Throughout The Day
Since muscle building is your ultimate goal, you must eat frequently throughout the day . For instance, you can consume three meals and two or three snacks. Such a practice will help you build or sustain muscle by ensuring that your body is correctly nourished throughout the day.
A sample muscle-building eating schedule may entail:
- Breakfast: 8:00 am
- Dinner: 5:30 pm
Come up with a meal schedule that aligns with your wake-up time, your work and workout schedules, as well as the time you head to bed every night.
Ideal Macros For Building Muscle
When it comes to building muscle, calories are most important. However, having the ideal macronutrient setup is a close second. The macronutrients, or macros for short, are protein, carbohydrate, and fat. Protein and carbohydrates contain four calories per gram, and fat has nine.
Protein is the most vital macronutrient to build and maintain muscle. The goal is to lift weights and consume enough protein to boost muscle protein synthesis and reduce muscle breakdown. The best foods for muscle, which are typically high in protein, will help get you there.
Trying to figure out how much protein per day to build muscle? Current research supports the old recommendation of one gram of protein per pound of bodyweight1. You can probably get away with slightly less protein while in a caloric surplus but aiming for your body weight is easy to remember.
Pinning down the correct amount of carbohydrates and fat is a little less straightforward. Unlike protein, there is not a specific gram amount per pound of body weight that is the ideal intake. For fat and carbs, there is a broader range of proper intake, primarily due to personal preference.
Fat has a negative connotation in society, but consuming dietary fat doesn’t make you more likely to gain fat. Some fat is essential, and the body must have it to stay alive. Fat is necessary for regulating hormones, aiding joint health, boosting brain function, and more. We want fat consumption to be about 20-40% of our total calorie intake.
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Winner Winner Chicken Dinner
Remember that you need to look at the contents of a food not the total weight of a food so a chicken breast has 23g of protein per 100g of weight. So to get my 40g I would need nearly 200g of chicken breast. Keep this in mind when weighing your food as its a common mistake
Always weigh your food raw as cooked weights can be troublesome, eg rice can be different depending on how much water it absorbs while cooking.
How To Lose Fat And Gain Muscle At The Same Time According To Experts
Learning how to lose fat and gain muscle at the same time isnt easy. But according to experts it can be doneand, whats more, its actually more beneficial and sustainable for your body in the long run.
Phil Catudal, NASM-cpt and nutrition expert, can speak to this. Its called body recomposition, and its probably the thing I work on most with clients, he says. The first thing you should know, he says, is that winning the lose fat-gain muscle game requires a serious level of consistency and understanding.
Its something he stresses clients like Ann who came to him after giving birth to two kids looking for the best way to lose fat but gain muscle too. The two started working together six weeks postpartum, and he developed a plan for her that focused on the two main things that you need to achieve both at the same time: protein and calorie intake. By the end she was squatting 120 pounds barbells with chains on her waist and looking super badass, Catudal recalls.
Before undergoing any major changes to your diet or nutrition plan, you should speak to a registered dietitian or doctor. There are, however, some general guidelines and information that applies to healthy adults that you can use that are considered best practices by fitness and nutrition experts.
Keep reading for a beginners guide for how to lose fat and gain muscle with advice from Catudal and other health and fitness pros.
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A Sample Muscle Building Menu Plan For Women
When selecting your muscle-building diet plan, it would be best to have a sample menu to guide you through the procedure. Heres an example:
Breakfast
- Whole grain pasta thats topped with olive oil pesto sauce
Snack
- A whey protein shake thats made with plant milk, protein powder, and nut butter or fruit
Dinner
- A taco salad prepared with taco seasonings, lean ground turkey, tomatoes, lettuce, black beans, salsa, and avocados
Snack
- Greek yogurt topped with walnuts and raspberries
Nutrition And Fat Loss
Diet quality also matters when it comes to losing fat.
Consuming a diet rich in protein has been shown to reduce fat while preserving lean body mass.
A study in 88 overweight adults found that a hypocaloric diet that contained 0.64 grams of protein per pound of body weight was more effective in preserving muscle mass and reducing body fat than a diet providing 0.36 grams per pound of protein .
Studies have shown that higher protein intake is necessary for athletes attempting to lose fat while maintaining muscle.
A review of six studies showed that athletes who lost the least amount of muscle mass while cutting calories consumed the most protein 1.141.3 grams per pound of body weight .
For this reason, upping your protein intake to at least 0.64 grams per pound of body weight may improve your body composition.
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How To Gain Muscle
But what about gaining muscle? To increase muscle you actually need to be in a calorie excess, which means taking in more calories than you burn. You can do this by increasing your calories from food, or by reducing your activity levels.
Thats not the only factor involved in gaining muscle. You also need to eat enough protein so your body can create new muscle tissue, and you need to do regular weight training to provide the necessary stimulus.
You Need To Eat Clean All The Time To Lose Fat
No, you could eat a diet consisting completely of twinkies and still lose fat.This has been done.Also has been done with ice cream.Its dependant on a calorie deficit if you lose weight.But Twinkies and ice cream only wont really help muscle gain.
Eating some junk is fine if it fits into your calorie allowance for the day. This is a proven researched fact.
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How To Gain Control
For instance, its recommended that you pay attention to what you eat and how much you eat instead of eating mindlessly, eat only when youre genuinely hungry and stop eating when youre full, according to the Mayo Clinic. Avoid eating while youre working, watching TV or fiddling with your phone, since youre less likely to notice signs from your body telling you that youre full.
Try examining your motives towards the food you eat. Its possible that youre eating out of boredom or in response to an emotional trigger, like stress or sadness. If you are in fact emotional eating, start replacing that habit with a healthier one.
To Gain Muscle You Need To Have A Positive Muscle Protein Balance
What is this?
Whenever you eat protein or workout in the gym with weights you set off a process called Muscle Protein Synthesis. This is a spike of activity that diminishes over time about 23 hours.
This is the building of new muscle tissue .
When you are not eating protein or training with weights the spike gradually goes into a negative value and you get something called Muscle Protein Breakdown which is a natural process
The trick to building more muscle is to get more of the day into Synthesis than Breakdown.
The diagram above shows MPS in Yellow and MPB in Blue. In this diagram MPS exceeds MPB and this means the person is building muscle.
This is why bodybuilders and big strength guys and girls eat protein meals every 23 hours so that they can build as much muscle as possible.
Muscle Protein Synthesis happens irrespective of if you are dieting or not and so by definition the act of building muscle is not dependent on if you are in a calorie deficit or not.
However, having more calories in your diet will make it easier to build muscle as you have more energy available to train properly and recover glycogen for training. Also muscle building is a calorie intensive activity for the body so having a surplus of energy does help making muscle building optimal.
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To Maximise Muscle Building On A Diet Phase Make Sure You Do The Following
- Eat at least 2g/kg bodyweight of protein a day e.g Im 100kg so I need at least 200g of protein a day to maintain and build muscle if Im dieting.
- Eat around 45 servings of protein a day spaced out through the day to maximise MPS spikes. Divide your protein requirement from above between these meals
- Train with weights to failure 34 times per week. If possible hit each muscle group twice a week. This doesnt mean destroy legs twice a week but for example, you can do one exercise of squats to failure a few days after your main leg day to give that failure signal and encourage muscle growth. Research has shown that twice a week to failure training seems to be more optimal for hypertrophy.
Eat Veggies With Each Meal
Veggies offer the fiber required to ensure that the digestive system is constantly functioning and processing the food youre eating. Focus on filling half of your plate with nutrient-rich vegetables to achieve optimal digestive health.
If you also add the following veggies to your plate, youll have a power-packed boost.
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Identify Muscle Building Calorie Requirements
According to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, weight maintenance calorie requirements for moderately active and active women include:
- 19-25 years old: 2,200-2,400 calories
- 26-30 years old: 2,000-2,400 calories
- 31-50 years old: 2,000-2,200 calories
- 51-60 years old: 1,800-2,200 calories
- 61+ years old: 1,800-2,000 calories
Is weight loss plus muscle-building your ultimate goal? Focus on consuming 1,200-1,800 calories every day, based on your starting body weight and how active you are.
Rule Number : Nutritional Supplements For Muscle Building
As part of your recommended diet for muscle building, proteins, carbohydrates and fats, as well as dietary supplements play an important role.
An additional intake of dietary supplements can optimise muscle building processes. We recommend the following products:
- Whey Protein: Protein for energy in the muscles
- Creatine Powder: For even better athletic performance and effective workout
- L-glutamine: For effective regeneration and recovery processes
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How To Stay On Track
Habits and cravings are the devil when it comes to dieting. Lets first deal with habits. Juge explains that it takes a good week or two to ease into dieting. Fast food is so easy and theres a McDonalds on every corner. The hardest thing is to develop the new habit of preparing your meals and taking them with you. The first week is the most difficult, so prepare yourself for some challenges as you abandon your usual routine. For example, you might usually go out for a sub sandwich or burger at lunch. Youll now have to bring your food with you and resist the temptation of spicing up your meal with the Doritos in the vending machine or your usual can of Coke. It can be a real mental battle to stick to your food plan.
To stay motivated and deal with cravings, Juge has a couple of great recommendations. First, schedule a cheat meal on every seventh day. Many of my clients have their cheat meal on Sunday, so then theyre ready for Monday and the week to come, he says. If you feel deprived during the week, concentrate on the cheat meal to come, knowing you can eat absolutely anything you want topizza, lasagna, doughnuts, beer, chips, you name it. Remember, though, its just one cheat meal, not an entire day of cheating. Afterward, get right back on the wagon with your next scheduled meal.
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Know The Protein Requirements For Gaining Muscle
If you work out routinely, specifically if youre working on muscle building, then your protein requirements are comparatively higher than folks who are sedentary.
A professional dietitian will recommend you to consume around 1.4-2.0 grams of protein per kg. of your body weight every day, which is the same as 0.6-1 gram of protein per lb. of your ideal weight every day. For instance, if you have a goal weight of 130 lbs., then youd need approximately 78-130 grams of protein per day to build or sustain lean mass and burn excess fat.
And this leads us to the next point.
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