Beyond-Brawn-2nd-Edition

BEYOND BRAWN
20.14 e best way to determine the caloric intake that maintains your bodyweight
is to keep your food intake steady for a period without trying to gain
or lose weight. While doing this, calculate your daily caloric intake. Get a
kitchen scale, a book that gives you the caloric and macronutrient value of
each food and drink item you consume, a calculator and notebook. Keep a
log of the caloric value of everything you consume, together with how many
grams of carbohydrate, protein and fat you take in. At the end of a period of
three weeks, compute your daily average caloric intake.
20.15 If your bodyweight is constant over this three-week period, you will have
discovered your maintenance intake. If you lose or gain weight, make an
adjustment to your daily caloric intake and carry out a further test period.
Continue this process until you find your maintenance intake.
20.16 Once you know how many calories you are targeting each day for maintenance
purposes, you should only need a week or two of weighing and
computing to familiarize yourself. Unless you are always changing your food
selection, or are making very fine adjustments, you can quickly get to grips
with sizing up your food for its caloric value without having to weigh and
compute every item. But you will need to check on foods you add to your
diet that are not regular inclusions. To make it very easy, you could compose
several dietary schedules that meet your needs, and rotate them. To keep
tabs on your caloric intake—to see whether or not you are straying from
your target—keep a dietary log on a sporadic basis.
20.17 All this numerical work is time consuming, and involves some hassle. But it
is necessary because without it you will never really know where you stand
nutritionally.
B 75
e harder and more seriously you train, the greater the need to
satisfy nutritional requirements. Better to oversupply on the nutritional
front than undersupply. Do not give your all in the gym and
then sabotage your progress by cutting corners with your diet!
Gaining muscle
20.18 Many hard gainers simply do not eat enough. On top of that, they overtrain
and focus on the wrong exercises. No wonder they do not build any muscle.
Almost any male who is consuming fewer than 2,000 calories is never going
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