It was 15 days ago I posted my last post regarding food consumption. Since then I can honestly say I have only completed one 6 mile run in that time due to injuring myself pushing my car out of the snow. Not a great start, infact the perfect excuse to delay starting my training for the half marathon. I don’t think so, wrong guy.

My diet has been 90% perfect, only three times have I deviated from my plan, and that has mainly been due to weekend time or skipping meals because of my work/study schedule. So the results? I can now tell you I weight 165.5 lbs at my last weight in yesterday. That’s a 7 lb weight loss in only 15 days. A good portion of this will be water bloat, the majority of it will be fat and a little lean mass.

It cannot be underestimated how important diet is, if you have 100 g of bread your body will use around 400 calories to burn this off. If you have 100 g of protein, your body will use around 900 calories. I think it goes without saying that to get around 40% of your diet from protein has massive benefits. Try and get some with every meal of the day.

Tracking food consumption while you are training for any kind of physical challenge is essential. There is more to running a 1/2 marathon than just hitting a treadmill every other day and completing 13 miles of mind numbing running. One has to know the physical challenges ahead and ensure that your body is in the perfect condition to handle it.

As I am training and gradually making progress I like to keep track of my stats and what is going in my body and for what purpose. A typical day for me now can be seen in the following diagram (click for large version):

All this may look very bland and robotic but after a few days it starts to feel very ‘clean’ and eating rubbish actually feels like my body can do without it. I tend to sleep better eating like this and I don’t wake up parched through the night.

Once your in the mindset of eating this way you can swap things around a fair bit with the inclusion of fish, cottage cheese, wholemeal bread, brown pasta, and marinades etc. I find it best to think of food as fuel and your body as a car that needs to be properly looked after and maintained in order to get the best out of it.

Managing the reduction of my body fat percentage through diet and exercise is a requirement while training for my 1/2 marathon in 4 months.

With all the lose fat quick schemes that are around today it surprises me that people are willing to try them and pin all their hopes on them due to clever marketing, without actually taking the time to learn how their body actually uses food for energy and why it stores some of the intake as fat.

The primary source of energy for our bodies is via food in the form of calories. Calories are made up of macronutrients, carbohydrates, protein and fat.

Losing body fat is not just about what you eat and what exercise you do; its about math.

Take note of the following information :-

1g of Fat contains 9 calories
1g of Protein contains 4 calories
1g of Carbohydrates contains 4 calories
1lb of Fat equals 3500 calories

As you can see eating the same weight in Protein or Carbohydrates results in less calories consumed than if you ate the same amount of Fat. We can also see that to burn away 1lb of fat we need to have a deficit of 3500 calories which should be spread over the week.

So how many calories should you be getting?

This is where we use the Harris Benedict Equation to calculate. Its has slightly different constants for men and women but the formula is still the same.

BMR for Men = 66 + (13.7 x Weight in kg) + (5 x Height in cm) – (6.8 x Age in Years)

BMR for Women = 655 + (9.6 x Weight in kg) + (1.8 x Height in cm) – (4.7 x Age in Years)

Once you have your Base Metabolic Rate you need to perform one more calculation to figure what your daily calorie intake should be.

Little or no exercise = x 1.2
1 – 3 times per week = x 1.375
3 – 5 times per week = x 1.55
6 – 7 times per week = x 1.725
Very hard twice daily = x 1.9

Take your BMR and multiply it by your selection from the above table and that is the amount of calories per day your body needs to consume to maintain its current state. I cannot stress how important it is to be honest here, it’s about what you actually do not what intend to do, you can always change this figure as you progress and you will need to as you lose body fat anyway.

Summary

So now you know how to work out how many calories per day your body needs to maintain it’s current position. You also know that to loose a lb you need have a calorie deficit of 3500 calories. This deficit needs to be over a week so 3500 / 7 = a daily deficit of 500 calories from your daily allowance that you calculated above.