Creating a calorie deficit
A calorie deficit is a state your body enters when you are consuming fewer calories than you are burning on a daily basis, whether that’s through exercise or doing day to day tasks.
Absolutely anyone can enter a calorie deficit, whether you’re a seasoned bodybuilder or someone just wanting to lose weight, it all comes down to what you put in your body versus how much energy you use each day.
Each body is built differently, which means there are many different things that you must consider when calculating a calorie deficit. Things such as age, gender, height, weight, the amount of exercise you do on a daily basis and your overall body composition, this can all affect the total amount of calories needed to be in a deficit.
calculating a calorie deficit
In order to calculate a calorie deficit, we must first work out how many calories we burn per day. Everything your body does burns calories, even when you’re lying in bed! Bodily functions such as repairing your muscles, maintaining organs, digesting food all of it requires fuel. Our BMR or basal metabolic rate refers to the energy used by our body by simply being alive, this can be worked out using the following formula.
total daily energy expenditure
Once this has been calculated, we can then calculate our TDEE. TDEE is our total daily energy expenditure, this tends to be split into 3 categories.
- Sedentary or light activity (1-3 days per week of exercise or activity) = BMR x 1.375
- Active or moderately active (3-5 days per week of moderate activity or sports exercise) = BMR x 1.55
- Vigorous or highly active (6-7 days per week of hard exercise) = BMR x 1.725
deficit
Once you have decided which one suits your lifestyle, you simply multiply your BMR by the number indicated next to each category. For example, a BMR of 1500 with a sedentary lifestyle would be 1500 x 1.375 = TDEE of 2062 (rounded down for ease). From this number we can then remove a set number of calories to ensure you’re in the much-wanted deficit! I personally like to start a deficit with a 200 calorie drop, other people may like to drop calories by as much as 500 to start with, I prefer to make the initial drop smaller as some people may find a drop as large as 500 to be daunting, which could result in the athlete or client straying from the plan (especially if they are new to a certain lifestyle change)
Now you’ve worked out what your total calories should be for a deficit, let’s talk a macro breakdown and how to work out how much protein, fats, and carbohydrates you need! Each macronutrient has a different calorie amount per gram, these are.
Protein – 4 calories per gram
Carbohydrate – 4 calories per gram
Fat – 9 calories per gram
macronutrient breakdown
Regarding protein, this tends to be worked out as gram per pound of bodyweight, but if you are a more athletic/larger person, you may require anywhere from 1.5 to 2 grams per pound of bodyweight. But as a starting point, 1 gram per pound of bodyweight would most likely be used. For example, an individual that weight 195lbs would have 195g of protein. We then multiple this number by 4 to give the total calories from protein (195 x 4 = 780 calories).
We then move on to calculating how much fat we want to incorporate into our daily macros, most research states that between 20%-30% of your total TDEE calories should come from fat, so to make things easy let’s go with 25%. So, to work out your total grams of fat and calories we work out it out like this. Total calories x 0.25 (for example 2062 x 0.25 = 515vcalories) you then divide this number by 9 to give you the grams (515 / 9 =57g)
Finally, with what’s left over we can then dedicate to our carbohydrates! This is simply done by adding both the calories from fat and protein, subtract from overall TDEE, this answer is then divided by 4! See example below.
780 + 375 = 1155
2062 – 1155 = 907 calories left / 4 = 226g
So over final macro breakdown should look like this.
Calories – 2062
Protein – 780 calories – 195g
Carbohydrates - 907 calories – 226g
Fat – 515 calories – 57g
And there we have it! Once these are worked out, they can be amended to suit whatever goal you’re working towards! And in this case, a calorie deficit!
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