How to Change The Guidelines To Suit Your Goals

Goal Setting

As a starting point, you can’t really go wrong following your daily recommended calorie intake.

Provided you accurately pick your lifestyle activity levels, the calorie intake you go with should be about right to keep you in good health.

However, remember that these guidelines are for maintaining weight, not necessarily for losing weight, or even for gaining muscle. To lose weight you must consume fewer calories than you burn, while building muscle requires a surplus of calories.

As a rough guide, take 300 to 500 calories away from your theoretical intake if you’re looking to lose weight, or add 300 to 500 if building muscle is your goal.

Accuracy

While it may sound great on paper that you can simply pick a calorie number and go with it, it’s not quite as simple as that. Everybody responds differently to calories, and while your metabolism or genetics are very rarely an excuse for being overweight, they do play a part on how your body deals with calories.

Someone with a slower metabolism and more prone to storing fat will likely need fewer calories than the guidelines, whereas someone who is naturally lean or carries more muscle mass will be able to get away with eating a lot more.

Health and Food Choices

The guidelines don’t take food choices into account at all.

In theory, you could meet your guideline recommended daily intake by eating burgers, pies and cake. This clearly isn’t healthy, but you would, by the letter of the law, be sticking to the guidelines.
Alternatively, you could pick much healthier foods, full of protein, vitamins, minerals, healthy fats and fiber, eat the same number of calories as your junk food diet, yet look and feel much better.

Calories are critical, but they’re not the only aspect you need to consider when dieting.

Monitoring Progress

Calorie manipulation is a very useful tool in maintaining your progress in the gym and on the scales.

This relates back to the concept of fad diets and extreme calorie cutting as discussed earlier. If you have an idea of your calorie intake, it’s extremely easy to make small changes in your diet to keep you progressing towards your goals.

If your weight plateaus one week, you can simply reduce your intake by 50 calories per day. Likewise if you’re training for muscle and strength gains and are feeling weak and lethargic, an extra 100 calories can do you the world of good.

Without tracking your intake, you have no idea whether you’re over-consuming calories or not, and are taking a stab in the dark when it comes to making changes to your plan.

Counting Calories

Calorie counting doesn’t have to be a chore.

You can go the old-fashioned paper and pen route, or you can use one of the many tracking apps or websites and count your calories in a matter of minutes every day.