Calories intake problems

Hello everyone.

I've been using GBT program for a while now, but only recently I've started to think about following a decent diet. It’s not like I was eating completely random food all the time but it wasn't a strict diet.  After surfing this forum and other internet resources for quite some time I decided to go with the Paleo diet. I completely stopped eating all kinds of so-called junk food (well to be honest I wasn’t eating a lot of it, just maybe only few times a month here and there), cut on grains (eating them only for breakfast, well that’s already not a quite Paleo approach but I couldn't think of an equal replacement), started to eat decent amount of fresh salads combined with fruits, different kinds of nuts and also eating sufficient, well I hope so, amount of meat, mainly chicken breast and fish (such as salmon and tuna).  However, today I decided to count my calories intake and I was quite shocked of how low it actually is. I’m 176 cm tall and my weight is 75 kg.  So what I counted was around 2000 kkal at best and according to T-Nation article for a person like me it should be around 3200 while active training .  So I looked closer. Like someone mentioned on this forum earlier that it’s a good thing to start with 1,5g/kg protein and about 4g/kg carbs and get the rest from fats. I can hit protein requirements quite easily but to do so with carbs seems like a challenge for me. Paleo diet suggest that you don’t eat carbs like grains/beans/potatoes but those look like the main sources of carbs, vegetable-wise. Should I start eating them too or maybe eat more fruits which are rich in carbs (despite the fact that most resources suggest eating more vegetables instead), or just eat even more regular vegetables, cause, as I said before, hitting that 300g carbs bar seems kinda hard for me at the moment. Well even if I manage to do so then I’m going get 450kkal from protein and 1200 kkal from carbs but this leaves me with 1550 kkal to go. It means that I should get the rest from fats and it looks like I need to consume about 170g of them. Isn’t this too much? (Let’s assume that I’m getting them from good fat food like fish, nuts, oils and such). 

P.S.  I don’t want to follow exactly the Paleo diet it was more like a starting point for me.

You have to get starches if you want to hit realistic carbohydrate goals without drinking soft drinks or eating candy bars (neither of which are good ideas).

If you want to use Paleo broscience, humans have been cooking root vegetables and tubers for at LEAST 100,000 years. They are, in fact, "paleo" foods.

Don't get too much fish. Eating whole fish something like twice per week seems to be fine, but going over that starts to give you too many omega 3's. They make your cells more pliable, which means your blood vessels can become TOO stretchy and you can get aneurisms more easily. This is what happens to Eskimos who live on whale blubber.

Stay balanced in your diet, don't go to extremes anywhere.

First mistake is using 3200 cals.

3200 is high unless you are trying to put on big mass. And most BB sites assume you are. I weigh about 78.5 kg find my stable zone is around 2200 kkal, before exercise. I'm not very active though outside of exercising - have a desk job and like to lay on the couch and play with my laptop   You can look at calculators or use various formula manually but the bottom line is that experimentation will give you the best answer.  If you are not losing weight at 2000 (over a long period of time like 6 weeks)  it might not be very far off.

However, if you haven't use a calorie tracker like fitday.com or myfitnesspal.com to track your calories. It's not uncommon to miss a portion or two of something unless really being meticulous.

Also as I wrote a post recently, exercise burn may count for less than the published values, especially if low-intensity, because you have to back out your normal maintenance burn for the time period - before adding in the exercise burn.   So if burn 150 calories normally in a hour being awake, and 400 in your exercise for an hour, the net exercise burn is 250, not 400.

Now Josh made a good point, although not all fish is high in omega 3s.  Cold water fatty ocean fish are; lake and warm water fish aren't. The latter are still are good quality sources of protein though.  Beans, rice and potatoes are paleo enough to me, and make it easy to get 200g+ carb. If paleo people can eat cooked meat, I don't see why they can't eat cooked beans.  Other pseudograins like quinoa and buckwheat are also available.  Personally I also eat bread and pasta but make no claims to eating paleo. However, I do avoid soda and candy bars absolutely.  The main benefit of paleo for weight control is probably eating a lot of vegetables and protein; but low carb paleo doesn't work for most athletic people over the long term,

(There is always someone who says low-carb works for them - I'm not denying this experience,  just saying that it doesn't for most.)

Alexander Chekalin said:

 I can hit protein requirements quite easily but to do so with carbs seems like a challenge for me. 

Good sources of carbs:

Sweet Potatoe

Buckweat

Rice

FutureisNow said:

... Also as I wrote a post recently, exercise burn may count for less than the published values, especially if low-intensity, because you have to back out your normal maintenance burn for the time period - before adding in the exercise burn.   So if burn 150 calories normally in a hour being awake, and 400 in your exercise for an hour, the net exercise burn is 250, not 400. ...

can you link me to the post that has the source for this?

I have been looking at recent data on METs, and most activities actually measure higher than the table values.

FutureisNow said:

First mistake is using 3200 cals.

 

3200 is high unless you are trying to put on big mass. And most BB sites assume you are. I weigh about 78.5 kg find my stable zone is around 2200 kkal, before exercise. I'm not very active though outside of exercising - have a desk job and like to lay on the couch and play with my laptop   You can look at calculators or use various formula manually but the bottom line is that experimentation will give you the best answer.  If you are not losing weight at 2000 (over a long period of time like 6 weeks)  it might not be very far off.

 

However, if you haven't use a calorie tracker like fitday.com or myfitnesspal.com to track your calories. It's not uncommon to miss a portion or two of something unless really being meticulous.

 

Also as I wrote a post recently, exercise burn may count for less than the published values, especially if low-intensity, because you have to back out your normal maintenance burn for the time period - before adding in the exercise burn.   So if burn 150 calories normally in a hour being awake, and 400 in your exercise for an hour, the net exercise burn is 250, not 400.

 

Now Josh made a good point, although not all fish is high in omega 3s.  Cold water fatty ocean fish are; lake and warm water fish aren't. The latter are still are good quality sources of protein though.  Beans, rice and potatoes are paleo enough to me, and make it easy to get 200g+ carb. If paleo people can eat cooked meat, I don't see why they can't eat cooked beans.  Other pseudograins like quinoa and buckwheat are also available.  Personally I also eat bread and pasta but make no claims to eating paleo. However, I do avoid soda and candy bars absolutely.  The main benefit of paleo for weight control is probably eating a lot of vegetables and protein; but low carb paleo doesn't work for most athletic people over the long term,

 

(There is always someone who says low-carb works for them - I'm not denying this experience,  just saying that it doesn't for most.)

Some people require a lot of food to gain ANY weight.

I've tracked my caloric intake everyday for the last six months (feels good to no longer be doing that), and if I didn't consistently eat ~3100kcal then I wouldn't gain any weight over the course of one month. I'm not exactly big either: ~177cm/ 5' 10" 65.3kg/144lbs

stefanhinote said:

Some people require a lot of food to gain ANY weight.

 

I've tracked my caloric intake everyday for the last six months (feels good to no longer be doing that), and if I didn't consistently eat ~3100kcal then I wouldn't gain any weight over the course of one month. I'm not exactly big either: ~177cm/ 5' 10" 65.3kg/144lbs

Well it would be uncommon to need that many calories at your size, unless you were very active.

Yes, it I do know what you mean. So nice to just go by feel.

Joshua Naterman said:

can you link me to the post that has the source for this?

 

I have been looking at recent data on METs, and most activities actually measure higher than the table values.

Self taught.   But I'm not saying that any exercise is any less intense, just that when adding its value to calorie expenditure, not to double count the METS of the normal activity that exercise is performed in lieu of.

For example, most people estimate their maintenance from the RMR + an activity multipler that typically does not include exercise, but includes normal non-resting and work activity. However if you are using a method that keeps track of your current activity level on an hourly basis perhaps like a body bugg would, the step I am suggesting need not be performed because there is no double counting.

An example:

Say the person is 100KG (non-fat mass if you like) and has determined their basic maintenance to be 3000 calories. 8 hours of sleep is 720 calories (.9 MET), leaving 2280 / 16 or 142.5 calories / hour. This is an average METS of 1.425 over the course of the 16 hour waking day which includes  normal activities and work activities.

If this person were using the METS of additional exercise to determine how many calories should be added to the "calories out"  calorie balance equation, I would suggest that the 1.425 should be backed out from the excercise METS. So easy walking, which has an approximate value of 3, should have a net METS of  only 1.6, in order to add the result to the pre-calculated daily caloric expenditure without double counting.

It's an estimate of course, but I feel it's helpful taking into account if not rating actual current activity values on an hourly basis, and calculating balance as you go along.

Hope I explained that ok Josh. Let me know if you have questions or problems with it

If you're only looking for EXTRA food needed, on top of resting metabolism, yes you could do that.

My personal experience has been that this is not as easy to roll with dynamically vs. simply calculating the total with table values and using the time block total, but if you are doing the math correctly you should get the same estimate.

You always have to take your resting metabolism into account, because it's always there.