NUTRITIONAL GUIDELINES FOR MAXIMIZING YOUR PHYSIQUE AND PERFORMANCE

Remember, diet is not just 12–16 weeks. It’s a long-term commitment to make a part of your lifestyle.

Your eating habits will either support or sabotage your training efforts.

Science can show you how; your job is to take advantage of this knowledge and reach the next step of your maximum hypertrophy and minimal body fat.

Calorie Expenditure

Basal energy expenditure (BEE), or basal metabolic rate (BMR) as it is sometimes called, is the energy requirement to maintain life. It is mea-sured at rest, but not sleep, in a thermo-neutral environment in the post-absorptive state.

Bigger muscles burn more calories than do little ones. Thus, the assumption is made that for any given LBW in the tables below, the BEE is based on an average person with an average percentage of body fat.

Eat at Least Five Meals a Day

Two or three meals simply are not enough. If your body is not getting the calories it needs through your meals, where will energy come from? Muscle tissue!

That’s right—the same muscle tissue you spent weeks and months sweating for in the gym. The body is a conservative machine, and it won’t grow unless (a) you give it a reason to (through weight training) and (b) you provide plenty of calories so that the body is convinced it can afford to add more lean mass.

Caloric Distribution

Calories must be ingested according to your upcoming activity level. Therefore, prior to every meal, ask yourself, “What am I going to be doing for the next three hours?”If you plan to sit at a desk at work, eat less.

However, if you plan to train, eat more. By care-fully manipulating your caloric intake this way, meal after meal, day after day, week after week, month after month, pretty soon you’ll look in the mirror and see something you’ve been wait-ing to see for a long, long, time: a well-defined, muscular physique.

Fat Loss Guidelines

One pound of fat contains 3,500 calories. The logical assumption would be to reduce your ca-loric intake by 500 calories daily. Thus, 7 × 500 = 3,500 calories, so you will lose a pound of fat per week and be lean and mean in no time, correct?

Hold on . . . not so fast.

Your body tends to use “excessive” muscle tissue for energy before fat. As you drop weight and lose muscle, your caloric needs will drop. This is why calories must be cut very slowly!

Follow these guidelines:

• Subtract 2 calories per pound of bodyweight from your daily caloric intake.

• The reduced calories should come mostly from carbohydrate and fat calories and not protein. Eat minimally 1 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight.

• This caloric reduction should be applied to all your meals; do not reduce the frequency of meals.

For example, assuming a bodyweight of 150 pounds and that you’re eating 5 meals per day (highly recommended), you should reduce each meal by 60 calories (total of 300 calories’ reduc-tion over a full day).

By reducing your daily caloric intake by 300 cal-ories, you can expect to lose about 2.5 pounds of fat per month, assuming you’re weight training for muscle-mass preservation or increase.

Increase your caloric intake 2 days per week by 2 calories per pound of bodyweight to ensure that you’re getting enough calories to put on lean muscle and that upward BMR adjustments are being made.