The first place you want to start when you have a desire to build a new ecosystem in your body is in what you’re buying to eat. That begins with looking at your grocery list and if you don’t have one, making a list of what you currently eat to assess. Maybe you go to the store once a week and buy as you go for the month(s). Maybe you just buy a meal here or there if you feel like cooking, but the rest of the time you only eat out/get take out. As with anything else, when you don’t have a plan things can get messy and something I learned about on this journey is food decision fatigue. When you think about it, we make countless decisions in a day as there are choices involved in everything. What am I wearing today, should I read one more paragraph or go take a shower, should I tell them I can hang out or save the money for something else, what time should I tell my spouse to meet me at the diner, now I’m walking through the library, where should I sit? Food can be eliminated from this with some simple planning, which brings less stress, which brings less ‘I don’t want to feel like shit every time I go buy food because I shame myself that it’s bad for me to eat it’ or ‘I don’t want to beat myself up after anxiously looking up the nutrition PDF for the restaurant or fast food place and seeing the total calorie count.’ I know because this was me.
The best way to understand what you eat is to take a week to track. Use a notebook and just write down every single thing you eat each day for 7 days, then set it to the side. Calories are the energy of the food and it’s what gives your body power but what makes you gain, lose or keep your weight the same is based on how much of those calories you’re consuming vs. expending. Eating more than you burned = you’ll gain weight, eating less than you burned = you’ll lose weight, eating about how much you burned = your weight will stay the same.
You can use this online calculator to determine how many calories you want to be consuming on a daily basis. It is a total daily energy expenditure (TDEE) calculator which is the total amount of energy you expend every 24 hours, expressed in calories. You will fill in your weight, height and age and how active you are, and then see something like the below.
To maintain the weight you currently are, you will focus on consuming the TDEE base caloric number. If you want to lose weight, you can focus on the left chart which shows fewer (deficit) calories than your TDEE base number and if you want to gain muscle, which is usually for people who go to the gym because they are simultaneously working out at the gym, you will focus on the right chart which shows more (excess) calories than your TDEE base number. If you don’t go to the gym do not worry about this. I absolutely want to go into the details of the gym in future posts but for now, let’s focus on balancing your food intake by first determining what you want-to gain, lose or maintain. As an aside, and I can’t emphasize this enough: the Fast numbers above are for people who body build. This calculator is on a fitness website, and it is not normal to consume as low as 449 calories a day unless you’re getting into shape for a competition. I recommend starting off Slow especially if you’re new to all this. So Slow would be 1199 in the above example, for someone who doesn’t go to the gym and is looking to lose some weight, while 1449 would be for someone who just wants to control their current weight through maintenance. In the example below I’m going to focus on the 1199 for losing weight.
After you have your own number, set it aside. Next we will determine macronutrient requirements - i.e. what percentage of the TDEE number should be protein, carbohydrates and dietary fat. With losing weight the rule of thumb is 40% P, 40% C, and 20% F. So using 1199:
40% of 1199 = 479.6 (now divide by 4 because there are 4 calories in 1 gram of protein, and you get 120g P)
40% of 1199 = 479.6 (now divide by 4 because there are 4 calories in 1 gram of protein, and you get 120g C)
20% of 1199 = 239.8 (now divide by 9 because there are 9 calories in 1 gram of fat, and you get 27 F)
So the numbers you end up with are 120g of P and C, and 27g of F, and that’s what you should be consuming daily if you want to lose weight based on your height, age and weight. And your daily calorie count target should be 1199, more or less.
After you have all your numbers, you can download the excel sheet below and add the numbers to the designated Daily Target cells.
This is an excel(lent) sheet in which you can input numbers from food labels in order to ensure you are following a plan. It allows you to see concrete numbers in your food, which is what balancing intake is all about. Therefore you will know if certain meals add too much fat to your overall daily target, you will know if you’re not getting enough protein or carbs, etc. Math is one of the few things in the world that is not changeable. 2+2 will always equal 4, so you can rely on this for security and stability. For convenience I have a few extra columns to the sheet: saturated fat, sodium, fiber, sugar and calcium because they are also on a food label and are important to account for your overall health. I added the daily targets according to the general 2000 calorie a day diet.
For now, you can look at the 7 day list you made of what you currently eat and try playing around with filling in protein, carbs and fat on the excel sheet by using what’s on the packages or nutrition PDFs from restaurants/fast food places. Play around with this to see how high these numbers can go, what works and what doesn’t meaning what fits into your Daily Target and what doesn’t.
In the next session, using the example numbers above, I will go over in detail how to read food labels and add the numbers to the Excel sheet, there is a lot to know about that. Later, I will help you make a balanced grocery list that makes sense without sacrificing everything you love to eat, this is a myth. And your grocery list doesn’t have to cost a ton of money, this is another myth.
Jennifer Diane is a writer, artist and intuitive based out of New Jersey. Healing with the Occult is a guide that shares hidden, transformative knowledge to assist with self-mastery.
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