Hey Athletes! What to learn how to track your calories correctly while training? Then tune in to this week’s Ask Me Anything!
Episode 38 of Ask Me Anything is up!
Ask Me Anything: Tracking Calories and Deficit
In this week’s episode of Ask Me Anything, Jerred and Joe are going over how to set your calories correctly. They talk about how to adjust calories based on your activity level as well as if you should be in a deficit or not.
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To becoming better!
Jerred
Transcript:
Ask Me Anything:Tracking Calories and Deficit
[00:00:00] Welcome to garage the math. He asked me anything. It’s pretty simple. I’ll be answering questions from the thousands of athletes that follow our daily programming. If you have a question or topic you want submitted, go to dot com slash AMA. Let’s get started.
Welcome to garage the math. He asked me anything. It’s pretty simple. I’ll be answering questions from the thousands of athletes that follow our daily programming. If you have a question or topic you want submitted, go to dot com slash AMA. Let’s get started.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the garage gym athlete podcast. Jared moon here with Joe Courtney, Joe, still in Texas, still in Texas. Yeah. Third week in a row. All [00:01:00] right. We have a question, kind of about caloric deficits. It’s a longer question, but I want to read the entire thing because some of you may have similar questions.
So Justin says, my question is in regards to tracking nutrition and adjusting food consumption. I tracked my food daily using my fitness pal and based off some calculations, I figure I should eat around 2300 calories a day. Now I stick to as close to this as I can, but I do realize that with our training, by the end of the day, my caloric deficit is around 1000 or more calories.
Conventional wisdom says you need to consume 500 calories less than you burn in order to lose weight. One. Is that still true to this day? Two, should I be adjusting my consumption based on my caloric burn each day, or just stick to a certain caloric intake and live with the ever changing daily deficit.
Thanks for any input, what you got Joe. So first I’m going to start off just with the whole calorie counting and things [00:02:00] like that. Trackers, like did you wear it on your wrist are wildly inaccurate and I’ve worn Apple. Garment and whoop, and I’ve gotten three completely different calorie totals because they’ll at the end of the day, they all stay.
I’ll give you an estimate of your calorie burn. So they are catching up. They are getting better each with each iteration by like by AppleWatch nine, we might be at like pretty close. Yeah. And it’s a great estimation. And honestly, it’s, it’s best for like, if you have your, your tracker, then see what you burn each day and then that could be your baseline for that specifically.
But then. Combine it with what you’re eating. You might not, your deficit might not be accurate. So that’s one thing that I would, I would a foot stop a little bit. Is that why you might seem like, okay, I’m burning this many calories. My device has this many calories and ate this many. So I’m at an extreme deficit.
Well, your calorie burn estimation might be a bit off. cause honestly I don’t think he would even factor for like heat and everything like that. Also adjusting calories day to day because of how many [00:03:00] calories you burn. I also would stay away from that because, we always talk about more, more hitting your macros and focusing on macros versus, counting calories, calories.
Aren’t treated equally also day to day. It’s not so much like if you eat a bunch one day and then nothing, the next day, you’re still, it’s not every day that you need to look at. It’s more of like the grand view of the entire week, the amalgamation of the entire week total. So if you say consistent of, okay, this is what I need to eat this day.
And this is what I need to do the next day, and then maybe base it on your workouts, if anything, but staying consistent. It’ll also help you hit, nutrition and, you know, stress, stress wise. It’s a big thing about nutrition is that people get into these places to where, if you’re counting calories consistently, it’s going to add stress to it.
And you’re like, okay, I ate too much today. Oh my God. I needed to shovel all this food in because I didn’t eat enough today. If you just keep those, whatever you find your macro and CA and calorie count for food. Happy for that day for a single day, try and keep that consistent every day. And it will be better [00:04:00] in the long run versus looking at your calories and thinking, Oh, it’s seven o’clock at night.
I need to eat 500, 600 calories real quick before I go to bed or also I’m in too much of a deficit and this wasn’t a direct, I’m trying to lose weight. So is this the right way? You kind of mentioned it there, but I’m assuming you’re wanting to lose weight or if you were, that’s why you’re talking about caloric deficits and not surpluses or maintenance at the end, they were kind of asked like you were.
You were asking a maintenance question. so for weight loss, the science, is there calories in calories out like the science is there? Yeah. If you eat fewer calories and you burn more, like you will lose weight. So the science is there, but to Joe’s point, you. Do you have to make sure that these things are really accurate.
Like there are a lot of things that there’s your actual activity, which is happening from a fitness tracker, there’s the accuracy of, you know, whatever, how well you’re actually tracking your food. And then your resting metabolic rate also needs to be incredibly [00:05:00] accurate. I see people screw that part up a lot too.
So what you can really look at here is if you’re trying to find out if what you’re doing is good or bad is your body weight. So if you are not wanting to lose weight, like I don’t want to lose weight. So I, I look at my body weight and, you know, at least once a week, and if I start to move down. I’m like, Oh, okay.
I’m not eating enough calories to your point. Like, I probably need to eat a little bit more and stay on top of that. If my weight is going up, then maybe I’m eating too much. Typically my training’s the same. So my nutrition is always the lever that I get to pull. And so I’m like, okay, you know, maybe I need to back off on certain types of foods or whatever.
so the year, while I’m not a big fan of just like stepping on a scale and always tracking the weight. If that’s your goal that will kind of be your indicator. Like if you’re a trackers, say you’re running at a thousand calorie deficit every single day for months on end and you’re not losing weight, something’s off like.
Once attractors off your calculations are off something’s off. Cause if you are truly burning more calories than you consume, [00:06:00] you should lose weight. so just look at your weight and, and adjust for what you’re trying to do, but Joe hit it on the head that you need to look at this bigger picture of what’s going on for the week.
we do recommend typically people stick to their macros, getting enough protein, enough water, things of that nature, as opposed to getting too worried about like, ah, you know, I’m 76 calories over what I was allotted today. Cause that’s just a little bit, a little bit more arbitrary to be honest. Yeah.
I also personally, like when I shower, I’ll take off my watch and I might not put it on for like two hours. I’m still doing something I’m still burning calories to the two hours, but it doesn’t know that I’m doing that. So it’s just another example of how they can be a bit off, but just see how, how it is day to day with your macros lined up with that and then adjust from there.
Yeah. And keep an eye on the body weight for your, for your goal. And if the body weights move in the direction, staying the same, or going up, if it’s doing what you want, then, then you have things pretty dialed. Then if it’s not. One of your trackers is probably off. Cool. All right, guys, if you have, I have a question, go to dot com slash AMA.
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I hope you enjoy. Today’s ask me anything episode. So one more time. If you want to submit a question, topic or idea you can do. so@garageteamathlete.com slash AMA and Hey, while you’re there, if you haven’t already sign up for garage gym athlete membership, we are the best. Community and programming on the internet.
I dare you to try and prove me wrong.
I hope you enjoy. Today’s ask me anything episode two, one more time. If you want to submit a question, topic or idea you can do so at garage dot [00:08:00] com slash AMA and Hey, while you’re there, if you haven’t already sign up for garage, gym athlete membership, we are the best community and programing on the internet.
I dare you to try and prove me wrong.