Introduction
Flexible Dieting is all about counting your macro’s! Which is simple until you want to go out for food or have a party or any kind of social occasion. At this point most people fall apart with Flexible Dieting. There are two ways to attacks these situations, because they will happen. The first option you have is to just forget about your Macro’s that day. Say you have a wedding to attend, you shouldn’t do much damage in one day/evening. Let us say the wedding is over a weekend, Saturday and Sunday.
The way you would get around this is by shifting and moving your macro’s around. In this blog post, we are going to teach you how you can make macro’s even more flexible, and show you why they call it Flexible Dieting. So Let’s begin.
So let’s get started by explaining the basic principle of Flexible dieting. If you know that you are going to need more calories on a certain day. and say that you are allowed 1000 calories per day. This is completely and massively off what anyone will be allowed, but the maths is easier to calculate and easier to understand.
Flexible Dieting - Calorie stealing and Borrowing:
So let’s do some simple maths to start with. You are allowed 1000 calories a day, 7 days in a week so your weekly calorie intake is 7000 calories. I prefer to count calories per week rather than per day. Makes it easier to borrow and swap out. So you have 7000 Calories a week, 1000 calories a day. Say that you know you are going out for a big meal on Saturday. Today is Tuesday, now what you can do is borrow calories from the days around Saturday. Thursday, Friday and Sunday and add them on to Saturdays calories.
If we take 100 calories of the remaining three days, that takes them days down to 900 calories but leave us with 300 calories to borrow,
so we can add them onto Saturdays which takes us from 1000 calories up to 1300 calories. You can take more or less of each day as you feel fits, you can even take more from some days and less from others, it’s completely flexible, that’s why we call it flexible dieting.
This way you still consume your weekly calorie requirement. The maths to this is 1000+1000+900+900+900+1300+1000=7000. So you are still consuming your weekly target which means you won’t divert off track or slow your progress down.
Continued…
How many calories you borrow from how many days is up to you. The more days you borrow from the less you have to borrow from each, making it a smaller change you have to deal with. So to sum it up you are basically eating less from some days so that you can eat more on others. Just don’t go over the top and starve yourself so that you can borrow that few more calories. You have to find the line between borrowing the right amount and borrowing too much, This will come with experience.
You might find that a certain day of the week you can get away with eating less anyway. Let’s say on a Wednesday you naturally don’t eat as much. You might have meetings early and find you tend too fast Wednesday Morning. Well, instead of struggling to eat on this day what you can do is work out how many calories you are eating under by. Add them on to another day. Let us say Saturday again (We chose Saturday because it’s the day most people will go out to eat.)
So as you can see below, you take the calories that are left over from the Wednesday, Which you didn’t manage to eat and keep them in your back pocket, ready for a day you might need extra. When Saturday rolls around (Or any other day that you need free calories) you have these in your back pocket ready to use, giving you the option to eat more on that day.
Flexible Dieting - Extra tip:
Some extra tips when counting calories and Macros is holding meals back. If we go back to our example earlier, let’s say you have 1000 calories a day and you know when you wake up that you will be going out for a big meal in the evening. Well, what you can do is have a smaller Breakfast, smaller lunch and save the calories for dinner in the evening. Think of it as borrowing calories again, but instead of borrowing them from another day you are borrowing them from different times on the same day.
Flexible Dieting - Another way to gain extra calories:
Another way you can gain more calories is to do more exercise. As we all know exercise burns calories. So to keep it simple most people will do extra cardio or exercise to lose weight faster and put themselves in a bigger calorie deficit. Let us say you have eaten 500 calories over, you can burn 500 calories extra at the gym and balance it out. but you can also flip it, do the exercise first and use it so you can eat more and still be on target.
For example let us take our earlier example and say that you had 7000 calories a week to eat. That is 1000 calories day, So let us say that you go to the gym or do a workout and burn an extra 300 calories, this will give you 300 free calories. You could eat 1300 calories that day and still be bang on track.
Now with this method, there is a lot of maths and working things out beforehand. Fitting the gym time in and such so it can get complicated to work out but can be useful. Just don’t aim for silly numbers when trying to burn extra calories. I would say nothing more than 300-350 calories. Anything more will take too much time and too much effort, you don’t want to be in the gym all day so that you can have a pizza Saturday.
Flexible Dieting - Last and Finally Way:
The last way is to just let the day happen and don’t worry about it. Unless you are competing, have a photoshoot or just need to be mega lean for something, one day isn’t going to affect you much. That 1 meal out isn’t going to ruin the average person’s progress, just roughly guess how much you can eat how many calories a certain meal is going to be and you will be fine. So there is no point getting super stressed, spending all day trying to burn extra calories and borrowing and under eating other days just to spare some calories. one day away from the diet is going to change things the same way 1 day on a diet isn’t going to change things.
Conclusion
Hope you have learn’t something from this blog post, Hopefully, now you will be able to enjoy your weekends, eat whatever you want and still be on track with your macro’s and calories. The more you move your calories around the easier it becomes. It also helps to make some food swaps to help save some calories as well. Check out our blog post here for help on what to swap and when to swap.
How to you approach social events? Do you stick to your macros or do you forget about it and move on the next day? Get right back on track? Let us know over on Instagram. Remember if you are wondering how many calories you can eat a day, check out our free application which contains a helpful Calorie and Macro calculator. Free to download!
Written by Kieran Blacker
Kieran is the CEO and Founder of Sets & Reps. He decided to make an application that helped people get a gym workout when not at the gym. He designed, Coded and built the application himself.
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