Body Composition Basics (Re-post)

Have you ever felt like you were doing all the necessary things to get to your desired body composition, yet in time look the same while the number on the scale won’t move? I hear this quite often from frustrated clients, sometimes even those who are fairly advanced. It all starts with the problem of perception versus actual feedback. Perceiving that you’re eating “well” or “all the right stuff” to lose fat or gain muscle provides a somewhat thoughtful attempt, although overly subjective and immeasurable.

When I ask the simple question of how many calories someone consumes daily on average, I’m usually disheartened to hear a defensive answer somewhere in the realm of “enough” or “not much at all!” Again, answers too subjective to measure, let alone analyze.

It’s essential to establish up front that energy balance is succinct mathematics, not fairies and unicorns. If you continually gain weight, it means you are continually consuming more calories than you expend, and vice versa. No pseudo-scientific diet wizardry has proved to trump the laws of thermodynamics. Think of it like this: following a diet that doesn’t account for calories is like hiring a financial advisor who doesn’t implement a budget. Not a wise decision by most standards.

Taking the reigns on your nutrition is a lot like having a budget, though, at least in the sense of gaining feedback so that you’re able to determine where and when you can be flexible. And if experience has shown me anything, flexibility drives adherence. I owe a lot of my personal progress, as well as the progress of many of my clients, to that principle alone.

The straightforward solution to all of this is to simply create habits that develop into a system that holds you accountable by using concrete numerical feedback.

What I’ll outline below is the process I use for myself and recommend to others to attain goals of muscle gain or fat loss. It requires minimal time and effort, and allows you to still remain fairly flexible in what you eat. No severe restriction, demonized foods, or overpriced supplements. The only real requirements are consistency and moderate self-discipline (and the assumption that you’re training in at least a somewhat productive manner).

It’s also important to note that as with anything dependent on human feedback, most of the math included in this strategy isn’t entirely exact. Most of it utilizes the best possible estimations based on the best available data known to us. Please don’t nit-pick my math, nerds.

Disclaimer: The following recommendations are not intended for the treatment or prevention of disease, nor as a substitute for any kind of medical treatment or an alternative to medical advice. Use of the following recommendations is herein at the sole choice and risk of the reader.

Step 1 – Choose a nutritional tracker.

This can be an app on your phone, your “watch” of choice, or even the old-fashioned pen, paper, and spreadsheet (though the apps available on your smartphone seem to be the most organized and have the largest food databases). Really you just need to narrow it down to whichever kind of tracker is easy to use and allows you to track calories and macronutrients. Plenty of apps will let you track these two things for free, so save your money.

Step 2 – Track total calories and macronutrients daily for at least 2 consecutive weeks.

You will need to log everything you eat each day into your tracker. Yes, this takes some time. No, it does not take as much time as you think, however. For instance, at the moment, between meals, snacks, and shakes, I’m eating 6 times per day on average. Because the app I use is very efficient and saves the foods I eat most consistently, it never takes me longer than 1 minute to log my food when I sit down to eat.

Again, because a lot of folks need to hear this: it never takes me longer than 1 minute to log my food when I sit down to eat.

Let’s run through that math really quick to put that in perspective. I’m awake for 16 hours most days, and the total time commitment for logging my food is (at the most) 0.006% of my day – a blink of an eye, relatively speaking. Given, I’ve been doing this for some time, so I may be a little faster than others, but even if I took twice as long, that still only amounts to 12 total minutes per day.

If you have hours to devote to watching TV and scrolling through social media each day, then you have time to track your food. Prioritize.

I prefer people to have at least 14 days of data before coming up with a definite strategy because it gives a pretty clear view as to what you are eating on a consistent basis. Most of us tend to eat a little differently day to day (especially on weekends). A more macro view lets you look at averages, which will fare you much better when planning for long-term progress.

It’s also crucial that you do not purposefully change your diet while doing this initial tracking just because you know you’re tracking things. This is a testing effect that’s normal to human nature, like the token subject who changes his or her behavior under the knowledge of being watched by an observer in a study.

I’ve experienced this numerous times before, where people get back with me claiming that they were right; that they still put on all that weight while under-eating because the calories they’ve been eating show to be so low. In reality, they just went full starvation diet as soon as they started tracking and became conscious of what they were eating. Be honest with yourself and maintain normal habits and behavior. This plays a critical role in setting up accurate numbers later.

Step 3 – Weigh yourself daily and calculate weekly averages.

Although the scale may be limited in its ability to distinguish between fat mass and fat-free mass, it’s still one of the most available and easy-to-use tools we have to adjust variables for body composition.

I prefer to use routine weigh-ins to correlate body weight data with the nutritional data you’re tracking, so that you can regulate certain variables when your desired outcome isn’t being met. Like much of this, it just requires consistency.

What you need to do here is commit to weighing yourself every single day, at the same time of day, under the most identical conditions possible. For the majority of people, the easiest way to assure this is to weigh yourself first thing in the morning, naked, after you’ve used the bathroom and before you’ve ate or drank anything. If this isn’t possible for you, just try to keep the conditions as close to the same as possible. Make sure that you write your weight down each day. If you’re using a scale that uses decimal values – even better.

At the end of the week, you’ll take the last 7 weigh-in values and calculate an average. This number will be the weekly average for that corresponding week. It’s important to use a weekly average because even with little to no change in bodily tissue, body weight can fluctuate day to day due to factors like hydration and gastrointestinal content. Like I said, working in averages will serve you better in the long run.

Step 4 – Adjust caloric intake and/or activity level in accordance with changes in weekly average weights.

Once you have a consistent set of weekly average weights, you need to start comparing the numbers week to week to determine if you are gaining, losing, or maintaining body weight. Obviously the first move here is to make sure that whatever your weight is doing coincides with your goals. If it’s not, then it’s time to make adjustments.

For example, if your goal is weight loss but your weight steadily increases week to week, then the simple fact is that you’re actually in a caloric surplus, no matter what your nutrition app has been telling you. This leaves you with three realistic options:

1. Review your food logs and make sure that you’ve been tracking everything and tracking it accurately.
2. Increase your amount of exercise and/or overall physical activity so that you begin to expend more calories than you are regularly consuming.
3. Scale back on whatever “activity level” you entered for yourself when you set up a profile on your app. Keep in mind that this information is a pretty rough estimate, but if you overshoot it, then the app will allot more calories for you so that you’re losing weight at a safe rate. These extra calories that the app thinks you need could be adding up, and modifying this variable is an easy way to get your estimates on-target.

It’s also important to note that some apps will account for the event described in the 3rd option above, and slowly cut back calories immediately to compensate for the undesired weight gain. Then again, it’s my experience that some programs don’t do this. Make sure you’re familiar with the features of whatever app you’re using.

You can also do the inverse of this method with exercise/activity level if you’re trying to gain muscle and your weekly averages are not increasing. Same principle, just in the opposite direction.

After you have some pretty consistent numbers nailed down to work with, the final piece of the strategy involves setting realistic expectations.

Step 5 – Set an acceptable surplus/deficit and rate of gain/loss.

Aside from certain circumstances (being absolutely new to training, being obese, taking performance-enhancing drugs, to name a few), it’s not that realistic for us to expect to lose fat while simultaneously building muscle, at least not consistently or in any noticeable sense either way. After all, any kind of tissue loss is catabolic and any kind of tissue building is anabolic, and the environment for those two processes banks entirely on being in a caloric deficit or surplus. Due to the fact that anabolic and catabolic processes occur independent of each other in this way, we are left with the following realities:

• Any loss of body fat will be accompanied by some loss of muscle mass.
• Any gain of muscle mass will be accompanied by some gain of body fat.
• Maintaining current body composition, by definition, indicates no appreciable change in either body fat or muscle mass.

That being said, rather than constantly chasing the white whale of body recomposition, it’s much more plausible to adhere to one of the following strategies:

• Maximize fat loss while minimizing the amount of muscle lost with it.
• Maximize muscle gain while minimizing the amount of fat gained with it.
• Maintain current body composition, minimizing fluctuations in muscle or fat mass.

For a lot of folks, the idea of gaining body fat or losing precious muscle as a sort of side-effect sounds fairly discouraging. The good news is that the above strategies are easily controlled for just by regulating how much of a caloric surplus or deficit you’re in, along with the rate of which you’re gaining or losing weight.

Most trackers will ask you to put in a rate of gain or loss first, and then spit out the appropriate surplus or deficit. For that reason, I’ll start with the rates first. Now, this is really where estimates have to applied, as there are many physiological variables that can affect these rates, yet we can’t realistically measure for. For this reason, nailing down exact figures can be tricky, even for researchers working under highly controlled conditions. The following rates are what I would deem to be acceptable averages according to the majority of the literature out there.

For fat loss, I recommend that the majority of people start with a goal of losing 1-2 pounds per week. If you’re relatively lean, this may be closer to 0.5-1 lb/week. People who are a bit more overweight can lose more per week, perhaps 3-4 lbs, but this will usually stabilize as you get closer to an average body fat percentage. Overall, this usually correlates to a loss of 0.5-2% of body weight per week. This rate of loss assures that you are likely sparing as much muscle mass as possible.

For muscle gain, I recommend that the majority of people start with a goal of gaining 0.25-1 pound per week. This rate may be higher if you are a true beginner in terms of resistance training. Likewise, you should expect to put this rate closer to the low end if you’ve been doing serious resistance training for several years. I’ve also seen this estimated rate to be lower for females, notably smaller females in which a few pounds of muscle can be more noticeable. Generally, this rate is usually found to be somewhere between 0.25-1% of body weight gain per week. Again, this helps to affirm that any fat gain is kept to a minimum.

For maintenance, make sure your weight stays the same week to week. Shocking, I know.

In the case of either fat loss or muscle gain, the daily caloric deficit or surplus needed will usually need to start in the realm of 100-300 calories in either direction – not too difficult of a modification. As I said, your tracker should set this number and make adjustments if needed, but you should still be aware that too aggressive of a deficit or surplus will result in measurable muscle loss or fat gain – two processes you should be striving to suppress at all costs.

Macronutrient Considerations

I mentioned that you should use a tracker that also keeps tabs on macronutrients aside from calories, and although macronutrient content will never trump the laws of energy balance (calories consumed vs. calories expended), I would be failing to mention some important details if I left it out of the picture here.

How you choose to break up your daily calories among macronutrients (protein, carbohydrates, and fats) is quite flexible and largely dependent on personal preference. However, there are a few boxes that I recommend checking in either circumstance of fat loss or muscle gain.

For fat loss, I recommend setting protein relatively high, preferably higher than the typical max figure of 1 gram per pound of body weight. This comes as a surprise to some people, as there still exists a stigma that eating a large amount of protein will automatically make you bigger. Of course, this notion is false given the overarching rule of energy balance, and setting protein high during fat loss is beneficial for a few reasons:

1. A consistent surplus of amino acids in the body may help keep muscle loss at a minimum during a caloric deficit.
2. Protein has the highest thermic effect of the macronutrients, meaning that it costs more calories to break it down, therefore helping you to stay closer to your goal caloric deficit.
3. Protein is the most satiating macronutrient, meaning that it makes most people feel fuller longer, in turn helping to control appetite.

Once your protein requirement is set, you can split whatever remaining calories towards carbs and fat at your preference, as long as you can do it in a manner that keeps you in a deficit. You can get more detailed with carb and fat intake if you are eating for desired performance outcomes, but as far as just shifting body composition over time, the differences are marginal. Eat plenty of protein and stay in a reasonable deficit.

For muscle gain, you again need to put protein at a premium (notice how important protein is to all of this?). Although, probably not quite as high as the recommendation given for fat loss, because we don’t need the added secondary benefits associated with thermic effects on metabolism and appetite control.

Most research shows that a daily consumption of 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight is the maximum needed for stimulating muscle protein synthesis. Any amount consumed above this hasn’t been shown to have any markedly increased effect on muscle building, yet it hasn’t shown to have any downside either. So if you love protein that much, eat away in this case. It might just bump up your grocery bill a little.

After you’ve determined your figure for protein, you are yet again free to allot your remaining calories towards carbs and fats as you please. Again (and this will sound familiar), you can get more detailed with carbs and fat for performance purposes, but for most folks, the bottom line is to eat plenty of protein and stay in a reasonable surplus.

The majority of nutrition trackers will display your macronutrient breakdown in the form of percentages. In this case, the percentages will represent how much of your total caloric intake is being spent toward each macronutrient. If you follow the guidelines above, this will probably put your macronutrient breakdown within the following amounts:

• Protein: 20-30% of total calories
• Fat: 20-30% of total calories
• Carbohydrate: 40-60% of total calories

Of course you can toggle with these amounts depending on your preference, but I’ve found that these ranges are where I, along with many other fellow humans, will tend to naturally fall into. Luckily these ranges are still fairly “normal” for most people, which is promising for flexibility and overall adherence. Remember, the biggest overall factor at work here is still total calories.

*Side note – also remember that there are 9 calories in a gram of fat, compared to only 4 calories per gram for protein and carbohydrate. Depending on your macronutrient breakdown, this fact can turn out to have a significant effect of total calorie consumption.

Recap

1. Choose a nutritional tracker.
2. Track total calories and macronutrients daily for at least 2 consecutive weeks.
3. Weigh yourself daily and calculate weekly averages.
4. Adjust caloric intake and/or activity level in accordance with changes in weekly average weights.
5. Set an acceptable surplus/deficit and rate of gain/loss.
6. Determine reasonable ranges for your macronutrients that allow you to eat flexibly while still remaining in your goal caloric surplus/deficit. Prioritize protein either way.
7. Be consistent and disciplined to make changes when needed.

Really, that’s it. My strategy for this hasn’t really changed much since I finished college because, well… it works. Although brutally fundamental, I’ve never seen anyone follow this method consistently that at least didn’t come away with enough feedback to see what steps to take moving forward. After that, the choice to take action is up to you.

Feel free to comment with any questions or thoughts; you can also contact me directly at strengthscrolls@gmail.com

Thanks for reading!