Let’s get down to brass tacks and lay out my current goal(s). The overriding goal right now is weight loss (“cutting”). My stats, when I started anew, again, on April 19, 2020, were around 227 lbs and 29.5% bodyfat.
Lose Weight: Based on what I’ve seen of the research, a high but sustainable weight loss rate is about 0.7% of your bodyweight per week. For me, that’s roughly 1.6 lbs per week. Of that, again what I’ve seen in the research over the years, it is reasonable to assume that up to ¾ will be fat (if you lose weight quickly, you’re going to lose lean mass, pretty much no matter what … from what I’ve seen). So, I laid out a plan for steady weight reduction at 0.7% of my weight, per week, and assumed 75% of that will be fat.
Breaks: From my own experience, and again from the reading I’ve done over the years, breaks are needed, if not only for sanity, also because of hormone issues when doing a steady calorie deficit. So what I did was insert a one-week break, every eight weeks. So, eight weeks cut, one week break, eight weeks cut, one week break.
Goal Weight for First Cut: The goal is to lose 55 lbs. Yeah, that’s a lot. Less than some people, more than others. Let’s ignore other people because this is my issue. Based on the above cut-break cycle, I should be able to get to 170 lbs around the end of February, 2021. That’s 9 months away, but on the other hand it took me 6 years to gain the weight: I can’t expect it to go away quickly. At that point, I should be around 15% bodyfat which will be lower than I’ve ever been since I started measuring in 2006.
Calories: This first cut is split into nutrition phases based on average weight for the week, in 10-lb increments. At 220±5 lbs, my BMR is roughly 2275 kcal (my AppleWatch reports a similar BMR around this number). My goal of –1.6 lbs/week right now is split between calorie deficit and exercise. My primary goal with diet is to lose 1 lb/week. Everyone says that 1 lb of fat is 3500 lbs, so you want a 500 kcal deficit per day. Problem is, that’s not true. 1 lb of pure fat is actually 453.6 gms, and at 9 calories/gram, that’s 4082 calories per week. Except, that’s also not quite true. A lipid (fat) cell is 72–87% fat (cell wall, cell nucleus, mitochondria, etc. need to be there). And, a gram of fat is 8.7–9.5 calories. So what I’ve done is assumed numbers on the outside estimate, and said that I want to lose (28.35 gm/oz)×(16 oz/lb)×(1 lb)×(9.5 cal/gm)×(87%) ≈ 3750 calories per week, or a daily deficit of about 535 calories from my BMR. Whew.
Macros: There are a lot of people who make gigantic pronouncements for how much protein one should consume, and they are all significantly larger than what the average person eats. I am not worrying about that until I want to bulk, where I’ve seen folks say to consume around 1.15 gms protein per pound of bodyweight. For cutting, I’m trying to hit macro goals, instead. My fat / carbohydrate / protein split goal is 30 / 35 / 35. That translates to 58.0 gms fat, 152.2 gms carbohydrates, and 152.2 gms protein, per day. That gets me up to the calorie goal of 1740 kcal/day.
Exercise, Calories: My goal for exercise right now is to lose a little more than ½ lb per week through exercise. It’s not larger because it doesn’t need to be, and it’s much easier to not eat a doughnut than to walk for a half hour.
Exercise, CV Fitness: Another purpose of my exercise is to improve my cardiovascular fitness. I do live on a mountain, and the driveway is a ≈5 m / 20 ft climb, but I should not be out of breath just from getting to its top. My current VO2max is roughly 31.6. For men in my age range (30–39), <31.5 is Very Poor, 31.5–35.4 is Poor, 35.5-40.9 is Fair, 41–44.9 Good, 45–49.4 Excellent, and >49.4 is Superior. So, my score is crap, and so I am trying to do a fair bit of cardio these days in order to improve that, not necessarily just for the purpose of losing weight. (For those who don’t know, VO2max is a good indicator of your cardiopulmonary system health — it’s how much oxygen your body can absorb in order to do anything — the units are mL per kg per min (so, milliliters of oxygen, per kilogram of bodyweight, per minute).)
Exercise, Strength Training: While cutting, the goal here is to keep the muscle that you have. If you don’t use it, you lose it, so my goal is to include some basic strength training and core training to build up those muscles a bit, but primarily to maintain them. I’m carrying over 45 lbs of fat I don’t want, so my main goal is to get rid of that and worry about building muscle next year when I can eat more.
No Exercise-Diet Trade-Offs!! I think one of the primary issues where my math has failed in the past is when I was trying to do the whole “multiplier” thing with BMR to figure out calories. The idea is that if you are more active, your BMR is higher (you expend more calories by being alive) and so you can eat more. If you’re “very” active, the multiplier can be up to 1.9, meaning that instead of my BMR being around 2275, it would be around 3600. I don’t care how much exercise I do, there is no way I’m going through 1300 additional calories per day from exercise. Another way of putting it is that if you do exercise, you can “buy additional calories” for the day. MyFitnessPal does this, where if my goal is 2000 kcal and I do 500 kcal on the elliptical, it says I can eat 2500 kcal. Problem is, that means I have just eaten back the calories I exercised to shed! So, for me, what has worked and is working is not doing this trade-off. I have a calorie goal with is is set to a deficit based on my BMR and loss per week. I have an exercise goal which is set on the weight loss I want per week plus whatever to maintain lean mass and improve cardiovascular health. If I do extra exercise beyond that, great, but I don’t get to eat more. If I do less exercise, sucks, but I don’t eat less.
And so … those are my current set of goals and the explanation behind them.
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