You are going to need a smart phone of some kind to help you get fit, some other gadget are usefull and we will cover them too.
Lets kick things off with diet.
1. First of all you need to know how much you are eating. Get Myfitnesspal app to track your calorie intake. Here is how you should set it up. On the desktop version, under MyHome- Settings-update diet/fitness profile.
Choose what you want for your goal weight, always choose sedentary and no workouts as we will add our exercise another way. At the bottom you get to choose how much you want to lose. I would go no higher than .5kg a week. I started with this and quickly reduced it to .25 then changed to maintain weight ! You may or may not know what weight you should be. Use a BMI calculator as a guide, or if you were thin and fit before, recall what weight you were when you could run and cycle with ease.
Then go to MyHome- Goals and fill out the information.
I set my meals up that way somewhere else in the app, it's not that important but makes sense to me working different shifts.
2. Now heres one of the most important things in this guide. Your Macros.
The key here is to start with your Protein intake.
Take your weight in Kg and multiply by 1.75 That number is how many grams of protein you need to eat in a day. You need only match this with grams of carbs and the rest will be healthy fats.
This vid is about low carb, it also demonstrates why you need to base your intake on Protein.
Above you can see I have manipulated the Macros in daily nutrition goals to be 25/40/35 PFC. I'm going to move to 25/45/30. Any extra Carbs must be earned in exercise.
You can link something like Strava or Trainingpeaks to Myfitness to automatically add your 'free' calories you earned with exercise.
3. We are almost there. All you need to do now is not go over your daily limit. A good way of doing this is following a 16-8 eating plan otherwise known as intermittent fasting. I'm usually finished eating at 1900 and try to go until 1100, often I have food at the standard tea break time of 1000 :) This is not always practical and if I have planned a long cycle or other rather difficult workout I WILL eat in the morning. That said, I can easily do a zones 2 cycle for 90 mins before I break the fast at 1200 on my days off.
The 16-8 has health benefits and makes it easier to stick to you calorie goals so its a win win.
So we have 3 things to remember.
1. Carefully monitor your intake.
2. Eat enough Protein
3. Try fasting
Do it.
