How To Maintain Your Gains During Quarantine Through Diet
During these strange and challenging times, it’s likely that your regular routine has been disrupted in some way or other. This two-part series will detail how and why to track your nutrition (for the general fitness enthusiast and the performance athlete) in the simplest way possible to ensure that your hard efforts are not derailed by the disruption to regular gym access. Or at the very least, are mitigated as much as possible.
You might also benefit from this article if you have tried, and failed, to track numerous times before but never to the point of it becoming a long-term habit. I myself struggled for years to track in a way that aligned with my inconsistent schedule and eating habits. This was in part due to the misconception that nutrition tracking needs to include planned and precooked meals done in advance and frozen for an entire week. Not that this doesn’t work for some people. This can be an effective strategy for someone who enjoys that process and has a consistent schedule that helps to facilitate that type of meal planning. The reality is, for myself and many others, that eating is spontaneous and is often worked into a varying schedule. And so, these are my own personal strategies that have made tracking sustainable long-term.
Why Tracking is Important
First, we need to discuss why tracking is tracking important. Under normal circumstances (pre and post quarantine), tracking will help to ensure that you are actually moving in the right direction towards whatever goal you might have. Without going too much into the physiology, muscle gain is maximized when eating in a caloric surplus while fat loss is maximized in a caloric deficit. If your goal is to lose weight but you are accidentally consuming a caloric surplus, no amount of additional exercise will help you reach this goal and vice versa; if your goal is to build muscle, you probably want to maximize the rate of this muscle gain. If you are accidentally consuming a caloric deficit, you might actually be losing muscle instead. Therefore, under normal circumstances, you want to remove the guess work to ensure you are actually moving towards your goals.
In a quarantine when your exercise equipment availability is limited, you want to ensure all of your gains or losses are preserved as much as possible. Continuing to maintain a surplus or deficit during this time will help to mitigate any loss of progress that might occur while gym access is limited and you are confined to home workouts.
Definitions and Concepts
The next section will include some basic definitions and concepts for individuals who may be less familiar with some of these topics. Feel free to skip this section and move onto to the practical applications section if you’re familiar with these.
Calories (kilocalorie or kcal for short) – This is how energy is measured in nutrition. You are probably familiar with this term already. More technically, a kcal is the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of 1 kg of water 1 degree Celsius. For our purposes, a calorie is simply a unit of measure that allows us to quantify the amount of energy is in the food we eat.
Maintenance calories – This is the number of calories (or amount of energy) that you would need to eat in order for you to not gain weight or lose weight. This number is a combination of what your body needs to fuel all of its functions and any movement (exercise or just daily activities) you do on a daily basis.
Caloric Surplus – This is any number of calories in surplus of your maintenance calories. This means that you will be consuming more calories than what you are expending and this will cause you to gain weight over time. Weight gain can be in the form of muscle or fat and is usually a combination of both, but varies depending on the size of the surplus and whether this caloric surplus is paired with exercise, and most effectively with resistance training. A caloric surplus is a requirement (for the most part) if you want to put on muscle from resistance training.
Caloric Deficit – This is any number of calories less than what you would need to eat to be at maintenance calories. This means you will be expending more calories than what you are consuming and will therefore lose weight over time. As with a surplus, this can be both in the form of muscle or fat and is usually a combination of both. The same thing applies here, these vary based on the size of the deficit and the amount and type of exercise being performed. A caloric deficit is a requirement (for the most part) if you want to lose fat.
Macronutrients – These are your carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. They are called macronutrients because they are consumed in large (macro) quantities.
Protein – Protein contains 4 kcal per 1 gram. Adequate protein intake has a number of benefits including being necessary for building muscle, improving body composition, and maintaining muscle mass during a caloric deficit. For performance and body composition goals, protein intake is second in importance only to total calorie consumption.
Carbohydrates – Carbs contain 4 kcal per 1 gram. Carbs (in the form of glucose) are the body’s preferred source of energy and are stored in the liver and muscle tissue as glycogen. This is especially true during high intensity exercise such as resistance training.
Fat – Fat contains 9 kcal per 1 gram. Fats are necessary for a number of functions in the body and are the body’s largest store of energy. This is the body’s main source of fuel at rest and during low intensity exercise.
Micronutrients – These are the vitamins and minerals that are consumed in relatively small (micro) quantities. They are vital for the health and function of your body. However, I won’t focus on these all that much. Provided you are eating the recommended number of servings of fruits and vegetables, it is likely that you are getting an adequate amount of micronutrients. With that being said, this isn’t always possible if you have dietary restrictions that limit your intake. A multi-vitamin can be useful in this regard.
Practical Applications Order of Importance
In the pursuit of muscle growth, fat loss, or maintaining current body composition, there exists a hierarchy of importance that will help facilitate these goals. Furthermore, establishing a list of priorities can help you to get the most return for your effort, if you are not able to give 100% all of the time.
They are:
1. Calorie intake (surplus, deficit, or maintenance)
2. Protein intake (adequate intake relative to goals)
3. Carb/Fat intake ratio
Caloric intake determines whether you are gaining or losing, protein intake helps to maximize muscle growth during a surplus and minimize muscle loss during a deficit, and finally, as fat is critical for some metabolic functions there exists a minimum amount (15% of kcal from fat) that must be eaten in order to sustain healthy bodily function. If you are a performance athlete, it is generally best to maximize the amount of carbs you are consuming to maximize the amount of energy you have for performance (while still maintaining a minimum fat intake). Otherwise, this ratio can be manipulated to fit your own personal eating preferences (e.g. if you like your high carb foods more than high fat foods). I typically try to maximize my carbs for performance, but honestly, the ratio of carbs to fats varies quite a bit on a daily basis based on what I feel like eating that day.
At the beginning, I wouldn’t harp on this too much, or at all, to make it as simple as possible to facilitate tracking becoming a habit. As you get practice, this will come in time, if it is important to you.
Determining Maintenance Calories
Given that caloric intake is priority number one, we need to figure out what your maintenance calories are to determine how much more or less you need to eat to reach your intended intake. My recommendation is to eat as you normally would for a week and determine your daily average. This shouldn’t be significantly different than what you would eat otherwise, unless tracking subconsciously changes your eating habits. Either way, this can be corrected for at a later time if your weight is not trending in the direction you want it to.
Determining Your Surplus or Deficit
Unless you intend on maintaining your weight, you now need to figure out what rate of gain or loss you want to achieve. Generally, slow weight gain will minimize fat gain and slow weight loss will minimize muscle loss. Contrarily, fast weight gain tends to result in more fat gain and fast weight loss tends to result in more muscle loss. A secondary consideration of rate of progress is your training age.
Individuals who are more advanced in their training age should generally be more conservative in their surplus or deficit because their rate of progress is no longer as fast as someone who is new to training.
Next, we need to know how much energy is contained in a pound of bodyweight. Thankfully, this has already been calculated. 1lb of fat = 3500 kcal. Therefore, if you want to lose or gain 1lb per week, you need to eat 3500 kcal less than maintenance. Daily, this equates to a 500 calorie deficit. However, 1lb a week is not the same for all people. 1lb per week is 1% of bodyweight for a 100 lb person, but only 0.5% for a 200 lb person. So, rate of gain and rate of loss is generally calculated as a percent relative to bodyweight.
These are some general guidelines to determine the right surplus or deficit for you:
-Novice (< 1.5 years training): gaining or losing 1-1.5% of bodyweight weekly
-Intermediate (1.5-5 years training): gaining or losing 0.5 to 1% of bodyweight weekly
-Advanced (5+ years of training): gaining or losing < 0.5 % of bodyweight weekly
Determining Your Protein Intake
The final piece of tracking that needs to be closely monitored is your protein intake.
The range of recommendations for protein intake is around 0.8g – 1.2g per pound of bodyweight. 0.8g per pound of bodyweight is probably the minimum that you can eat without leaving gains on the table in a surplus. However, research generally still shows improvements in body composition at the higher end of that range.
In a deficit, protein is even more crucial to minimize the breakdown of muscle tissue. During a deficit, it might be best to eat at least 1.2g of protein per pound of bodyweight or more.
Calorie and Macronutrient Checklist
1. Determine maintenance calories
2. Determine surplus or deficit
3. Determine protein requirements (higher during a deficit or when trying to maximize muscle growth or body composition)
4. Determine minimum fat requirements (this should be roughly 15-30% of your daily calories)
5. The rest should come from carbs
In the next part of this series, I’m going to discuss how I track and some of the tips I’ve learned along the way to make this as simple as possible. Hopefully this will ensure you are successful in making tracking a habit and keep your gains (or losses) during the quarantine!
As always,
Stay Strong Ladies and Gentlemen,
Sean (lead author) and David (editor and secondary author), from Smart Fitness
Sean’s social media: seantjw
