Menu planning

One thing I have found when I try to eat well and fit a bit of exercise into my day is that I need to plan a bit better. If the food isn’t in my fridge when I get home from work then I won’t be able to eat it, and if I don’t pack my lunch the night before I’m going to end up down the food-hall picking the best of the bad options come lunch tomorrow.

So now one night during the week I make the menu plan for the following week and turn it into my shopping list for the weekend. Not only does this help me eat clean for the week but it means less waste as I buy what I need when I need it and I’m using it.

To make it all a bit easier and for a neat looking list I can pin up on the fridge I found this link to a printable menu planner form today.

 

How many calories do I need each day?

It is important to eat enough calories each day to support your bodys basal metabolic rate (BMR) if you don’t your body thinks things have got really tough and there’s a famine going on, after all your body knows you are pretty smart and know how to get it food, your not dumb enough to stop feeding it so it needs to help out. It does that by switching down the metabolism and using energy as slowly as possible. In turn this slows down your fat loss and your functioning, you may find you’re heads a bit foggy, your reponses slowed and energy levels drop.

To achieve optimal fat loss you need to feed your BMR enough calories for its vital functions this still leaves a significant gap between the calories you eat and the amount your body needs for fat loss and you can increase the gap by adding in or increasing your active time and exercise programme.

So what is my BMR, it is the amount of energy your body uses to perform its vital functions such as breathing, heart beat and maintaining the body temperature. This takes 60-70% of the daily energy requirements.

In addition to BMR the body uses energy for physical activity, this is another 20-30% of the required calories and for the thermic effect of food, the energy used to digest it is around about 10% of the calories consumed, it depends a bit on what you eat.
So our minimum level to keep burning is to feed at lest the BMR, for women this is roughly calculated as 655 + (weight in pounds * 4.3) + (height in inches * 4.7) – (4.7 * age in years). For men the calculation is 66 + (weight in pounds * 6.3) + (height in inches * 12.9) – (age in years * 6.8).

To roughly calculate the total calorie burn of the body in a day you can select your activity level and calculate as:

• Sedentry – BMR = 30%
• Moderately active (cardio exercise every second day) – BMR + 30
• Active (cardio exercise every day) -BMR + 50

 

Calculating your BMI (Body Mass Index)

The Body Mass Index, commonly referred to as the BMI, is a tool used in the medical and health industry. It identifies whether an individual is in a healthy weight range or under/over weight. It is designed for an ‘average’ individual and will not provide an accurate position for an extremely muscular person nor someone with certain physical disabilities but in generally this is a good tool to be aware of.

You calculate your BMI by taking your weight (kg) and divide it by your height (m)³ but the easiest way is to use an online calculation tool that will let you input values in either metric or imperial measures. I like the BMI tool at Calorie King Australia which is nice and easy to use. While you are there you might want to take a look around the site, it has a lot of useful information and I particularly like the food database which is great for Australian and New Zealand products (they have a separate US site that covers US product).

I found calculating my BMI and where that placed me in the healthy weight scale was a good wake-up call – and it gave me something tangible to target, the numbers on the scale on their own don’t have as much meaning to me, using the BMI I can work out what is a healthy weight range to target.