The Basics of a Healthy Diet for Fat Loss

Fueling your body with the right food is just as important as getting the right amount and kind of exercise! When it comes to fat loss, it’s all about the calories. But to keep your body healthy and to build lean muscle tissue, you also need to be mindful of where your calories are coming from. Getting the right amount of protein, carbohydrates, and fats is essential for reaching your fitness goals.

Let’s start by figuring out how many calories you should be eating. Use the this calorie calculator to get a starting number to test out over the next few weeks: https://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/macronutcal.htm 

Once you have your goal number of calories, you’ll want to make sure that the right amount of those calories are coming from protein. Protein is important for building lean muscle tissue and boosting the metabolism. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics recommends 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram or 0.35 grams per pound of body weight per day for general health--you’ll need more for building muscle though (check out this infographic from ACSM). 

I encourage my clients to shoot for a minimum of between 75 and 90 grams of protein per day. Each gram of protein is 4 calories, so at least between 300 and 380 of your daily calories need to be coming from protein. 

The rest of your calories should come from carbohydrates (carbs) and fats--what I call your “energy macros.” How you split up your energy macros between carbs and fat is totally up to you--but generally you want to shoot for between 45% and 65% of your calories coming from carbs and 20% to 35% coming from fats.

It’s best if the main source of carbohydrates in your diet come from vegetables, fruit, and whole grains. Try to avoid consuming too much processed and packaged foods like crackers, cookies, and other baked goods. For fats, you want to prioritize unsaturated fats (usually vegetable sources like olive oil, nuts & seeds, avocado, etc) as well as fatty acids that come from fish (aim for 8 oz of seafood per week).

Use the MyFitnessPal app to log everything you eat and drink every day--trying to reach the daily calorie goal that you calculated. Weigh yourself once per week to see how your body responds. For fat loss, a good goal to shoot for is losing 1 pound of body fat per week (sometimes people lose more in the first 2-3 months of their training, but eventually it should stabilize to about 1 pound per week).

You may need to adjust your calories and macronutrient distribution from time to time. When we lose weight, often our metabolism will slow--reducing our basal metabolic rate and requiring us to reduce our daily calorie intake. When we build muscle though, our basal metabolic rate increases, therefore we will need to increase our calorie intake. 

It’s a good idea to keep an eye on your weight and body fat percentage from time to time while you’re tracking your calories and macros to make sure you’re getting the right intake. I recommend checking once per week or once per month.