Nutrition 101
How much does diet matter for your body composition and performance goals?
All nutrition is performance nutrition.
Your “performance “ will depend on many factors including your training level, training goals, daily movement, and day-to-day responsibilities. These factors will determine your daily caloric and macronutrient requirements. We call this your TDEE: total daily energy expenditure.
Every individual requires a certain amount of calories to keep your organs functioning. This means keeping your body “alive”—lungs breathing and heart beating kind of thing. This calculation takes into account your lean mass, fat mass, sex, and age which determines your TDEE. On top of this baseline caloric demand, your daily demands and responsibilities complete the equation to determine your maintenance calories.
Maintenance is what you need to consume to continue supplying energy to your body for day-to-day tasks including training and daily movement. For example, are you a shift worker? Are you a parent? Are you a business owner? Do you work at a desk most of the day? Are you an elite athlete? You can probably assume that a male Olympic-level track athlete’s maintenance calories won’t come close to the energetic demands of a mother of 3 who strength-trains 4 times a week.
Regardless of someone’s TDEE and maintenance calories, proper nutrition is essential for all human beings. Whether you have big lifting goals, body composition goals, or general health goals—there’s no denying that eating enough of the right things will make the world of a difference.
What Do I Need To Eat?
After determining your TDEE and maintenance calories for your unique performance goals, breaking down the macronutrient split most suited for you is the next step.
Protein will always kick it off. It is the most essential macronutrient as it is quite literally the building blocks of everything we are (cells, organ tissues, skeletal muscle, bones, you name it). Chances are unless you’ve been tracking your macros religiously for years, you might be underconsuming how much protein your body needs to repair and rebuild these tissues. Yes, most people are probably consuming enough protein to prevent malnutrition. The government guideline states consuming 0.8kg of protein per kilo of body weight suffices to cover daily protein requirements.
However, “not deficient” does not mean optimal.
To eat an optimal amount of protein, a good guideline to start following is eating 1g of protein per pound of body weight. If you’re an elite-level strength athlete, you can often get away with eating up to 1.2g of protein per pound of body weight but exceeding that amount wouldn’t really do you much good. Staying within the range of 1g to 1.2g is a great place to start.
After determining your protein intake, the remainder of your calories will be allocated to fats and carbohydrates. Deciding what kind of split to follow will be based on 3 factors: maintenance calories, biological sex, and training demands.
First off, fats are more calorically dense than carbohydrates so an individual with lower maintenance calories may follow a split that allows them to eat more volume of food in the carbohydrate department.
Second, women tend to utilize fats more efficiently during exercise and carbohydrates during rest (1). Men tend to experience the opposite. A male and female of relatively equal training level and that have similar performance requirements will see differences in their fat and carbohydrate split.
Lastly, a highly competitive individual who trains frequently at high intensities will require an adequate carbohydrate intake to meet these energetic requirements (2). Consuming more of their calories in the form of fats may not be conducive to their recovery and digestion since fats are slower to digest than carbohydrates.
Acknowledging these differences will impact how this caloric split will be determined.
What happens if I want to lose or gain weight?
Using your TDEE and daily activity level, you’ll be able to calculate your maintenance calories. The basic theory dictates that to lose or gain your caloric consumption needs to be less or more than your maintenance. While in theory, this makes sense, there are many nuances to this approach to caloric manipulation.
You first have to consider one’s maintenance calories, fat mass, lean mass, biological sex, daily movement, training intensity, and frequency, type of training, and most importantly how long they’ve been trying to lose/gain.
Considering there are many nuances to what an individual’s deficit or surplus phase can look like, let’s dissect the basic idea of it at its core.
Calculating how much more or less you should eat will start in increments. Cutting your calories in half or doubling your intake all in one go will give you very quick but unsustainable results. The goal is to get you to adapt to a whole new set of maintenance calories while making changes to your body composition that become your new normal. Slow and steady is the name of the game.
A goal place to start is around 5-10% depending on how aggressively you want to approach this goal. Individuals more experienced in caloric manipulation such as bodybuilding athletes or weight-class athletes such as fighters or weightlifters may start off with a 10% caloric surplus or deficit depending on their nutrition history. An individual who is newer to caloric manipulation may want to start around 5-7% to be able to adapt to this change with minimal impact psychologically.
Author’s Note: Some may decrease their caloric intake permanently, for example, an individual undergoing drastic weight loss. Then, some will only be in a temporary caloric deficit, such as a bodybuilder prepping for a show or an individual undergoing a mini-cut for body composition changes. The same goes for eating in a surplus. An athlete in the off-season may dial back their caloric consumption but during their competitive season, they will be consuming considerably more calories to support their increased training intensity.
Nutrition isn’t a one-size-fits-all.
It’s easy to look at celebrities or athletes online and become intrigued to follow their specific diets. Some even preach ideal numbers as the “perfect diet” (ie. the infamous 1200 calories for weight loss). The truth is that even if you have relatively the same height, age, fat mass, lean mass, and biological sex, there’s only one person you should be tailoring your nutrition around. That person is you. Your caloric demands will change through the years and based on your pursuits. Not all elite athletes stay athletes their whole lives. Not all individuals battling with obesity may stay that way forever. Not all “hard gainers” stay slim forever either. We all age, we all go through physiological changes that shape our bodies’ needs. Muscle gain, weight gain, muscle loss, or weight loss.
The best practice to use when approaching your nutrition is to ask yourself these two questions:
Is this sustainable for my overall health?
Will this support my goals and allow me to live my best life?
It’s guaranteed that every single human being on the planet eats. What and how much each of us eats will be unique to us and should always support living a healthy and strong life.
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Kanter M. High-Quality Carbohydrates and Physical Performance: Expert Panel Report. Nutr Today. 2018 Jan;53(1):35-39. doi: 10.1097/NT.0000000000000238. Epub 2017 Oct 21. PMID: 29449746; PMCID: PMC5794245.