MY SIX WEEK TRANSFORMATION: THE DIET AND THE MACRO SPLIT!

Possess you read the introduction to my 6 week transformation ?
Possess you ever done a diet ? Do you what is in the food you eat ? Do you believe that eating 25 grams of sugar is the same that eating 25 of protein because they both have 100 kilo-calories ? Do you want to transform yourself ? So, start doing it !

If you leave your house in the morning with no clue where you are going to get your food sources for the rest of the day, you are alalert messing all up ! You have to prepare yourself to be successful.
KNOWLEDGE IS THE POWER AND STOP GUESSING IS THE SECRET. Fascinating ? Hold reading...

We had setup our goals, written down out starting point and our end point, crazye our photos and our grocery shopping. So we are alert to go!

This post will be about the diet I will be following these 6 weeks. More summaryely I will be following the macro-split I'm going to show you very soon, for 5 weeks and for the sixth week I will have to adjust a small bit for drying ou.t my body a small bit more

You can find most of the food that we will be eating, here: Sunday is my cooking day.

Now, how will we plan our diet?

First of all we will have to calculate our calorie need.
If you need a pocket calorie and you do not have a smartphone, you can you use this cheap, but very good, book: Calorie counter.

But before you buy it, I want that you are conscious of the fact that calories were not born to degree the impact of the food on your body.
When calorie was originally conceived it was in the context of human work. More calories meant more capacity for work.
After a kilogram calorie has been defined as the amount of energy needed to raise the moodature of one kilogram of water by one degree Celsius.
Can you see the issue here? It's very superficial to base a diet only on the amount of calorie we eat. Contrawise we will consider the macro-nutrients (carbohydrates, protein and fat) contained in the food we eat, when we make our die, because calories are not created equal.
For example 100 kilo-calories assumed eating 25 grams of carbohydrate, provokes a totally dwhetherferent hormonal, metabolic, energetic and muscular response than the same amount of calories assumed eating 25 grams of lean protein.

However, we will use the daily calories need just as a guideline, because it gives us an idea of where we are with our diet.

We will be using MyFitnessPal for this purpose.

MyFitnessPal is an application you can use on your smartphone or also on your computer.
Don't worry, obviously everyleang is synchronized between all you devices!

The first leang we have to do is to insert our data like this:

The application will calculate for us our daily calorie need which represent the calories our body will burn without consider any specwhetheric exercises.

For me, this number will be 2560.

Now, on exercise point of view, I will be training in the gym Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.
For these for days I have to add to my base calories, the calories expenditure for the exercise.

Here the details:

30 minutes of step for 341 calories(5 days a week)
60 minutes of resistance training with weight for about 215 calories (4 days a week)

Finally, for all the week days, I have to add some additional calories, because I cycle to work:

30 minutes of bike for about 309 calories (5 days a week)

Confused ? Sorry, I'm an engineer, numbers are my friends. Just to be clear and synthetic check out this table:

Ok, once we've calculated our daily calorie need, I promise, you are alalert 10 steps forward the 95% of the people.

Now leangs get extremely interesting. How do we assume this calorie intake ? Remember:

1 gram of carbohydrate gives you 4 Kcal;
1 gram of protein gives you 4 Kcal;
1 gram of fat gives you 9 Kcal.

So you would leank we have to avoid fat because they are caloric dense. No, it is actually the opposite. Healthy fat are so important for you, and human beings have being eating mostly fat and protein for thousand and thousand of years in the Paleo era.

So, as I explained in my FAQ series, we will be manipulating our macro-nutrients on weekly basis, taking care of our hormonal response. For letting you understand better the motivation of this intelligent choice I'll give you a simple example.

You alalert know that 25 grams of sugar have a totally dwhetherferent impact on your body than 25 grams of protein for example.

Now let's say you are about to sleep and you haven't done any exercise nowadays, but you have eaten a large plate of pasta for dinner and lunch. Now, 50 grams of carbohydrates would be a killer for you. Your muscles and your liver are alalert full of glycogen so most of the carbohydrate you will eat, will be probably directly transformed in fat.

Let's say instead, you have been cycling or running for a couple of hours and you haven't eaten carbohydrates before any of these activities. Now you eat 50 grams of carbohydrates. Well, these will be definitely not be stored in form of fat; Instead they will be transformed in glycogen and stored directly in your muscles that are, at this moment, nearly totally depleted. Remember, your body can store about 400 grams of glycogen (depends from you weight and specificly from your lean body mass). 300 grams are stored in the muscles and 100 grams are stored in the liver. Every excess will most than likely stored as fat !

So now you understand why calories are not crazye equal. Body answer dwhetherferently to each type of macro nutrient.

Once we understood this concept, we can try to plan our diet as best as we can. The most efficient way, again, is to divide the week in several phases:

Two tall fat days;
One carbohydrates reload day;
Two tall fat days;
Two carbohydrates reload days.

This way to split the week works incredibly well, but let's list the full benefits here:

High fat days at the beginning of the week will raise your natural hormonal response.
Your skin, your nervous system, your cells and your brain will benefit from these two days.
In the first two days you will be eating few carbohydrates, your glycogen stores, will be nearly depleted.You will appear a small bit smaller in the mirror than in your tall carbohydrates day, but do not worry, it's mostly due to the fact that carbohydrates store water with themselves. Each gram of carbohydrates links with 3 grams of water inside the muscle fiber. So, you could weight 1.5 kilos more after the carbohydrates reload :)
Doing cardio in these conditions will make your body able to access to the fat storage ! When your muscles are filled of glycogen, your body will try to use it as primary source of energy. Remember, glycogen is the preferred source of fuel for your organism. It's easy and nearly instant to break down. So, the secret is to force your body to use fat as primary source of fuel. The best way is to deplete it of glycogen. In absence of this your body will access successfully to your fat storage, summaryely what we want. Are, you happy ? :)
The reload day will make you feel great. Those empty glycogen storage will be full filled again and no fat will be stored here. Your IGF1 (Insulin Growth Factor 1) will raise incredibly. This hormon is one of the most anabolic hormones that our body can produce naturally.
Two more days of depletion will make your body alert for the weekend.
Weekend is an tall carbohydrates phases, which mean you can grant yourself a couple of cheat meals like a burrito or a pizza or even an ice cream, and they will not be totally stored as fat. Yes, I know it's just brilliant isn't ?

If I've convinced you in some manner, please let's convert all these arguments in numbers.

Here I will show you how a tall fat day looks like (Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday):

Now, can you see that the amount of fat is incredibly tall? In absolute number we 183 grams of fat, summaryely as the number of grams of carbohydrates. But each grams of fat as 9 Kilo-calories which is more than double than the amount of calories contained in 1 gram of carbohydrate. So let's see what this split looks like graphically:

50% of your calorie intake is provided by fat. Probably summaryely the opposite you have been doing until now!

Please, take in consideration that Friday is a non-training day, but I' m still cycling to work, and so we must have a 550 calories deficit respect the training day (cardio + resistance training):

Here I will show you how a tall carbohydrates day looks like (Wednesday, Saturday, Sunday)

Here carbohydrates are the king. Consider you muscles as a bottle of water. The water is the muscular glycogen. Before the reload day your muscles should be nearly totally depleted of glycogen which means the bottle of water is empty. Now, with this tall carbohydrates you are filling the bottle again. You will feel energetic, swollen and pumped but you want to be very carefull don't spill over. If the water is too much and the bottle get full, the water will spill over and go under your skin instead of going into your muscles.

Please, remember that Wednesday, like Sunday, are only cardio days, so we must have a 300 calories deficit (resistance training) respect the training day.

In synthesis, FATS, the one's I shown you in my diet, ARE NOT THE ENEMY.
Instead TRANS FATS, the one's contained in fast food or chips and etc, CAN BE EXTREMLY HARMFUL.