Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Pre-contest prep homework! Caloric intake and Marconutrient breakdown..

This blog is designed to help others that have hopes of doing a bikini competition and like me can not hire a competition coach. I am a personal trainer and have played around with my own diet to know how my body is going to react. I have done a ton of research about this topic and find it frustrating that it's not all in one place until you want to front the money for it. This inspired me to put my contest prep into a blog along with the facts, figures, diets and workout plans I use. Along with progress pictures along the way to not only motivate myself by to hopefully inspire others to have the will power to change there body image and ultimately better their self confidence!!!!!!

One of the most important aspects of preparing for a bikini competition is nutrition. When it comes to nutrition, it all seems to be a numbers game. The best place to start is finding your BMR. Now, BMR is your Basal Metabolic Rate. These are the amount of calories your body needs everyday just to sustain your bodies regular functions, such as breathing. For the average person to maintain their weight, they need to consume a few hundred calories above their BMR. While cutting for a competition, you typically consume a few hundred calories less then your BMR. Now all of this information is not going to help unless you know what you BMR is, so the formula is...

655+(4.35 * weight in pounds) + (4.7 * height in inches) - (4.7 * age in years)

For me, I am 5'7" and 150 pounds, my BMR is about 1,523 calories. Now to cut for my competition I have decided do decrease my calories intake to 1,300. Calories intake is important, but another key factor is the ratio of your macronutrients along with the types of food you are eating.

Macronutrients consist of protein, carbs and fats. The ratio that I recommend to start out with is 40/40/20. In other words, 40% of your diet comes from protein, another 40% comes from carbs and the other 20% comes from fats. This is a healthy ratio to start out at, even if you are not cutting for a competition. This ratio will be adjusted throughout the contest prep as it gets harder to get rid of that stubborn fat. The next step is to take this ratio and calculate it into calories. Each gram of protein and each gram of carb is 4 calories, whereas, a gram of fat is 9 calories. The first step is to figure out the calories you need from protein each day. To do that, you take your total calories times the ratio of protein. In my case, 1,300*.40= 520. Now, when you look at a nutrition label, they do not talk in terms of calories for your macronutrients. Therefore, we must take the total calories of protein needed in a day and divide that by 4. Because there are 4 calories in a gram of protein. This comes out to 130 grams of protein a day for my contest prep of 1,300 calories a day.
The same formulas need to be used to figure out the grams of carbs and fat that is needed daily. For the carbs,in the ratio we used, it is the same as the protein. So for my diet I need 130 grams of carbs daily. For the fats, 1,300 needs to be multiplied by .20 to get 260. The 260 is the calories from fats needed daily. That needs to be changes into grams. As stated before, 1 gram of fat is 9 calories. Therefore, we will divide 260 by 9 to get 28.8 grams of fat daily.

This is just the start of nutrition for contest prep. More to come in the next few days :)

23 comments:

  1. hey I just found your post awsome idea, I was looking for blogs on contest prep for so long now, you should post daily pictures to make it more interesteing like what you eat, and some days when you are at the gym working out, also before and after pics as well as progress pics, I think this blog has a huge potential so keep up the work I will definatly come back soon

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  2. Thank you for your input! That was actually what I was planning on doing. I am just finishing up with finals for school so time for the blog is limited right now...more to come though!! Thanks for reading!

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  4. I've been blogging for almost 2 years and have been reading all sorts of blogs, it really helps to read other "healthy life style" type blogs because you LEARN so much from it as a blogger like your self the info is priceless. Just things that I WOULD highly suggest, to keep this blog entertaining keep it diary style like for ecample insted of teaching a whole lot like as you are giving a lecture in a class, include more of personal stuff like pictures of what you ate, and how you are succeding or diffuclties that you are facing with this strict dieting and exercising, tell your story I promise you this blog will be a huge huge hit, here is just A FEW blogs I read daily, I thought it might help you discover your OWN style
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  5. Thanks for your information! Sandi

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  6. I don't mean to be rude, but your post is very misleading and dangerous. Your BMR is what your body needs if you WERE NOT doing anything ( i.e if you were in a coma, or sleeping all day). This is the amount of calories that you need when your body is at rest. Now, as a bikini competitor, we are doing a lot of exercise ( 5-6 days a week typically or more). Likewise, you also need to consider the activities you are not doing when working out ( i.e working, cleaning, doing dishes etc). Therefore, your body needs more calories than your BMR. Thus, one needs to calculate their TDEE, which is your Total Daily Energy Expenditure. This is the amount of calories your body needs in a 24 hour period through all your activities. You were right in calculating your BMR which is :Women: BMR = 655 + (9.6 X wt in kg) + (1.8 X ht in cm) - (4.7 X age in years)
    However, now that you know your BMR is 1523 you need to ADD in your activity:

    Activity Multiplier
    Sedentary = BMR X 1.2 (little or no exercise, desk job)
    Lightly active = BMR X 1.375 (light exercise/sports 1-3 days/wk)
    Mod. active = BMR X 1.55 (moderate exercise/sports 3-5 days/wk)
    Very active = BMR X 1.725 (hard exercise/sports 6-7 days/wk)
    Extr. active = BMR X 1.9 (hard daily exercise/sports & physical job
    Or 2X day training, i.e marathon, contest etc.)

    I would say that as a bikini competitor you would qualify as very active, or extremely active. Therefore, your TDEE is anywhere between 2,600-2900. Now that being said, that is your MAINTNENCE LEVEL, meaning that is the amount of calories your should have to maintain your weight or body fat. Now to lose body fat for a competition, you should aim at losing 1-2 lbs a week to be safe. A pound of fat is 3500 calories a week, therefore, you would need to cut 500 calories a day ( or 1,000 as a MAXIMUM) to lose it safely. Therefore, your prep calories should be no where below 1600 calories a day for you. I just wante dto point that it out becuase you could be hurting yourself, and others by not giving your body enough nutrition.

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