How to plan your Diets to lose weight; The Indian Edition

Hello Everyone!

So as promised I am back today and this post is going to be specifically addressing all the Indian college going students who live in the dorm rooms and face problems with their weight loss goal, like not being able to track their Macros and many more.
So, before we get started, lets work on some terminologies;

1. Cutting: Cutting means having calories less than your body uses per day, which results in a loss of fat, that basically means those of you trying to lose weight are actually trying to "cut".
2. Bulking: Bulking is just the opposite of cutting, it means that you are having more number of calories than your body uses up in a day, thus all the skinny guys would want to "Bulk".
3. Clean/Dirty Bulking: Clean Bulking will be referred to as consuming a caloric surplus of up to 500 calories above your maintenance caloric intake, whereas during a dirty bulk, you extend your caloric surplus beyond 500 calories.

Today, I'll be talking about Diets: Food items you should eat/avoid, how to plan your diet and meals and how to track your calories.

Diets

As I pointed out in my earlier post, diets make up for 70% of the progress in your weight loss goal, so i will be taking this up first.

OK so first things first, before planning any kind of diets you will have to calculate your TDEE or your maintenance calories, those of you who don't know what TDEE is please refer to my previous post.
After calculating your TDEE you must calculate the amount of calories you should take to lose fat (I strongly recommend not cutting more than 500 calories from your TDEE) and lets call that your Daily Goal Calorie intake (DGC).

Now once you have your DGC calculate the amount of macros (protein, carbohydrates and fats) you must get daily to achieve that daily calorie intake.
You can calculate all of the above things HERE.
Anyone trying to lose/gain weight, you have to calculate your TDEE and DGC nevertheless.

You have the amount of protein, carbs and fats in grams that you must have on a daily basis and also a number of calories which you should not exceed, now let's talk about how will you go about managing that.

For this I would suggest you download the app MyFitnessPal, this app has a huge database of different foods that we eat with their nutritional info. Now you should log a rough estimate of what all thing you are going to eat the next day, the app will then provide you with the estimate of how many carbs, fats and protein you will be all day long with the total number of calories.
With this said, being a student in any Indian college living in a hostel you obviously wont be able to hit all the macros exactly, for this while loosing weight what i did was:

1. I kept my calories in check, never exceeded my DGC by a huge margin.
2. I played around with my macros, I made sure i get me daily intake of protein and the amount of carbs and fats varied, usually i took fats more than the estimated number and reduced my carb intake to keep my calories in check.

This method worked for me, basically I was following a low carb, high fat and protein diet.
Also, please note that the fats i was taking was all healthy fats and not trans fats, e.g egg yolks, peanut butter, fats present in milk and milk products etc.

Now that I have given you the above information, I will leave the calculations part upto you.
After the calculations, you'll have to figure out for yourself how will you hit your macros and what foods are available to you in your vicinity, however, if you need help you can always leave a comment down below.
Also, i will give you a list of great foods, that you can include in your diet and also those which are a complete no-no.
So here goes:

Foods That You Should Avoid:

1. Simple Sugar/Carbs: This simply tops the list, all the food items containing simple sugars are off limits, these include any type of sweets, coke, cake, pastries yaada yaada.
   If you want to know why simple sugars are so harmful for you Click Here.
2. Trans Fat: These are the harmful fats present in the cooking oil that we use (soybean oil, dalda oil etc). which are used to produce chips, french fries or any other deep fried food products available in the market.

Foods That You Should be Eating:

1. Proteins!! Proteins are the holy grail for people in fitness industry. Proteins are necessary for muscle building but they also play a crucial role in burning fat. How's that, you ask?
   Well let me tell you this, research has shown that eating foods that are rich in proteins can curb hunger and provide us with that filling sensation, what this basically means is that when you eat lean proteins, you'll feel full without eating much calories.
   To read more about my above assertion, Click here.
   Here are some great sources of lean proteins: Fish, boiled chicken, egg whites, turkey breast etc
2. Fiber: Fiber too, like protein helps curb hunger and has a very low calorie density which again means that you can eat a lot of it without having too much calories. Apart from this when you go on a high protein diet with eggs, chicken and foods that are known to cause constipation, fiber helps a lot in digestion.
   Foods that are known to contain Fibre: Salad, Green veggies, Oatmeal, Wheat etc.
3. The "Good" Fats: (Monounsaturated fats and polyunsaturated fats) are the good fats and the main sources are:egg yolks, peanut butter, fats present in milk and milk products etc.
   Read More about the good and the bad fats HERE
4. Complex Carbs: Complex carbs are basically "polysaccharides" what this basically means is that they are a bunch of simple carbs(monosaccharides) linked together.
   
   Complex carbohydrates are good because they usually take longer to be broken down into glucose in your blood, meaning they provide prolonged energy and stabilize your blood sugar rather than spiking it up like simple carbohydrates do.
   Sources: Oatmeal, whole wheat bread, brown rice, beans, lentils etc.

Now that you have a rough Idea of how to go about calculating your TDEE and planning your diet let me give you a model diet plan of around 2500 calories :

• Breakfast: 6 egg whites, 2 slices of brown bread OR 30-35 gms of oatmeal, 500 ml toned milk (not boiled, just out of the packet) with a scoop of protein powder.
• Lunch: 4 Roti, the seasonal sabzi that our mess provided (I tried to make it protein intensive, like I used to prefer chicken, fish, black chickpeas etc), dahi, dal.
• Pre-Workout: 2 medium sized bananas.
• Post-Workout: Protein shake with 5 grams creatine and a banana/oatmeal (Again,I did not boil my oatmeal, i used to have it raw).
• Lunch: Roasted Chicken about 100 grams with 2/3 roti.

As you can see, I overshot my protein goal by a large extent but its okay as the protein projected by this app is actually not totally accurate, in fact it projects around 3-4 grams protein in rotis which is impossible considering the quality of rotis that we get in mess. :p
Additionally, It is good to keep your protein high during a serious cut, it'll be very helpful in preventing muscle loss.

Also. the goal calories given in this is actually my TDEE and as you can see i am safely in a deficit of around 300 calories per day.
So with this i will sign off from today's funda session,

Topic for the next post:
Good workout regimen for weight loss.

Till then,
Stay healthy! :)