Reducing your calorie intake is essential to losing body fat while maintaining a consistent schedule of exercises for strength training and endurance to build and tone muscles. Counting calories in relation to losing fat and achieving an ideal body weight can seem tedious at first, but the result can be greater muscle definition because of the loss of excess body fat.
How to Maintain Body Weight
You can get an idea of how to reduce your calorie intake by using a formula from the website Secrets of Muscle. Multiply your current body weight by 15 to determine how many calories to consume per day to maintain your current body weight. For example, if your current body weight is 180 pounds, you need to consume no more than 2,700 calories per day to maintain your current body weight.
How to Lose Body Fat
Secrets of Muscle also suggests that you eat 11 calories per pound to lose body fat. In other words, multiply your current body weight by 11 and subtract that number from the amount of calories necessary to maintain your current body weight. The result is the amount of calories you can expect to burn daily. For example, 2,700 calories minus 1,980 calories, the result of multiplying 180 by 11, equals 720 calories burned each day. One pound is the equivalent of 3,500 calories, according to Secrets of Muscle, so burning 720 calories a day for a week would result in a weight loss of about 1.44 pounds. Strength-train with weights two to five times a week and perform cardio five to six times per week while maintaining your new calorie intake.
Pacing Your Meals
Eat five small meals per day to provide more immediate energy to the muscles and decrease the likelihood that the body will store the calories as it would if you consume three large meals throughout the day. Ensure that your daily calorie intake consists of 40 percent carbohydrates, 40 percent protein and 20 percent fat, according to Secrets of Muscle.
Calorie Intake
Your daily calorie intake from protein can include chicken breasts, fat-free ground beef, fat-free milk, lean-cut steaks, tuna or turkey. Your daily calorie intake from carbohydrates should come from slow-digesting carbohydrates such as apples, baked potatoes, broccoli, brown rice, carrots, cauliflower, corn, lettuce, lima beans, oatmeal, pasta, pears, spinach, squash, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, yams or zucchini. Slow digesting carbohydrates help the body maintain a fat-burning state throughout the day and prevent sharp changes in the body's levels of insulin, according to the Journal of Sports Science and Medicine.
Fats and What to Avoid
Your calorie intake from fats should come from healthy fats such as avocados, canola oil, fish, flax seed oil, nuts, olives or peanut butter. Avoid saturated fats from butter, cookies and fried foods and only eat dairy products that are fat free.
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