I'm currently on a diet/workout program.. and i'd like some advice on how to improve it. I'm 16 years old, and i weigh around 80 KG.. hoping to drop down to around 74 KG .. here's my current food and workout plan (Only "Home foods" .. as in no whey or protein shakes et all as many here use)

Breakfast: 1 egg, one fresh orange juice

Pre-workout meal - 4-5 pieces of fatless meat.. kebab style

Post-workout meal - One orange, one slice of low-fat turkey mortadella

Dinner - Boiled veggies

Thats an example of one of my days.. workout includes:

Oblique workouts, ab workouts, pecs workout.. in a circuit style workout program.. finished off with a 20 min walk on a treadmill at 7 kilometers per hour speed and 12% inclice. Thanks for your time and effort.

You'll starve on that diet.

Dinner alone is nowhere near enough calories. Unless you are eating about 8lbs of veggies.

Study the beginner's threads stuck to the top of this forum (http://forums.johnstonefitness.com/forumdisplay.php?f=24)

Hort is right.

You're a 16 year old boy! Food is not your enemy! You need food to be healthy! You need food to lose weight!

Junk food is your enemy, alcohol is your enemy, and binging is your enemy. The surprising truth is that a balanced diet is actually the best way to lose weight and be healthy - just as you might have learned when you were a kid.

Your message is a great one zeyad, and thank you for posting it. It's great because it shows a couple of the ideas most people have about weight loss that need to be revised in order to be successful. It's got a good bunch of the weight-loss myths in it.

MYTH #1 - Eating nothing but veggies or salad at any point is a good idea.

Veggies are "free" - unless they're potatoes or yams, they aren't a significant source of calories, which means they don't count as energy sources. You should definitely eat them, especially when you're hungry, to get rid of the urge (and for the fiber, which is invaluable) but it should be in addition to the food you eat for energy, not instead of.

People who eat nothing but salads won't lose weight - they'll starve, and their bodies will stop burning fat. Unless the salads have lots and lots of creamy or oily dressing, in which case they'll accomplish nothing.

So, you want veggies for dinner? Great! What else are you going to eat? Veggies don't count.

MYTH #2 - Eggs should generally be eaten by growing and grown men at a rate of one or two per meal.

You can eat a whole bunch of eggs in one meal. One egg has less than 100 calories. If you separate out the yolks and just eat the whites, you can eat five, even six eggs for breakfast, and still be eating low-calorie meals. If you eat the yolks, I'd say a single meal that consists mostly of eggs should rarely have fewer than three eggs in it.

I used to rarely eat eggs (they never seemed to satisfy), but once I figured out I could eat three or four eggs instead of one egg and half a loaf of toast, I found eggs made a very hearty breakfast.

MYTH #3 - Orange juice is substantial enough to be one of my major food sources.

the diet you have posted probably makes you feel pretty crappy about halfway through the day, and I bet you rarely stick to it. The reason for this is that about half the calories you get in the morning are pure sugar, and that is a bad way to get your energy.

There are debates about whether or not you should drink juice at all while trying to lose weight (I'm against it - it's too easy to overdo it, I prefer eating the whole fruits when I want fruit), but I don't think you'll find too many people not trying to sell you a juicer who would agree that juice should be your main source of calories over the long haul.

Juice fasts should be temporary things, your body can't subsist on just sugar.

You see a lot of beginner diets where somebody has nothing but juice for, like, half a day. This may cause them to drop some weight in the short term, but it's a bad long-term strategy, because it's really hard to sustain. It's just sugar. You'll get a little quick energy, and then you'll crash, your body won't burn fat, you'll feel like crap, and you'll quit your diet, thinking that eating healthy makes you feel like crap.

It sounds crazy but you'd be better off having a multivitamin and a few strips of bacon for breakfast than that orange juice. The bacon has the protein and fats that'll stick with you.

Think of your guts like a furnace that burns food and fat. If you keep the furnace running hot, it'll burn the fat off your body. If you let the furnace die out, the fat will stay on your body. You have to fuel the furnace enough to keep it burning hot. You need to give it coal, or oil, or gas, or wood. Drinking juice is like feeding paper into the furnace. It'll burn away really quick, and then the whole house will cool off. It's not a good solution.

MYTH #4 - The most important things to work out in order to look good and feel good are your pecs and your abs. You should work them out all the time.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that, categorically, the most important things to work out in order to look good and feel good are your legs and your back.

- They're your two biggest muscle groups, which means they grow the fastest, which means that you burn lots of extra caloried every day when you strengthen them
- they are muscle groups you use all the time doing everyday tasks (when was the last time something fell on top of you when you were lying on your back?),
- they are involved in the biggest compound exercises that will work the whole rest of your body (squats, dead lifts, rows, and pull-ups, to name a few)
- they are the places where people who don't work out tend to get the most disasterous injuries as they get older

of course, you should work out EVERYTHING, but it is particularly unfortunate that, if people are going to pick only two muscle groups to work out, they pick abs and pecs. You want to have a strong core, that's very important. But doing a bazillion sit-ups isn't the way to go, anyway - you want to do lots of different exercises for your whole body, and that means not just isolation ab work.

And pecs are really overrated. A strong back will do more to make you attractive to women, for instance, than pecs will. I forget who it was on this forum who said it, but it made me crack up, because it's so true - "girls don't care if you have big floppers."

And doing ab or pec workouts won't get rid of chest or belly fat. Only eating right and keeping that furnace burning hot does that. To the extent that exercise helps, a balanced exercise routine will help more than one dedicated to only one body part.

I hope you meet with lots of success in your journey - please look through the sticky threads and then let us know if you have any more qestions! We're here to help!

:gl:

I can't believe you've been eating like that!

Keep it up and you'll have an eating disorder in no time.

At 27 I'd starve to death in one day on that diet and when I was 16 I was able to eat tons more than I do now. Tons, tons more.

That's not to brag, but to indicate that your diet is horrifically undercaloried. I was about your weight at that age. You need to eat more. The existing posts should help you out, but get that diet in shape. DO NOT starve yourself. You'll crash the metabolism and never have that six pack or the bis & pecs that you want.

Besides ultra-low calories, which are bad enough alone, you have very little protein on there. Super low calories and super low protein is the absolute best way to starve off any lean mass you have!

Eat :eat:

BTW don't worry about the lack of whey. I couldn't get it back then, either (and ten years ago protein drinks tasted like ass. It's amazing how much better they are these days). My mother didn't want to pay for it or thought it was weird, but I managed to easily get my protein most notably from gobs of skim milk and lots of cans of tuna packed in water. Often, whey is not a bonus to the diet but rather a replacement for what we should be doing. I have one or two scoops a day of whey protein but the bulk of my protein still comes from "real food".

Good luck!

Wow, this community is extremely helpful, thank you very much. I stuck to the diet believe it or not, and yes, i did feel kinda empty at times, but i nevertheless stuck to it. After reading your advice (which i very much appreciate), i changed the orange juice to a cup of skimmed milk, to give me my protein. I'v increased my intake in my meals.. for example, i'v included fat-free fruit youghurt, All-Bran cereal with fat-free milk. Are those suitable foods? Basically, after reading your posts, i'v changed to semething like..

Breakfast: 2 Eggs, One cup of fat-free milk.

Pre-workout meal: One orange, half an apple.

Post-workout meal: (today): Chicken (breast) curry (inclused zucchini, carrots, tomatos) with a bit of rice (the diet kinda of rice.. where we take its water out or something, not entirely sure).

Snack: One fruit-flavoured fat-free youghurt pot.

Dinner: One can of tuna in water.

Is this suitable? Thanks again :claplow:

NO!


You need to calculate how many calories you need daily and eat accordingly. I guessed at your height and made you "average"- I'll bet your "maintenance level" the amount you eat daily just to maintain weight, not including workout/ is at least 2000 calories a day.

Rough calculations on what you just listed total MAYBE 1000-1200 calories.

READ THIS THREAD (http://forums.johnstonefitness.com/showthread.php?t=1222)

Basically, after reading your posts, i'v changed to semething like..

I added it all together in FitDay and got
1414 calories
43% protein
40% carbs
17% fat

That's not a bad composition, but it's simply too little. An adult of your size should add another 500 calories on top of that, but what's "worse", you're 16. You're still growing, which means you're in a natural "bulking" phase, having faster metabolism and naturally requiring more nutrients and energy for that. So, I'm not completely sure but perhaps 700 calories more than that. It's not too bad to eat the same things if you wrote (I'd add more carbs such as whole wheat bread to go with those eggs in the morning especially), but simply 30-40% more of it.

Keep in mind that you really have to eat that much. Assumably you're trying to look ripped, not to end up looking like someone just out of Auschwitz. You are not being more "hardcore" if you eat less. Going into too deep of a calorie deficit will have negative consequences. It will simply mean you'll switch your body in the "economy" mode, lose more muscle and have harder time getting over ensuing plateaus.

Thanks again, but whenever i exceed the 1500 calorie mark, i feel guilty and i instandtly want to cut down. I'm around 5ft 8 .. though i am slight big-boned. I'v started a month ago, and i'v been pretty much going to the gym everyday, doing a bit of cardio and working out muscle (though no heavy lifting or the like.. ), and i'v been following a 3-a-meal diet (which i have now changed). I went down from 86KG to around 79 KG. Many on here would say it's a loss of muscle, but surely this can't be since i'm working my muscles out every day.. wattya think?

Thanks again, but whenever i exceed the 1500 calorie mark, i feel guilty and i instandtly want to cut down. I'm around 5ft 8 .. though i am slight big-boned. I'v started a month ago, and i'v been pretty much going to the gym everyday, doing a bit of cardio and working out muscle (though no heavy lifting or the like.. ), and i'v been following a 3-a-meal diet (which i have now changed). I went down from 86KG to around 79 KG. Many on here would say it's a loss of muscle, but surely this can't be since i'm working my muscles out every day.. wattya think?Whoa, nelly! Yes, it can surely be muscle loss. Weights will limit the amount of muscle lost on a calorie deficit diet, but don't you agree that if you took a person, threw them in a prisoner of war situation but gave them free access to weights, they'd still come out looking like a skeleton? They would. Bodybuilders invariably lose size when they "cut" for a competition, even though they're doing their damdest to keep as much muscle as possible.

You have lost 7 kilos which is 15 lbs, in one month. If you weighed 400 lbs I'd say congratulations but you weight well under 200 so anybody here will say you're overdoing it. You are definitely losing lean mass (muscle) with that weight loss. 15 lbs in one month is too much. That's because you're eating far too little. I don't know why you feel guilty on more than 1500 calories/day. You should feel guilty now that you're losing muscle (if you notice some minimal strength increase it may be your body simply adapting to the feeling of working out as opposed to growing real muscle).

Your macronutrient ratios (protein/carbs/fat) look good. Don't be too scared of fat, though. Your calories are too little, period. Raise them up to 2100-2200 calories/day and your weight will still fly off but you'll not be killing muscle to the same extent.

One cannot distil weight loss down simply to "the less calories the better" because it's not quite that easy.

Wow, you guys have really helped me here, thanx =D Will eating more increase the rate of metabolism? And another question if possible, when we go the toilet often, does that mean a rise in the body's metabolism or ..

And any suggestions on the kinds of food (examples if possible) i should eat on a daily basis? Foods that will aid in stopping muscle loss and aiding in overall fat loss? Thanks :)

Will eating more increase the rate of metabolism?

Yes.

Eating a little more often does it, too.

And another question if possible, when we go the toilet often, does that mean a rise in the body's metabolism or ..

Well, it means you're probably getting your fiber, which is good for your metabolism, and/or your water, which is good for your metabolism, but it doesn't really mean that much by itself, no.