I have plenty of thoughts to offer, but I’d like to know more about how you are currently eating. It’s important to point out I’ve never been 100+ kilos, and I don’t want to lead you astray with bad advice that’s not yet applicable to you. It can be quite easy to create a very aggressive deficit by applying certain rules, and I’m not a fan of “crash” diets.
People have already asked, but it’s a good question:
- Is there any dietary consistency?
- How much alcohol do you drink per week?
- How many other caloric beverages do you consume (milk, juice, soda, …)?
@T3hPwnisher s suggestions are good, as is his blog post on leaning out, but I think he started at a bodyweight lower than yours? Maybe some 20-30 kilos. Which, even if you’re inactive (sedentary + weighttraining) translates to about 500-900 calories a day.
I’m finding it increasingly difficult to post on these boards about fat loss because I know there are readers to wit what I write will not apply and if they adhere to the numbers it’ll cause detriment to their health, however I quote and emphasize this applies to people with a healthy level of bodyfat
You should weigh yourself every 7 days after waking up. Shoot for a weekly loss of around 2-3 pounds. Of course use your judgement. If you’re a lean individual or a small person, losing 1-1.5 pounds per week might be satisfactory.
- Aim to lose 0.5 to 1% of bodyweight per week. For a 215 pound guy, that means to aim to lose roughly 1 to 2 pounds per week.
Either of which can contextually be too aggressive. If you don’t weigh “enough” then absolute terms in poundages is too harsh, but if you weigh plenty then the percentage based model gives you more leeway to be somewhat more aggressive at no significant health risk.
If you don’t want to count, the model I like best to start with is finding a frame of reference that you can apply to your current eating and then scale up/down.
As a very simple example that probably does not match the nuance of your life (I’ll describe how to elaborate on the model to match “reality”):
Let’s say you eat 4 meals per day, and you happen to find that each meal is composed of (roughly)
- 2 cupped hands of carbs
- 2 palms of protein
- 2 thumbs of fat
- 2 fists of vegetables
(Yes, the ideas stem from Precision Nutrition of which I am indeed a fan)
And that’s adequate for you to maintain weight, and it doesn’t really matter if those cupped hands are rice, potatoes, pasta, …, if however you eat matches that model roughly and allows you to maintain weight then only the averages matter even if you rotate foods that are inherently different in caloric density (i.e., a cupped hand of rice has way more calories than a cupped hand of potatoes, but measured over the week it’ll be the average that matters).
If you were to find that this (or some other number with regards to the servings) it what allows you to maintain your weight you can start by reducing the carb portions not adjacent to workouts. That should kick off a deficit. When it no longer does, you can remove another piece of the puzzle, and so forth.
So you read this, and you go “great, but I always have a bowl of yoghurt and it’s really hard to gauge if that’s one cupped hand or two?” and then I suggest either use a bowl that you can consistently fill to the brim or get smaller bowls as your diet progresses. I’ve done this with for instance pumpkin seeds. I’d have a tablespoon measure inside my packet of pumpkin seeds and then replace that with a teaspoon and have two (one tablespoon is three tablespoons).
If nuts and avocados are part of your diet, then I highly recommend pre-portioning these out (especially nuts as it is so calorie dense and the difference visually between 30 and 40 grams isn’t much). I keep old plastic containers of a seasoning I tend to but which incidentally fits 50 grams of diced avocado (freezer) and ~30 grams of walnuts. I weight these out at the end of Sunday and grab them on the fly during the week.
Probably morning, but the answer is:
whenever your physique is the most likely to not be subject to short-term changes.
What do I mean? Well, for me, the evening is bad because maybe I’ll have a big dinner with friends, maybe I’ll have sunbathed and be smoothened from a little sunburn. Maybe I’ll have had a lot of water to drink, and so forth. The morning offers me the most consistency. I also weigh daily, but I hear once per week is adequate. I just know that I could undereat substantially in a 7 day period so I tend to favour the daily weigh-ins.