I'm a proponent of eating small frequent meals. I've seen this rec'd by many trainers and weight lifters. My uncle's trainer friend (who trains Johnny Depp, when he's in town<3) believes in the 3 hour diet, were you eat every three hours no matter what it is - to prevent sugar drops, I guess. I don't exactly follow the 3 hour rule but I do eat throughout the day.I eat when I'm hungry and stop when I'm not (which is before I'm "full"), if it's a couple bites that's cool and if it's a whole plate or more of foods that's cool too.
Other people say you should eat three meals and two snacks a day, I'm told this is Bob Greene's approach (Oprah's trainer).
If you do start eating when you're hungry and listening to your body you'll find out what works for you. I actually do turn inwards and ask my body what it wants, we have conversations. Those conversations usually lead to good healthy foods and every once in a while it wants ice cream or something.
And now for some background stuffs about how many calories you need to maintain and live and lose.
Good news! Eating makes your body shed fat (you've already mentioned the "eat muscle bad" thing so yay). When you eat too little your body says, "ho, no! famine! Hold on to precious life-sustaining fat at all costs!" so your body isn't inclined to give up as much fat as it would if you gave it enough nutrients and calories to do all it stuff and then you workout and burn calories and you also cut a few hundred calories from your diet and you gradually will lose. Of course the scale pretty much sucks as a way to tell how "fat" you are and keeping a record of how many inches around your body parts are will help keep things in prespective. Anyway, if you lose healthily that weight should be mostly fat.
So, how many calories to do you need just to stay alive? That's your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) and to that you add any activity you do such as sitting up in bed!
xd Or typing, walking to work or class, cooking, reading, standing, sleeping - all that good stuff. Now you have your daily metabolic rate and of course it changes everyday and of course the
online calculators aren't going to be 100% but they're just a guide. Sedentary is being mostly bed bound, lightly active would be most students and office people, moderately active would be people in more of a standing/moving around job place. If I was doing barn work that day it would most likely bump me up to moderately active, very active would be people training for a sport or farming and the like, extremely active would be like highly physical worker people like lumberjacks or construction workers.
Once upon a time I found a calculator that would let you break up your day into all the different activities, with a list of what counted as what but alas, I can't find that again.
crying So we just guesstimate.
Now you have your BMR + daily life acitivity and we want to lose, not maintain our weight. One pound of fat is 3500 calories and 500 calories would equal that over 7 days. If we want to lose a healthy 1-2 pounds a week everyday we cut out half those calories, 250-500 calories, of food and we want to burn the other half of those calories, 250-500, through exercise.
From a calorie in calorie out standpoint as long as you're eating to lose you will lose but what you're putting into your body affects what is getting burnt fat or muscle? Muscle is much more tasty to eat than lumpy fat (geez, no one wants itXD) and if your body doesn't have adequate protein intake and the vitamins and minerals your body needs it will take them from your muscles, like you said.
The RDA for protein is 50 grams, I believe, so aim for that at first if you aren't already (if you start doing weight lifting and increased exercise you want to aim higher than that, to feed teh muscles), another good goal is your fiber intake which I believe is at rec'd at 25 grams (not sure). Keeping saturated fat to 10% of less of your fat intake (generally around 30% of your total calorie intake) is another good goal. Eating good fats in flax seed oil, olive oil, and others are something we want in our diet.
Okay. Heh, sorry for the longness. Rock on.
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