How To Manage Your Body In A Healthier Way

Are you unhappy with your body for one reason or another and want to manage it in a healthy and sustainable way?

Do you want to change the way you view your body to a healthier way?

Do you want to ditch the quick fixes and give yourself the body that you aspire for either in what it looks like physically or what you can do with it?

Then this blog is for you! By the end of it, you’ll have an easy to use step by step guide to build your basic calorie and macronutrient profile for you to then develop into the way of eating that you best feel suits you, setting you on the road to give yourself long term benefits and a sustainable way of living.

Firstly, I’ll explain how I got to knowing about this topic.

Much to the envy of those around me, I was one of those teenagers that could just eat anything and everything in copious amounts and genuinely struggled to put on weight of any kind. When I say I was eating a lot… trust me, it was a lot! I wouldn’t say I was an overly active person with the exception of doing a paper round as a teen and playing football once or twice a week. The rest of my time spent indoors on games consoles, much to my regret now.

So the reasons as to why I was able to stick to the tall, lean and adjudged underweight frame is lost on me. My ability to keep weight off though was later a hindrance to me when I wanted to bulk up and give myself a physique that I aspired to, which would require me to gain muscle mass. This is where my deep dive into nutrition to support my goals started and took me on a journey to allow me to be able to control not just my body mass but the composition of it as I so wished. The knowledge gained on this journey of many hours studying and researching is something that would only be selfish to not share with you.

To show you visually where I was to where I am now, on the left is me in 2011 6ft 2 and around the 70kg mark at the age of 17. Whereas on the right, I’m stood at 6ft 3, 87kg and 27. In that time, I’ve gone up to 98kg to suit my sporting needs before coming back down.

Let’s get into how you can use your diet to manage your body in a healthy way!

Diet for many is a very confusing thing and what doesn’t help is the array of outside sources influencing people to look like person X, make sure you’re having supplement Y to get benefit Z or get on diet A, B or C to “live the life and gain the body you’ve always wanted”. We are surrounded by the “perfect” body to makes us feel inadequate and want results yesterday to achieve what we’re told is the ideal. Even if many try and avoid this messaging or make these comparisons, there’s a subconscious and instinctive element to it that’s always there typically driving them to gain/lose weight.

The conditioned aspect of people wanting these results yesterday with what are sold as short term fixes to feed their short term gratification and move on to the next thing, leaves many indulging in life and health changing quick fixes which paper over the cracks and/or causes a cascade of other health problems as they often look at things in a binary manner.

This drive for results doesn’t just ring true for wanting to lose weight either. As a teenager who suddenly was exposed to the gym culture but suffered from the inability to gain weight and definitely lacked a masculine frame, it would have been very easy for me to have fallen into the trap of wanting to get all the types of supplements available on the market that promised me results, though to extent I was with protein supplements. BCAAs, creatine, preworkout, protein supplements, testosterone boosters; the list goes on. Even to the level of investing in performance enhancing drugs if I felt I needed those results faster than I could naturally gain them.

So I understand this feeling of needing to do something drastic to change the way you look as I did whereby I felt like I would be able to achieve more in life, whether this be sporting endeavours or how I looked physically.

Unfortunately, there’s a significant lack of education on the very basics such as calories, macronutrients and the full holistic nature of the human body at all levels. Naturally, we wouldn’t have had this problem but in a world full of abundance, this education is needed but outside of the basics such as the food triangle I was shown as a kid, I feel this area is severely lacking. It’s because of this and seeing so many people around me make drastic health altering changes to try and achieve these aims quickly, often to be left disappointed or gaining more negatives than benefits in the long run, that I am writing this blog to help those that are lost from the perspective of someone who’s been there.

The structure of the blog will be as follows:

Starting off by discussing quick fixes and why, though they may work in the short term, in the long term could be more detrimental to your health and actually leave you in a worse position than which you started.
Moving on to how to start to change your mindset on how you view your body and to judge progress towards your aims.
Finishing off by giving a step by step guide on how to found out your daily calorie intake required and then tune your body to what suits you.

So let’s get into the main part of this blog and get you on a path of guiding your body to a healthier way of being!

Why Quick Fixes Don’t Work

As tempting as they are to use to get the results that you want quickly, and some of them may work in the short term, in the long term they simply aren’t sustainable methods for changing your body in a healthy way, potentially resulting in leaving you with unwanted side effects or swinging back to where you started or worse. I’ll explain what I meant with a couple of examples at both ends of the spectrum.

Starting with losing weight, one of the common mistakes that people make is they over restrict their calories hoping to lose body mass quickly, which they will but the repercussions can be detrimental. Here are a few examples of what you could end up doing to your body:

Loss of muscle mass – Restrict your calories too much when you’re wanting to lose body fat could leave you actually losing muscle mass too due to the body having to go into a catabolic state to keep it surviving.
Loss of certain body functions – Reducing your body to a very small number of calories, it’s going to go into survival mode and start shedding taxing bodily functions that it doesn’t need to simply stay alive such as loss of menstrual cycle, low libido or other signs of your hormones being thrown off.
Metabolic damage – Reduce your calorie consumption too much for too long and your body will go into survival mode, causing your metabolism to slow down to try and meet this, hence the shedding of certain bodily functions. The issue with this metabolic damage is that when you start eating your normal level of calories again, you’ll now be in a calorie surplus meaning you’ll be gaining body fat, which you may have just lost. Your metabolic damage will take time to recover so if you continue this level of intake, you’ll end up worse off than you started hence why you see many swinging from extreme to extreme.
Surgery – Some even go to the extent of having surgery to support them getting the body they way, leaving them either with life changing additions to their body or they may pay high prices for something like liposuction but if they don’t change their habits, they will simply return to the way they are.

When it comes to gaining body mass in the more desirable way of increasing lean muscle mass, the quick fixes, though having different side effects, are just as if not more damaging to the body as a full holistic system:

Significant calorie surplus – This will provide enough calories to drive muscle hypertrophy however, depending on the scale of the surplus, this could lead to various metabolic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease or excessive body fat bringing strain on the body.
Excessive use of supplements – With the promise of various supplements giving you the body you want one way or another, it’s all too easy for you overindulge in them, which can bring about some damaging side effects such as too much protein causing damage to the kidneys.
Use of exogenous hormones/compounds – Though very effective in what they do and certainly an efficient quick fix, the dangers and side effects associated with using these compounds can be detrimental to your short and long term mental and physical health. As your body attempts to balance our the supraphysiological levels of hormones/compounds, it could potentially wreak havoc with your endocrinology.
Surgery/implants – I’ve seen a variety of different procedures and most of them are mad in my eyes. Injecting oil into the muscle, silicon bum implants or even abdominal implants. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you why these are a bad idea in the long run.

The key message here is that the quick fixes may be fixing the problem in the short term and giving you the short term results but in the long term, the side effects or the swing back of your body may leave you in a lot worse position than when you started. This will only leave you with much more work to do than if you had done things in a sustainable way initially.

That should give you a good enough idea why quick fixes aren’t the way to go but the want for these is mostly driven by an unhealthy way of thinking and wanting to have results yesterday, which needs to be changed.

Body Composition Vs Numbers On The Scales

One of the common mistakes made in my eyes when it comes to managing your body as an entire organism is the concentration on the simple numbers that are displayed on a set of scales when you step on them. Honestly, I don’t blame you. It’s a simple metric for people to use and evidently gives a read out of the results from the changes that you’ve made to yourself, be it in diet or exercise.

The issue here though is it’s far too simple and often causes more problems that it solves. Let me explain why this is the case.

All this number tells you is how much your entire body weighs without any context. It doesn’t take into account the ratio of muscle, fat and other bodily tissue but it’s these ratios that tell the rest of the story for you and your overall health.

For instance, the density of muscle is higher than fat. What this means is that if you start training, you could be losing fat mass and gaining muscle mass but if you’re concentrating on only the number being displayed on the scales, though you are getting healthier, you could still be at the same weight on the scales. If that’s your only metric for progress, you’re going to feel deflated and like you’ve wasted your time when actually, you could be making great progress within yourself.

See what I mean now? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying throw your scales out, they are a useful tool to build up the whole picture of your body health but they are not for judging the whole picture.

Another example of why this isn’t a wise method is if you’re not taking into account your height, you may be setting yourself up for failure. If you’re using an arbitrary weight as your target without any consideration, there is a chance that you could give yourself a weight target that is too low for your height to be healthy or too high for your height, again leaving you in an unhealthy position if you aim for it or achieve it.

What you may be wondering now then is what should you be doing to track your changing body. This will depend on how technical you want to get. There are a variety of tools, gadgets and methods of giving you a full picture of your body such as the use of body fat callipers, electrodes to give you your composition and blood tests to see your endocrinology, but for the purposes of this blog, I want to give you a simple method to use to start you off. If you wish to invest in these other methods later on, I’ll leave that down to you.

The first thing you need to do is set yourself a goal of what you want your body to look like. This could be a generic goal or inspired by the physique of someone else to give you an idea as a starting point. If it is the physique of someone else, noting what I said earlier in the blog, remember they have either worked for that physique for years, may be using quick fixes themselves or simply, genetics will mean you may not be able to exactly obtain it. Ultimately, whichever goal you go for and how you form it will typically lead you to the basics of one of the following:

Gain muscle mass
Loss body fat
Stay at the way you are currently

I feel the last one is often overlooked. There is so much talk of gaining or losing weight that people often forget that they want to stay where they are but don’t know how to healthily do it.

The basic method to supplement the use of the scales, which indicate the general trend of the direction your body is going, is to pay attention to how your body is changing in the mirror everyday. Visually, you may notice various changes occurring from day to day; week to week; month to month. To really emphasise your ability to notice these changes would be maybe create an album in your phone for progress pictures, take one everyday and then you’ll have a sort of time lapse see where you’ve come from and where you’re going.

The sorts of things to be looking out for in the mirror or photos could be any one of the following or a combination:

A smaller silhouette of your body shape
Greater definition of certain body structures, such as the face or abdominals
Muscle development
Improvements in other areas of your body such as skin or hair due to better internal health

This is just a starting point of noticing changes visually with your body. As I go through the step by step guide later in the blog, I’ll give you further signals that you will need to tune in to that will let you know what direction your health is going.

A More Sustainable Way

Well, it would be rude of me to not inform you what a more sustainable way of doing this would be after all that. You’ll be glad to know that this is what I’m going to get into now. The foundation rule in my eyes when it comes to managing your body mass is:

Calories in - calories out =

If a positive number, then you're in a calorie surplus and you'll gain body mass

If a negative number then you're in a calorie deficit and you'll lose body mass

I feel this is the strong foundation that the rest of your diet should really be built around. Knowing what your body requires on a daily basis gives you the power of being able to control your calorie intake to start moving your body mass in one direction or another. Further empowerment with knowing what you body type requires with the ratio of carbohydrates, fats and protein will allow you truly head in the direction of your goal physique.

How you decide to eat thereafter to manipulate styles of eating to prompt certain reactions from your body is completely down to you and is something I’d highly advise looking into. Whether you decide to go for intermittent fasting, ketogenic, eating numerous meals a day or go with the perceived norm of 3 square meals a day, you can enact certain systems in the body to meet your needs.

Calculating The Right Calories & Macronutrients

Something that’s not really spoken about enough is calculating the right number of calories you need in a day. Often we hear the terminology of Recommended Daily Amount, or RDA, as guidance on how much you should be eating a day. Though slightly helpful to give you insight on what’s deemed the appropriate number of calories and proportion of macronutrients, if you’re anywhere outside of definition of “average”, these numbers aren’t that helpful.

So here’s a step by step guide on how you can workout how many calories you need in a day as a good starting point before you decide how and what you’re going to be eating. Please note that this method won’t be without its errors and in places lack 100% accuracy but in my eyes, a good place to start and one that certainly helped me. With the basics, you’ll be able to adjust to your requirements.

I have included a worked example for myself for you to see how to work through the steps and the sorts of numbers that come out as an example within a spreadsheet that I built myself and with this, you will see why things like the RDA can be very inaccurate for anyone who isn’t the average person!

Step 1: Use the Harris-Benedict equation to get your Basal Metabolic Rate, which is the amount of calories you need to simply sustain life. After two revisions, the current version of this (as revised by Mifflin and St Jeor in 1990) is:

Men – BMR = (10 x weight in kg) + (6.25 x height in cm) – (5 x age in years) + 5

Women – BMR = (10 x weight in kg) + (6.25 x height in cm) – (5 x age in years) – 161

Disclaimer: the reason why I say this is a good starting part is, as highlighted this 2021 study, the method is up to 70% accurate.

Step 2: Once you have your BMR, the next thing to do is gauge what multiplication factor needs to be used based on your day amount of activity. It is as simple as:

Daily calories = BMR x activity factor

The activity factors are as follows:

1.2 – Little to no exercise
1.375 – Light exercise (1-3 times per week)
1.55 – Moderate exercise (3-5 days per week)
1.725 – Heavy exercise (6-7 days per week)
1.9 – Very heavy exercise (Twice a day or extra heavy workouts)

Don’t forget to factor in if you have a particularly arduous job!

The number of daily calories here will be what you need to maintain your current body mass.

So in my worked example, I’ve shown what my result would be if I was sedentary (on the left), giving me 2,296 calories. So if I hit the male RDA, I’d be in a surplus of 200 calories thus gaining a pound of fat (3,500 calories) every 2.5 weeks or so. However, I train twice a day so I should be using the 1.9 activity factor, which is on the right.

Step 3: Decide what your goals are with your body. By this I mean, do you wish to gain muscle mass or lose body fat? As I said before, don’t leave it to trying to hit a rudimentary number on the scales. This will give you a factor by which you should increase or decrease your daily calorie intake and how quickly you wish to make the changes you do, noting what I stated beforehand about doing things too quickly.

The rule of thumb that I always employed was ±5 or 10%. This meant that if I was wanting to lose body fat, it wasn’t too aggressive causing a loss of muscle mass and if I was wanting to increase muscle mass, it wasn’t going to significantly increase my body fat at the same time.

For some reference points: to lose 1 pound of fat, it’s 3500 calories however, anything more aggressive than 500 calories a day will potentially lead to muscle dystrophy as well so 500 is not a target. You’ve got to remember you may have to handle the hunger and 500 calories could be a significant reduction bringing about the possibility of metabolic damage.

Step 4: Working out the ratios of carbohydrates:fats:proteins. You aren’t going to start seeing results if you are fuelling your body with all carbohydrates, all fats or all protein. There’s only a certain amount your body can do with one fuel source but it’s this array of macronutrients that it requires to function correctly. The other side of it is that depending on your body type, your body will prefer different ratios of these macronutrients to allow it to manipulate your body composition in the way that you want it to.

The first one is based on your body type, which you are either an ectomorph, an endomorph or a mesomorph. Each body type processes certain macronutrients differently thus it is recommended to feed your body type with the right ratios, based upon these two resources (resource one, resource two):

Ectomorph – Skinny, narrow framed, difficultly gaining body mass, high metabolism. Ratio: 55% carbohydrates, 20% fats, 25% protein.
Endomorph – Gains fat easily, gains muscle easily, larger frame, difficulty losing weight. Ratio: 25% carbohydrates, 40% fats, 35% protein.
Mesomorph – Wider shoulders & smaller waist, gains muscle easily, can gain fat more easily than ectomorph. Ratio: 40% carbohydrates, 30% fats, 30% protein.

Once you have these ratios, you know the number of calories you need for each macronutrient. To get the respective number of grams of each macronutrient, you need to divide the number for carbohydrates and protein by 4 each and fat by 9.

The other method that you could use is to optimise the amount of protein for your body to maximise protein synthesis in the muscle tissue. This uses a combination of the body type method with this add on:

Protein – The literature would support that the maximum amount of protein you can consume before no further benefit is 1.62g/kg/day (0-74g/lb/day). So you know your body mass giving you the number of grams of protein per day. Protein provides 4 calories per gram, giving you the number of calories that will go towards your daily total.
Fat – Use the ratios for your body type as discussed above.
Carbohydrates – Take the number of calories provided by fat and protein away from the daily total gives you how many calories you’ll get from carbohydrates and then divide by 4 to get the number of grams.

Using my maintenance calories, I’ll show you the results for each method for me.

Deciding On The Eating Style For You

This alone could be a whole blog in itself with the wide array of eating styles you could take up and the plethora of literature that has been written on the topic. The key thing you should do is experiment with the various kinds and see what works best for you in a holistic manner but remember, there are lots of contributing factors so change things one thing at a time to see what’s causing the effect. I will simply list a few dietary styles that I’ve come across and my thoughts on them:

4-6 meals a day – This is a common diet plan for those who get into the fitness game and it has some merit to it actually. It does allow you to space out your calories so that you’re not overburdening the digestive system in one go. The other benefit is that if you have a particularly high protein intake requirement, within the guidance given, that your able to spread out your protein intake across the day which is advisable as the literature supports servings of 20-30g of protein at any one time.
Ketogenic – This is something that I toyed with the idea of but in the grand scheme of things, I’ve seen a few people end up in a bad way going with this diet. From my understanding, the principles are that you get your body to ketogenic state where it runs off ketones from fats, promoting it from using the body fat stores that you have. Personally, I see this as an emergency state for your body and something that should be looked at very carefully before taking it on. Additionally feel that this isn’t something for a prolonged period of time.
Intermittent fasting – The principle of not eating for a period of time to allow your body to go into a fasted state, typically taking 12-13 hours after last eating, meaning that your blood glucose is lower and your body will look to stored calories as its food sources. Alongside this, there are a variety of other benefits that are studied with it. I’ve been eating in this style since February 2021 and I’ve found this has worked well for me. I feel that I’ve had more energy during the day and that my body composition has improved in the way that I’ve wanted it to with a reduction of body fat and improvements in muscle mass and strength over time.

I reiterate that you should really look into these eating styles as well as any other that you’re considering and look at the pros and cons of them from reputable sources. All of our bodies are different and we have to be aware of what works best for us which brings me on to the next part.

Stay In Tune With Your Body and Adjust

The key during this whole process is for you to start with the basic principles of what the theory gives you. Then it’s over to you to test and adjust until you become satisfied with what suits you and your body the most. No one can tell you that nor can you purely copy it from someone else, only you can from listen to the signs and signals your body gives you and to adjust as you see fit.

Examples of things to look out for that will tell you the effect a change has had on your body are:

Energy levels – A very clear indication of how what you’re eating is affecting you is by how it changes your energy levels. The clearest example of this is eating something that isn’t compatible with your body or too much for it, you’ll soon see your energy levels crash. Whereas if you’re eating is compatible with your body, you’re potentially going to feel the vitality that it brings with it or at least an absence of that sluggish feeling.
Digestion issues – Your body may scream out to you more clearly when you consume something that it doesn’t agree with by being irritated, in pain or changes in the frequency of your bowel movements.
Hunger – This is a tough one to judge. If you’re intent on losing weight, you’ll be in a calorie deficit thus there will be a level of hunger but if it’s too much that you’re struggling to get through the day, then maybe reconsider how much you’re eating.
Recovery – If it’s taking longer than normal for you to recover from your usual physical endeavours, this is a sign that you’re not providing the correct nor sufficient nutrition to your body to rebuild, as long as nothing else has changed such as sleep.
Bodily functions – If you’re not providing the right nutrition to your body, it’ll go into survival mode and shut down certain regular bodily functions that will become obvious to you for both men and women.

Another major thing to take away from knowing these signals is the fact that you will know more about your body, have a more conscious relationship with it and show more compassion to it when you starting noticing what is and isn’t good for it. By paying attention to these signals or any other that may become apparent to you, you’ll be able to fine tune what’s best suited for you and your anatomy, allowing you to live better and happier.

Hopefully this is a useful blog or you to be able to take control of your health and body again, leading you to be able to shape it in the way that you want it to be to serve your health, your fitness goals and your appearance, bringing you that fulfilment in mind and body that you’ve always been wanting. To see more blogs about improving your lifestyle and health, leading you to a happier way of living, be sure to check out the fitness and lifestyle categories at the top of the page where you can find other common but easy to fix elements of your life.

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