The first thing you need to learn about are calories.

You've probably heard the saying "calories in, calories out".

This refers to burning as many calories (or more) than you eat per day and therefore maintaining or losing weight.

Calories make up our macronutrients like proteins, carbohydrates and fats, but for the sake of your SHJ Nutrition System we'll be focusing in on one macronutrient in particular: protein.

The next lesson will give you a full rundown on WHY.

For now, let's start with the definition of a calorie. Here's what Scientific American tells us:

A calorie is a unit that is used to measure energy. The Calorie you see on a food package is actually a kilocalorie, or 1,000 calories. A Calorie (kcal) is the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of 1 kilogram of water 1 degree Celsius.

To put it more simply we can really look at the first sentence and break it down more from there.

So we know it's a unit that we utilize to measure energy, and therefore energy expenditure.

We also know:

One Pound is equivalent to 3500 calories.

7 days a week X 500 calories a day adds to your 3500 calories a week.

Therefore that would be one pound of weight loss or gain per week depending on if you over or under your BMR by 500 calories each day.

We shoot for 3500 to 7000 calories (under or over) per week.

Let's break that down a bit more.

One pound, whether that is weight loss or gain, is equivalent to 3500 calories. That means throughout the course of a week if you are under your BMR (more on this in a second, but for now think of it as your metabolism) by 3500 in total, you would lose 1 pound of bodyweight.

Obviously we want that to be FAT loss, which is where our protein will come in during the next lesson.

If you were to be under 7000 total calories for the week you'd lose 2 lbs.

We'll build on why I don't up that number to 10,500 calories in a bit.

WHAT IS BMR?

For now let's cover what I mean when I refer to your BMR.

BMR stands for Basal Metabolic Rate: This is the amount of energy (or calories) your body will burn at rest on a daily basis.

That means if you did nothing your body would burn X amount of calories, where X is your BMR.

A QUICK EXAMPLE

So, let's take a look at an example.

Let's say Superman's BMR was 2500 calories.

That means he would burn 2500 calories a day.

So if he ate 2000 calories a day he would be UNDER his calories by 500 a day and 3500 calories a week, and therefore lose 1 pound.

Countering this would be 3000 calories a day, putting him OVER by 500 a day and 3500 calories a week, and therefore gaining 1 pound.

Kind of getting it?

TRACKING CALORIES W/O INCLUDING DAILY "ACTIVITY BURN"

Now, one more important thing to note is the fact that at SHJ we are using our BMR with the inclusion of activity.

That means our calculators will also be asking you what type of training you are doing to calculate the range of calories you are likely to burn on top of your initial BMR and provide you with a new BMR that includes that burn.

The options are build around specific amount of days you are training (total number) and/or our Superhuman System training.

So don't miss this part: DO NOT TRACK YOUR ACTIVITY BURNED CALORIES AND THEN THINK YOU CAN EAT EXTRA CALORIES THROUGHOUT THE DAY!

That means, if your smart watch tells you you've burned 1000 calories for the day and your tracking app (which I'll talk about in a later lesson) tell you that you can now eat 1000 more calories IGNORE IT and get rid of that setting.

Our nutrition calculators already account for your training.

VARIABLE IN DIETING AND CALORIE TRACKING

The reason for this is variables...which we'll talk about now.

When it comes to dieting there are A LOT of variables in regards to calories.

The first thing is your BMR. We have testing our calculators FOR YEARS now and we believe these are the best they can possibly be to finding your BMR.

BUT, it's important to note that even if we hooked you up the the best machines, surrounded by doctors, there's still the potential to be up to 30% off your actual BMR.

Tack on the fact that food labels are allowed to be up to 20% off and you're looking at decent range of error right off the bat.

Now, 30% on the BMR and 20% on the tracking is one thing.

We can work with this because it's going to take a week or two to see where your body lands and the direction the scale is going, on top of the fact that'll you'll need to get use to your tracking in general (tracking errors are a whole different ball game that you'll need to prepare for and work on yourself); but these percentages are easy to overcome.

What we DON'T want is to add a whole new percentage to the mix of potential error that we already have.

A study at Stanford concludes:

"“The heart rate measurements performed far better than we expected,” said Ashley, “but the energy expenditure measures were way off the mark. The magnitude of just how bad they were surprised me.”

And the exact findings she's referring to in this quote were:

"Even the most accurate device was off by an average of 27 percent. And the least accurate was off by 93 percent."

That's FAR too wide of a range and high of a potentially wrong number to want to worry about.

Which is why we stick to tracking your activity calories with our own tested calculations based on the routines we specifically program.

Okay, but next up on the list we'll talk a bit more about bulking and cutting (the differences between gaining and losing weight).

The Two Levels of Your Caloric Intake (Bulking & Cutting)

The majority of the people inside our SHJ Nutrition System are going to likely be losing weight, with the hope that the majority of that weight loss comes in the form of fat loss.

BUT, we do also have quite a few members who are looking to bulk up and tack on muscle.

I talked a little bit about the swap in calories to do this above, but I wanted to go a bit more in depth for each goal just to make it more clear and not brush over the fact that this system can work for ANY goal.

First and foremost, let's talk about the fact that you need to pick one.

You will need to choose whether you want to lose fat/weight or gain muscle/weight.

There are only three instances where it is possible for you to gain muscle during your weight loss and those are:

You are very overweight (on a BMI scale you would be obese)
You are new to resistance training.
You are on performance enhancing drugs.

Or, obviously, any combination of the three.

Many of you may fall into one of the first two categories, or both, and that's great!

That means you can use this system of tracking your calories and hitting your daily protein goals to tack on lean muscle while losing excess fat.

Now, what I also want to talk about in regards to gaining and/or losing weight is the speed at which you do so.

Your body is not a computer or a machine, it can only burn so much fat and tack on so much muscle at once.

That's why if you eat WAY under your calories you'll begin burning muscle, and if you eat WAY over your calories you'll begin tacking on excess fat; regardless of how much protein you eat.

So, the way I think of it is:

Calories control overall weight loss and/or gain up to 1-2 pounds a week (anything more and they will begin also controlling fat loss/gain and muscle loss/gain as well).
Protein intake controls overall fat loss/gain and muscle loss/gain with the help of your training.

That being said, this is why we specifically shoot for 500-1000 calories under or over per day.

Which means you'll be shooting for 1-2 lbs. of fat loss or muscle gain per week.

You CAN of course shoot for more, but on top of potentially tacking on excess fat during a bulk and losing muscle during a cut you'll also find that you run into BMR issues over time as well.

So, start by deciding your goal(s) and work from there with 500-1000 over or under your BMR (the calculators should automatically give you the cutting or bulking calories we suggest).

ADAPTING TO YOUR BMR AND TRACKING ERRORS

Sometimes errors do happen and you will need to work around some tracking issues and/or BMR discrepancies.

Depending on past dieting choices your BMR might be slightly over or under what our calculators think, and we can make this up by adjusting over time and/or accounting for it with added activity if you don't want to have to adjust your calorie intake too much.

That being said, it's important to really watch the scale every single day for the first week or two.

The reason for this is because there are a ton of different things that can mess with the scale other than weight loss and gain.

The first two things you need to keep in mind are water and hormones.

Both can play a big part in the number on the scale.

For example, when people do the keto diet they see a huge dip on the scale being that carbs make our bodies retain water, so once we don't have those carbs anymore we're depleting that water (which is one of the reasons bodybuilders use carb manipulation to deplete water before a show/competition) and therefore the scale could jump 5-10 lbs. quite easily.

Once those carbs start holding that water again, the scale is right back to where it was.

This can go in either direction, so we want to actually keep an eye on the direction the scale is trending throughout the course of the first week or two in order to make sure it's slowly going down or up depending on your goal(s).

If it is not we'll then take a closer look at your tracking and adjust from there.

MOST of the time it can be fixed with tracking things that people are forgetting to track, like oils, and liquids and things they normally would be simply adding to their foods without realizing (butter, condiments, etc.) that all add calories which quickly equate to hundreds throughout the course of the day and thousands throughout the week.

If you need some extra help looking through your tracking for errors you can always shoot me an email at mike@superherojacked.com.

And, yes, your weekends count as well and can EASILY throw off your entire week.

A LESSON ON CALORIES