Geschatte leestijd: 8 minutenWhen you want to lose weight or gain muscle mass, creating a personalized nutrition plan is essential. When you search online for a nutrition plan, you’ll encounter a vast array of options, but it’s questionable how much these plans will help you achieve your personal goals. It’s the personal nature of a nutrition plan that makes the standard plans you find online not very applicable. After all, they don’t take into account your activities, personal nutritional needs, and other eating habits. That’s why we developed the FITsociety app, which allows you to create your own nutrition plan and track your food intake for free.
Creating a Nutrition Plan with the FITsociety App
When you want to have a nutrition plan made nowadays, a personal trainer or dietitian is often the right person to turn to. This professional will assess your
individual calorie needs, calculate your activity level based on your work and training days, and depending on your desires, apply a deficit or surplus. Then, the macronutrients are distributed, including carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. You could already do this yourself quite easily using the various calculators on FITsociety, but you couldn’t track your food intake. With the introduction of the FITsociety app, you can now create your own nutrition plan and track your food intake.
To clarify things when you start with a nutrition plan, below are the most common terms. Whether you’re creating a diet or nutrition plan to lose weight, build muscle, or gain weight, the relationship between nutrition and weight loss is always present. Many of the terms you encounter here will also come up when you’re strength training for mass or when you want to lose weight.
Nutrition Terms in the Nutrition Plan
Calories: Calories are units that describe the energy value in your food. Excess calories not used by your body for energy are stored as fat in your body. Also read our article: what is a calorie.
Micronutrients: Substances that the body needs in small quantities. Minerals and vitamins are examples of these.
Amino Acids:
Amino acids are the components that make up a protein. They are usually referred to as the building blocks of protein. There are different types of proteins, each containing different amino acids.
Glycogen: Glycogen is carbohydrates stored in the body. When carbohydrates are ingested, they are stored in muscle fibers and in the liver as
glycogen. Glycogen is the body’s primary energy source.
Metabolism: Metabolism is the rate at which the body burns energy. A higher metabolism will result in higher energy expenditure, leading to a leaner body.
Protein Synthesis: The process in which amino acids are arranged into proteins. Protein synthesis is the process of muscle growth.
Anabolism: Anabolism is the state of muscle growth. When you achieve muscle growth, you are in an anabolic phase.
Catabolism: When your body is in a catabolic phase, muscles are broken down. The state of catabolism is muscle breakdown.
Aerobic: An aerobic exercise is an exercise that requires oxygen.
Anaerobic: An anaerobic exercise is an exercise that doesn’t require oxygen.
Calculating Daily Calorie Needs
In the past, numerous formulas have been devised to calculate the calorie needs. These formulas take various variables into account, such as height, age, weight, body fat percentage, gender, and activity level.
In the past, we have used both the Harris-Benedict formula and the Katch-McArdle formula. The first (now several times revised formula) looks at weight, age, gender, and height, while the second replaces many of these variables by looking at the fat-free mass instead.
Where Harris-Benedict uses two different formulas for women and men due to differences in body fat percentage, the Katch-McArdle formula solves this by looking at weight without fat, the fat-free mass. Since there are also significant differences between men and women, even among men and women themselves, especially when comparing heavy bodybuilders to boys who consist of half fat, we have preferred the Katch-McArdle formula in the FITsociety app.
In addition to this formula to calculate your calorie needs at rest, you can add a few other factors that determine your total calorie needs, such as your activity factor and your goal.
Activity Factor
This formula, Katch-McArdle, only calculates your BMR,
the Base Metabolic Rate. This is the amount of calories your body would burn if you were inactive all day. To calculate how many extra calories you use through your activities, a commonly used activity factor is used. For example, if you are a top athlete who trains twice a day, 6-7 days a week, you should multiply the amount of calories burned at rest by the factor 1.9. So, you burn almost twice as much.
Goal
Depending on your goal (losing weight, gaining weight, maintaining), you need more or less than the number of calories calculated by the BMR x Activity factor. The nutrition calculator also takes your goal into account in the calculation.
Somatotype
Everyone is different. Some are naturally thin, while others become fat just by looking at food. These differences were divided into the so-called somatotypes Ectomorph, Mesomorph, and Endomorph by the American psychologist William Herbert Sheldon in the 1940s. It is important here that so-called ectomorphs, naturally very thin, need much more food than, for example, endomorphs (naturally stocky) to gain weight, for example. The calculator takes these personal differences into account.
Applying Macro Distribution
Based on all the variables entered, you get the daily calorie requirement. You can make this calculation in the app for both Training Days and Rest Days. However, these calories can come from different nutrients. There is a big difference in the result if you were to get all these calories from fat or all from protein. Many strength athletes often use the ratio 50-30-20 for carbohydrates, protein, and fats, respectively. This means that half of all calories come from carbohydrates, 30% from protein, and 20% from fats. Other ratios such as 50-25-25 also occur. Both carbohydrates and protein provide 4 kcal (kilocalories, = 1000 calories) per gram. Fats provide 9 kcal per gram.
For example, if you need 3000 kcal per day, you would normally calculate:
- 50% of 3000 is 1500. So, 1500 kcal from carbohydrates. 1500/4 = 375, so you need 375 grams of carbohydrates per day.
- 30% of 3000 is 900. 900/4 = 225. So, you need 225 grams of protein per day.
- 20% of 3000 is 600. 600/9 (fat is 9kcal per gram instead of 4) = 66.67 grams of fats per day.
This ratio between carbohydrates, protein, and fats is a choice for the most recommended ratio for the average person. However, some people relatively burn fats easier than carbohydrates compared to others and vice versa. So, a different ratio may be more suitable for you. You may know this from previous diets.
You can also adjust these percentages according to your own preferences in the app, and the app calculates everything in grams for you. When a training session is scheduled, the values are used for the training days, and if no training is scheduled, the values are used for the rest days.
All Factors Are Just Starting Points!
All factors are designed to take into account as much as possible the circumstances that apply to you. However, these are just starting points.
For example, if you look at the activity factor, it mainly looks at the number of times you exercise per week. However, how many calories you burn also depends heavily on how long you train and how intensively.
The same goes for somatotypes. These are usually described as the extent to which someone is ectomorphic, mesomorphic, or endomorphic, with a score of 1 to 7 points given per somatotype. A “pure ectomorph” is indicated as 1-1-7, a pure meso as 1-7-1, and a pure endo as 7-1-1. So, there are 343 possibilities (7x7x7).
Training Days and Rest Days
Because you often need more energy on training days for your workouts and because you also burn more energy, there is the possibility to make the distribution between training days and rest days. The opposite is also the case, when you don’t train on rest days, you need less energy and burn less. To give you complete control over this, the FITsociety app offers the option to set this. As soon as 1 training or exercise is scheduled for a specific day, the value for the training day is automatically used. If NO training is scheduled, the app uses the values for the rest day.
If you miss a workout, you can move the workout to another day, and the app will adjust your diet accordingly by applying the values of the rest day.
If you don’t want to make a difference between a training day and a rest day, you can apply the same calculation for both days.
Tracking Nutrition with the FITsociety App
Now that you have calculated your calorie needs and macronutrient distribution, it’s just a matter of tracking your nutrition. Nowadays, there are many apps that provide this with various food databases. The problem with most food databases is pollution because users can add their own products.
That’s why we built our food database from scratch, manually verifying each food. All foods we have verified are marked with a green check mark of “verified”. This does not mean that you cannot add new foods. You can easily add your own foods, but we check every food added to see if it is not already in our database and if the values are correct. This way, we keep our database clean and the values you see with the foods are correct.
One of the difficult things about creating a meal plan is filling in the different meals to achieve the desired amount and ratio of nutrients. Fun to know, for example, how much is in 100 grams of peanut butter, but how many grams do you normally put on bread and how heavy is that one slice of bread or one slice of cheese? To prevent you from having to weigh every product, we have easily set the units for various commonly used products per item. For example, instead of 100 grams, the unit for bread is “1 slice” or for banana and apple “1 piece”. This does mean that we have had to make certain assumptions based on averages. One slice of bread is not the same as another, which is why there is an average weight behind the foods that we have added per item or per slice in our database. The pre-filled units are to make it easier and to have a good starting point.
Scanning Barcodes
Of course, you can also add foods using a barcode scanner. Like many other food tracking apps, with the help of the FITsociety app, you can simply grab a product, scan the barcode, and once the barcode is recognized, you can add the food to your meal plan. If the barcode is not recognized, you can add the food, which we will then verify. Until then, you can continue to use the food.
Adding New Products
If you want to add a food without a barcode, you can do that too. Once you have performed a search and you receive 0 results, you have the choice of whether to add a food or add a new recipe. Once you click on add food, you can add a new food and use it in your meal plan.
Creating Your Own Recipes
If you want to add your own recipes or you have some foods that you consume daily as your breakfast or lunch, you can add them to the FITsociety app.
1. Click on the nutrition tab in the FITsociety app
2. At the top, choose Recipes
3. Click on the nutrition icon at the bottom
4. Upload the photo of the recipe
5. Give the recipe a name
6. Choose the ingredients (from the verified food database)
7. Choose the quantities of the ingredients
8. Click on Save when you’re done
You can immediately see the macro distribution and the calories of the recipe.
Conclusion: Creating Your Own Meal Plan
Creating your own meal plan is very personal. Your energy needs and activities need to be taken into account. Once you have determined your resting metabolism, you can then determine what your goal will be. Are you bulking, cutting, or just wanting to lose weight? The goal will ultimately determine how many calories you will include in your meal plan. In addition to the number of calories, the distribution of macronutrients also plays an important role. Proteins, carbohydrates, and fats all provide energy but each play a different role when they enter the body. It is also important what your activities are in terms of work and training. All of this is possible with the new FITsociety app.
If you want a customized meal plan, the best advice is to visit a personal trainer or dietitian.
