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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2407 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 13, 2025

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Lifters in this thread, do you track your calories or try to hit protein targets? I didn't really advance my lifts very much when I was doing barbell training last year, and I'm seeing on reddit that apparently properly bulking is a big component of lifting nowadays. But I don't know how much I want to do dieting stuff.

You don’t want to “bulk.” You want to eat like 200 calories more per day than you need to, otherwise you’ll get fatter way faster than you get stronger. They say 0.82 grams of protein per lb of body weight is optimal; after that, returns diminish.

To be sure about both of those, you need to track calories and macros. Track what you normally eat for like 2 weeks and see how your weight changes, then adjust up or down accordingly. I was stalled for years because “I eat a lot of meat,” but when I started actually tracking it I was shocked at how little protein I was actually getting. I use MyFitnessPal, but there are lots of apps.

You want to eat like 200 calories more per day than you need to, otherwise you’ll get fatter way faster than you get stronger.

Seconding this. I was told ‘you’re not getting better because you’re not eating enough’ and put on 10kg, most of which was fat. I only ever got half of it off again.

If you want to it really depends on your goals.

I will say that tracking calories is so much easier than it ever used to be. I use cronometer, most food you can just scan a barcode and you're done. Otherwise just rough estimates of a food and what it weights.

A few weeks of that and I upped my protein intake. A few weeks after that I decided to play around with the macos. After that I decided to cut some unhealthy food.

Use AI to help with diet, meals, protein intake ideas.

Tldr: tracking is mellow. Don't make it hard and tie it to a hardcore diet. Just track your food as your eating now, review if you're getting enough protein (in the discover tab) and then adjust accordingly a little bit every couple weeks if you wish. Is chill.

I think it's valuable to formally count for a while to get the hang of it, but mostly I just try to mostly eat large amounts of food with a better protein/kcal than whole milk. Simple rule of thumb, does the job.

Personally I try to hit 1g/kg but I mostly focus on getting it throughout the day not just a ton during lunch and dinner. I'm pretty amateur tho and not focusing on putting up big numbers.

1 gram per kilogram is pretty hard to get, though, isn't it? You'd have to eat like, a pound of chicken thighs to get that far. That's a lot of meat... I try to get some protein in every meal, but that's kind of a lot.

You'd have to eat like, a pound of chicken thighs to get that far. That's a lot of meat...

It is hard to not get 100g of protein in 2500 calories if you stay away from junk.

And for pound of meat being a lot - I expect you will have a culture shock if you go to the Balkans, Caucasus or Latin America.

Hmm, I may have a skewed idea of how much a pound of meat looks like. Maybe I really ought to start tracking like some other people say in this thread. My kitchen scale kind of sucks. Maybe I'll buy a neat digital one.

Two things go into making the 1g/kg achievable for me personally:

  1. I'm not super tall so I just weigh less than other people
  2. My university offers an unlimited swipes meal plan and they always have grilled chicken breast. I'm usually hovering around 3 meals a day along with a protein shake.

But lots of other things could interfere with this, I'm just lucky right now and 1g/kg has been working (to the extent that they meet my amateur goals).

If you are getting a decent bolus of protein at each meal 1g/kg is not hard to get to and not 'a lot', especially while bulking. Especially if you at not vegetarian/vegan. One pound of chicken thighs is ~110g of protein. If you are lifting adult male and weigh 110 kg (243 lbs), eating a quarter pound of meat at four sittings shouldn't be that hard to do. With 3-4 feedings a day having some evidence for being more effective than one giant meal. It's tough to imagine a muscular 243 lb male that would have a hard time eating a quarter pounder honestly.

It's not even that expensive, about $2 a day against a real median personal income of about $115 per day in the US.

If prepping meat is too annoying, protein powders are supper cheap. Whey being the most common, mixing well, and with all sorts of flavors. Plenty of slower digesting and vegan options too, if that's what you're into.

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