How Your Body Expends Energy
TDEE - Total Daily Energy Expenditure - How many calories your body expends in a day
BMR - Basil Metabolic Rate - The Calories your body burns just to stay alive with no activity
NEAT - Non Exercise Activity Thermogenesis - The calories your body burns via activity other than exercise such as fidgeting, walking to get around during the day. Day to day activity that is not exercise.
EAT - Exercise Activity Thermogenesis - Calories your body burns during exercise
TEF - Thermic Effect of Food - The calories your body burns eating and digesting food.
BMR+NEAT+EAT+TEF=TDEE
The majority of your calories are expended at rest.
Ways to increase your TDEE
BMR - The only way to increase your BMR is to gain weight, and/or decrease your body fat percentage - LBM to FM ratio.
NEAT - There are lots of ways to increase your NEAT such as; increase your daily steps by more walking, taking stairs, not sitting so much, etc. Just increase your everyday movement.
TEF - Each macro nutrient has a Thermic Effect percentage, meaning the percentage of the calories they contain that are burned just by digesting that macro nutrient
Protein 20%-30%
Carbohydrate - 5%-10%
Fat 0%-5%
So eating more protein, which burns 20-30% of the calories from protein, will naturally increase your TEF
EAT - Getting more exercise in will increase this obviously, but if you put it into perspective, this is a very small percentage of your energy expenditure.
TDEE Calculator - tdeecalculator.net
Maintenance Calories = TDEE
Calorie Deficit - Lose body fat
TDEE < 20-25%
Calorie Surplus - Gain muscle
TDEE > 5-10%
Can you lose body fat and gain muscle at the same time if you are eating Maintenance Calories? Yes, if you are following a progressively overloaded structured strength training program designed for hypertrophy and:
- You are new to structured strength training or
- You have a good bit of body fat to lose 30% or more.
Can you gain muscle in a calorie deficit? Yes. You can do that if you have a good bit of body fat to lose, 30% or more, and you are following a progressively overloaded structured strength training program designed for hypertrophy. Once you decrease your body fat, that will no longer be possible.
Will you gain body fat in a calorie surplus? Yes, but you can keep it to a minimum by following the more conservative 5% increase.
Will you lose muscle in a calorie deficit? Sometimes. The best way to prevent it is to keep your deficit conservative and make sure you are following a progressively overloaded structured strength training program designed for hypertrophy or neurological gains. And be sure to keep cardio to a minimum to decrease the chance for muscle loss. If you have to do cardio, keep it LISS (low intensity steady state) such as walking.