"Shaping" your body

[Cheetarah]

more food=more muscle=increase metabolism=burn fat.

Well put.

 

[hookdup]

Okay, so how many calories should I be having?

I'm 5'0
22 % bf
117 pds.

And ...

if I increase my calories, can I increase my cardio to burn those calories or is that completely counter-productive?

Also, I'm trying to keep track of the weights I'm doing in the gym but I'm not sure how much the bar weighs ....
... you know the bar that you add the weights to???
I use it for squats & lunges and am curious.

 

[Gladiola]

Okay, so how many calories should I be having?

You are in your early 20's? (metabolism slows as you age) I would say in the vicinity of 2,000 on a workout day - a little less on a rest day (1,700). But again, you know you need to experiment. It really is staggering the QUANTITY of food you can eat with 2,000 cal if it's ALL clean

if I increase my calories, can I increase my cardio to burn those calories or is that completely counter-productive?

How much cardio are you doing now? Focus more on gaining that Lean Body Mass - and you don't need the cardio for that. It is good to do some cardio simply to keep your lungs & heart healthy - but 2-3X a week for 30 Min will suffice. You could even forgo that if you do some circuit/supersetting training to get your Heart Rate up while lifting.
When you do cardio, make sure you're not in a carb depleted state (for example, empty stomach FTITM) to increase your chances of NOT burning LBM for energy while doing the cardio.

Heavy bars (like for bench pressing & squats) usually weigh 45 lbs.

 

[hookdup]

Thanks Gladiola,

You totally answered everything !!!!!!

I'm actually 31 and have 2 kids so my metabolism has got to be slow.

I'm doing 20 minutes of interval cardio training 3 x per week but it's FTITM so that may be burning some muscle???

I'm also doing 1 hour of weights 3 times per week.


I'm going to try staying with what I'm doing (while raising my calories) a few more weeks and see what happens... it's Body For Life ... and it supposedly works for so many people so I'm trying to follow it to a T just to learn discipline more than anything else, and I'm also using myself as a human guinea pig ...
The program almost seems to be too good to be true so I testing it for myself.

 

[rez]

hookdup...
i would worry about cals sooo much..concentrate on your grams of carbs, pros and fats.

i weight 106pounds and work it out from there...

at the moment im cutting and do a carb rotating diet which looks like:
high carb day
pro=200-300g
carbs=100g
fat=30g

low carb
pro=200-300g
carb=50g
fat 40g

on the weekends i usally have a zero -20g carb day (from green veg)

 

[hookdup]

Thanks guys,

I'm writing all this stuff down. I still have a couple of weeks on BFL before making any major decisions, but from all the advice I've gotten here, I should have an awesome plan for after BFL.

To be completely honest, I don't think it's working for me... but I just want to stick it out ... They say you've got to be on it for about 4 weeks before you see any results and it's only been 2 weeks so ...

Well, at least my gym work outs seem to be working. I can feel some good muscle under that layer of fat. I'll have to find a digital camera and post some photos for y'all.