Welcome to the IIFYM Diet

I want to be athletic in build - strong, lean, cut, with definition. Keto is a really neat diet, and I think there's a lot of hardcore science behind it, but from my research, it's not great for athletes. I may no be thin, but I train like an athlete and I think my diet needs to reflect that. For those that don't know, body builders go through phases in their training, either bulking (gaining muscle and a small amount of fat) and cutting (losing fat and maintaining muscle). Right now I'm at 35% bodyfat. What does that mean? Well, since I weigh about 200 pounds, that means that I have roughly 130 pounds of muscle. Since my goal weight is between 135-145 (and I want to be at about 18% body fat). On the high end, that means I'll have about 120 pounds of lean mass - less than I currently have.

There's a couple schools of thought when it comes to cutting, but predominantly it's Eat Clean or IIFYM. The clean eaters, as you can likely infer, eat lots of veggies, lean meats, etc. IIFYM stands for If It Fits Your Macros. I love too many of the creamy recipes that I learned on keto to eat clean. I LOVE cream sauces.

The downside to IIFYM? So many different calculators and ways to go about it. I've decided that for the next 2.5 months (how long I was doing keto), I'm going to follow the one from IIFYM.com. It's highly lauded in the body building community as being reliable and reasonable. On top of that, it says that I should be down to 18% body fat in 25-38 weeks. That'd be pretty sweet.

So my macros will now be 49g of fat (down 100g!), 177g of carbs (up 157!), and 155g of protein (up 100g). I'm also focusing more on raising my calories. During keto, I was only eating 1400 calories simply because I lacked hunger.  Now my goal is 1780 calories. We'll see how it goes.