Muscle & Fitness 2018-03-01 Muscle & Fitness UK.edcoan.ir | Page 100

BACK TO BASICS NUTRITION Part 2 W ith the January blues long gone and focus now looking towards the warmth of the spring and summer holidays, it’s time to build on what we started last month. Short sleeved t-shirts and shorts will soon be replacing your winter wardrobe and the vests will once again make an appearance. But are you ready for it? Optimising Protein Intake In terms of the success of any diet, whether the goal be fat loss, mainte- nance or muscle gain, the outcome ultimately will be a result of four factors; • Consistency (repeatable actions that take you towards your goal) • Adherence (being able to stick to it) Peeling the layers of the winter • Desire (what your goal is) insulating fat off to reveal your • Your ‘why?’ (your reasons for hard-earned physique is now the your goal) goal, and if you’ve been following the series from last month’s issue (Feb 2018) you will already be a step ahead of everyone else. So just to quickly skim over what we talked about here last month: ✓ Estimating maintenance calories ✓ Monitoring food intake ✓ Goal setting ✓ Monitoring progress ✓ Adjusting calories for fat loss or muscle gain 98 MUSCLE & FITNESS / MARCH 2018 At EmpoweredByEating we say these factors make up your cake tin. Without a suitable cake tin in place, your cake, when trying to bake it, just like your diet, will fall apart. Once you’ve well and truly got the most important factor in a successful diet sorted, which is calorie balance, you can then begin to focus on where exactly your calories should come from. Taking a look once again at