Looking for help losing fat

[daveooo1]

Hi,

I'll try to be brief but sorry if this is long. I'm an 18-year old, 6"2 guy and I weigh roughly 180 pounds. I've been using scales to measure my body-fat and weight from time to time and it says I'm 20% bodyfat but that seems too low. I'm sure I have more but I have a healthy heart rate and blood pressure apparently so maybe I have less ('visceral') fat? My fat is mainly around the chest and stomach (obviously everywhere but mainly there). I started a diet and working out in July of 2017 at about 210 pounds and I managed to decrease that to 175 pounds by September in preparation for university. Obviously, I couldn't stick to my diet plan etc so I went up to about 180-185 ish till about now. Recently I've started dieting again and eating clean and trying to reduce my body fat and weight. I'm eating about 1200-1400 calories per day (I know I shouldn't reduce that much when active but I would prefer to keep it around this number of calories). I would like to reduce my bodyfat by about 10%, and if I'm going about the right steps to achieve that. I'd like to do it in about 3 months but I know I shouldn't put a time limit on it especially that much of a loss. I've started getting very active again, doing uni sport activities 4 days a week which are quite intense, and burning about 500 calories in the gym every day and doing some small weights, mainly dumbbells for chest and back every 2-3 days.

What I eat: Breakfast - Usually weetabix or oatmeal, with 2 poached eggs and a low fat yoghurt
Lunch - 1 Skinless chicken breast fillet with a fair amount of vegetables
Dinner - Turkey/chicken soup, salad and a couple of pieces of fruit.
I've tried to eat clean, and I don't particularly have time to snack 6 times a day so I would prefer 3 meals. I'm also on a budget at university so I need cheap meals like this that I can prepare. Thanks for any help and sorry for the long post

Also if you could recommend other cheap or quick foods that are high protein that would be great, thanks. Edit: I've been losing roughly 3 pounds per week with this diet so far.

[katya422]

Add more protein.

You are targeting a body fat percentage vs. a scale number. And eating at a fairly steep deficit if your info is all accurate. The steeper the deficit and the leaner the individual the greater the chance of muscle loss.

You should be getting at least 126 g of protein daily (.7 X body weight in pounds). What you have listed looks like around 70 g or so. If you set your fat grams at .3 then you should have 54 g of fat. 486 calories from fat + 504 calories from protein = 990 calories.

IMO 1400 is more reasonable, though still aggressive. That would leave you about 102 g of carbs and with a high activity level (energy) you can use them. More protein would be okay too though, and could be better for controlling hunger and maintaining muscle.

https://www.sailrabbit.com/bmr/

Some easy protein additions would be adding another piece of chicken at lunch, maybe adding an egg to your soup when it is around a boil (think egg drop soup) and/or you could add some cottage cheese to that meal since that would seem to fit well with salad and fruit.