What is Calorie Banking and How Do You Do It?
Calorie banking is the strategy that helps people lose significant amounts of weight, whilst still managing to eat unhealthy foods. It enables people to enjoy meals out, alcohol etc and not destroy their weight loss progress.
Calorie banking is the strategy personal trainers use for their clients who want to lose weight, but who struggle to avoid the higher calorie treats.
By using a calorie banking approach, you can save calories in the week for a higher calorie event at the weekend. It means your overall calorie intake doesn’t exceed the amount you’d need to eat in order to lose weight.
In this article I’ll explain in detail what calorie banking is and how to do it for weight loss…
How Calorie Banking Works
In order to lose weight you must eat fewer calories than you burn. This is called your ‘calorie deficit’. Your calorie deficit is usually a combination of a low calorie diet and a workout regime that burns a lot of calories.
When you are trying to lose weight, you’ll stick to a calorie allowance – this is a number of calories that will help you lose weight at a safe and sustainable way. It varies from person to person, and apps like MyFitnessPal will do the maths for you to figure out your calorie allowance.
With calorie banking, you ‘save up’ some of your daily calories by eating under your target number. It means you can enjoy a bit of treat at the weekend. Here’s how it works in practice…
Let’s say your daily calorie allowance is 2000, and you’ve got a meal booked with friends at the weekend. It’s going to be a high calorie meal, but you don’t want to miss out on the enjoyment. What you can do is eat 1800 calories per day instead, saving those calories for the weekend.
By saving 200 calories per day from Monday to Friday, you’ve now got an additional 1000 calories to enjoy on the Saturday!
Is it Effective for Weight Loss?
Absolutely – if it is done correctly.
If you’ve saved 200 calories per day, allowing 1000 additional calories for a meal on the Saturday, you’ll still lose weight as long as you don’t exceed 3000 calories on that day (your 2000 standard calories, plus the 1000 banked).
If you really splurge and end up eating 3500 calories for example, you’ll have to cut back a further 500 calories across the following days to level things out!
Calorie banking isn’t magic, it’s simple maths.
Making the Most of Calorie Banking
I like my weight loss clients to be able to enjoy a treat – life is for living, so it’s important that they should be able to enjoy meals out etc. In order to allow them that without sacrificing weight loss progress, I like them to follow a couple of rules with calorie banking…
- Allow 10-15% of calories per day as a buffer. Using the 2000 calorie example, I wouldn’t want my clients to exceed more than 15% reduction of their daily intake (meaning they’d be allowed to eat a minimum of 1700 calories per day). If your buffer is less than 10%, you’ve not really given yourself much room for extra calories.
- Train hard on the day of the meal. I always think it’s better to ‘earn’ a treat, rather than promise yourself that you’ll ‘work it off’ the next day. Chances are a hangover, or post-feast lethargy will stop you doing that. Earn the calories with a big cardio workout first – aim for 500 calorie burn or more.
If you stick to these basic rules, you’ll be able to still lose weight whilst enjoying some high calorie days. For many people, calorie banking is the way they are able to stay sane on a diet, knowing that they can have some flexibility.
Making it More Successful
The important thing with calorie banking is making sure your tracking is accurate. If you’re not accurately tracking your calories then you’ve got no way of being certain that you’ll be banking them properly. That could lead to unexpected weight gain.
Using MyFitnessPal or something similar is the easiest way to make your calorie tracking and banking more successful.
The other point is to make sure that ONLY the calories banked are spent. Once you’ve had your treat it’s time to get back on track, otherwise you’ll end up gaining weight. It’s an opportunity to be more flexible on your diet – not to destroy it completely!
Weight Gain Afterwards
Some people notice a slight weight gain after a treat, even if they know they stuck to their calorie targets. That’s quite normal and is often simply down to water weight.
If you’ve been following a low carb diet, or you’ve eaten more salt than usual on your treat meal then you can hold on to more water than normal. Don’t worry about it, it’s temporary and within a few days of eating back at your deficit level, you’ll lose that water weight and your weight loss will continue.
Even if there has been a slight weight gain, it’s not the end of the world – just get back on track and it’ll come off again!
Use these tips to make calorie banking work for you. It’s a great way to lose weight whilst still maintaining some culinary joy in life. Dieting isn’t easy, but approaches like this help to make the process significantly easier.