Man 2.0 Engineering the Alpha

Your Daily Calories
    First, we need to figure out your daily caloric need—the basic food intake you’d need to stay exactly as you are now. Obviously, this is just a starting point that we will manipulate to transform you into an Alpha.
    There are all sorts of formulas to determine this (most are not very good), and it’s important to recognize that no calorie formula is perfect. But having a formula that helps you determine how much you should be eating is one of the most effective ways to keep you on track without confusion. To that end, Roman has spent the last ten years testing and tweaking custom calorie formulas to come up with a chart that we have found to be exponentially more accurate and effective for fat loss than the others.
    To determine your maintenance caloric intake for Engineering the Alpha, we’ll be using the following chart:

Current Body Fat
Maintenance Caloric Intake (calories per pound of LBM)
6%–12%
17
12.1%–15%
16
15.1%–19%
15
19.1%–22%
14
22.1% or above
13

    To use the above chart, you must first find out your body fat percentage and your LBM. As a reminder, here’s how to figure your LBM:
    1. Figure out your body fat percentage.
    2. Subtract your body fat percentage from 100. This is your fat-free mass.
    3. Multiply your fat-free mass (as a percentage) by your body weight. This result is your LBM.
    Now, looking at the chart, you see a pretty big range; someone with low body fat is going to eat more calories than someone with very high body fat. The reason for this is rate of fat loss—the more fat you have on your body, the faster you can lose it. Moreover, the more of it you can lose without sacrificing LBM. Therefore, you can consume fewer calories and still have a great rate of fat loss without really affecting the metabolic processes responsible for losing fat and gaining lean muscle. After all, if you go too low on calories, your fat loss can slow to a crawl and gaining muscle can become increasingly difficult. It’s the whole reason why we’re making sure your hormones are optimized so your body can make the types of changes that you want to experience.
    In any event, once you know your body fat and LBM, simply find your percentage on the chart and multiply the corresponding number by your LBM. This number is your maintenance caloric intake.
    Let’s take your average two-hundred-pound guy who is 20 percent body fat. We’ll call this man Steve.
    200 pounds x 20% body fat = 40 pounds of body fat
    200 pounds – 40 pounds of fat = 160 pounds of LBM
    160 x 14 (because our 200-pounder is between 19 and 22 percent body fat) = 2,240 calories per day for Steve

    PRIME: THE DIET
    Determine Your Daily Caloric Intake During Prime
    Of course, you’re not interested in maintaining; you want to lose fat and gain muscle—during Prime, you’re going to achieve the former and set yourself up for the latter.
    For this phase, you’re going to adjust your daily caloric intake as follows:

    • To determine your calories for workout days, subtract 300 from your maintenance calories.
    • To determine your calories for non-workout days, subtract 500 calories.

    So Steve would be eating 1,940 calories per day on workout days and 1,740 on non-workout days.
    Once you’ve done that, we can move on to figuring out how much of each macronutrient to eat.

    MACRONUTRIENT BREAKDOWN
    Protein
    Protein intake is determined by your lean body mass, and during this phase you’ll be eating less protein than at any other time of the program. One of the goals of Prime is to minimize insulin production, and eating too much protein can actually create an insulin spike. That’s because the amino acids in protein can signal your pancreas to produce insulin. *
    Protein intake will be set as follows:
    Workout days: 0.8 grams protein per pound of LBM
    Non-workout days: 0.7 grams protein per pound of LBM
    Let’s use Steve as an example again. Remember, our two-hundred-pound man with 20 percent body fat has an LBM of 160 pounds. Given that information:
    160 x 0.8 = 128 grams of protein on workout days
    160 x 0.7 = 112 grams of protein on non-workout days
    Protein has 4 calories per gram, so that works out to 512 calories from protein on workout days. If you want to think of calories like a bank account, here’s where Steve would currently stand on workout days:
    Beginning balance: 1,940 calories
    Protein: –512 calories
    Remaining balance: 1,428 calories
    Carbs
    We’ve already discussed carbs in a