Hey Akemah!
Wow. With all respect to the above posters, there's a lot of conflicting advice there. Here are my thoughts on the matter. I'll say first of all that I'm not a professional - I'm someone who has lost weight and kept it off by eating healthily and exercising. I am the type of person who RESEARCHES the decisions I make - some of my friends and family say obsessively so.
I believe that the more knowledge you have, the better decisions you can make. An informed decision is a good one. So I encourage you to take anything you read from this board (including what I say) and look it up independently.
Ok, that said ... here are my thoughts.
At it's most basic, weight loss is calories in vs. calories out. The type of food you eat is important yes. If you want to look healthy, have strong muscles, and be fit, you must eat healthy food - eating 1500 calories of junk isn't going to have the same result as eating 1500 calories of veggies, lean proteins, healthy fats, and complex carbs. I think that's something that everyone can agree on.
However, the idea that you can eat 5000 calories of some type of food and lose weight/fat is ridiculous. Alkaline, acid, whatever ... your body is more complex than that simple equation.
As far as eating when you're hungry and stopping when you're full; in theory yes, I totally agree with that. It's called Intuitive Eating by some and I think there's a huge amount of validity to it. The problem comes in when you have people who have either been overweight all their lives or who have been on diets for a long period of time. For those people (myself included), our hunger and satiety receptors have been skewed. Often people who are overweight mistake other emotions for hunger. People who have been dieting for a long time sometimes go the opposite direction and block out hunger signals. I think for me what it boils down to is that if I really KNEW when I was hungry and when I was full to begin with (as opposed to being emotional about it) - I wouldn't be overweight.
I hope all of that makes sense.
So from here, I'll go on to answer your questions.
So to get enough calories I've eaten a lot of junk food,just to get my apetite back. Have F***** up my system now?
Have you f'd up your system? Hard to answer w/out knowing more, but i will say eating junk to raise your calories is bad. You can raise calories and restore your appetite w/out eating junk. That would be my first bit of advice to you - quit eating junk.
Should I calculate how many grams of protein,carbs and fat I need in one day to get the right balance?
I think everyone should be aware of how their diet breaks down. I think it's important to have a good balance of carb/protein/fat in your diet. For me, I do this by logging my meals online (I use dailyplate.com but there are lots of other sites that let you do this). I can see at a glance how many calories I've eaten, and what percentage of my calories are carb/protein/fat. I aim to get 40% of my calories from complex carbs, 35% from lean protein, and 25% from healthy fats. I don't always hit those exact numbers, but it's my goal.
As to how many calories YOU should be eating ... well, how much do you weigh now? What I use is a very simple calculation based on my current bodyweight. I estimate 14 calories per pound .... so for me that would be 177 lbs x 14 calories = 2478 calories. If I wanted to stay my current weight and not lose, that's what I'd eat.
But since i want to lose, I knock 20%-30% off of that figure. At 30% off, that gives me 1734 calories per day to lose weight. I started off with 1900 calories and found that I was losing too slowly, so I dropped to the 1700 calorie level and that works really well for me. Today (if I'm on plan and being accountable) I'll eat between 1600 and 1700 calories a day and aim for the percentage split I talked about above.
For you? Your goal, you said, is not so much to worry about pounds on the scale, but to look good and show the muscles you're building. So with that in mind, concentrate on eating the RIGHT foods ... junk is not going to help you build/maintain muscle or lean down to show off those muscles. Calculate your calorie level like I did above and use that as a guideline - it's not a hard and fast number, but a starting point.
It's not a difficult thing to do - and yet at the same time it's one of the hardest things to do. For a lot of people it requires rethinking the way they think about food. It's something I'm *still* learning and tweaking ... after 2+ years of doing this.
