When many of us hear the word diet, we immediately start to think of starving ourselves, eating chicken and broccoli, and drinking nothing but water. So right off the bat when people are trying to figure out how they can lose weight or hit their fitness goals, they start out with a negative connotation to the whole endeavor. Unfortunately society has kinda drilled this thought into our brains, and there are even whole brands based around the dieting phenomena such as SlimFast, Atkins, and even Lean Cuisine meals. Now these things aren’t necessarily bad by themselves and even can have a good place in many people's day to day lives, but rather than starve ourselves or eat boring and bland foods, we need to learn what a “DIET” really is.
A “diet” isn’t some fad that you follow and magically drop off body fat, instead it is a strategic way to eat throughout the day that allows you to achieve your fitness goals. This can be fat loss, muscle gain, or even just to maintain an overall healthy lifestyle. Now it’s not easy to create the habit of doing it by any means, and does take a lot of patience and persistence, but it is manageable and achievable by everybody.
Learning to diet is a process in which you continuously get better at it and become more in-tune with your body. No one needs to take it to an extreme either. I personally enjoy bodybuilding and the lifestyle, so I am continuously trying to push myself to see how much I can progress myself. I also on the other hand absolutely LOVE sweets and enjoy drinking beer. And when I go on vacation my legit top priority is planning what restaurants I’m going to and what food I’m going to try. So you could say dieting is also about balance too. Most days I am pretty structured with what I eat and even eat a lot of the same foods, but I by no means cut things out completely that I thoroughly enjoy. It’s all about finding the balance of eating to be healthy while also enjoying life.
Now when I said learning to diet is a process, I believe there are different stages in experience people can use as tools.
Step 1: Counting Calories
There are so many smartphone apps and calculators online that it couldn’t be easier to track how much food we eat in a day. Many of the apps even have barcode scanners so we can directly scan prepackaged food, and other users input many other things that may not have a barcode (such as fruit or vegetables). So the first step of learning to diet, is getting used to tracking your calories. To do this, you want to download an app, or find an online resource that allows you track what you eat. I personally use MyPlate by LiveStrong and MyFitnessPal is also a very popular one, both of which are free. Next when setting up your account/profile, the app should have a calorie calculator. When you use it to get a daily calorie amount, you should input your goal weight as the current weight that you are (if it asks for it). Then you also want to set your goal to maintain weight. These calculators are just to give you a ballpark number, therefore if you mess with those settings it will skew the output.
Now after your account/profile is all set up you're ready to start your diet journey. Even though we calculated our daily calorie intake, we should ignore it for the first two weeks. Instead for the first two weeks, all we need to do is track everything we eat while continuing to eat as we normally do. This includes any pop/soda between meals, creamer in your coffee, ketchup on your burger, everything. A little helpful tip too, is that weighing out food is way more accurate than using measuring cups, but at the end of the day consistency is key. Along with tracking your overall calorie intake, you should weigh yourself around 3-5 times per week and keep a log of it. We will continue to track our weight for throughout the rest of this process. Many of the calorie apps allow you to do this right in the app, but pen and paper work too. I personally like to weigh myself within the first 5 minutes of waking up before I have eaten or drank anything. When you choose to weigh yourself is up to you, but just make sure it is consistent. Don’t do it in the morning one day, then before bed the next, and after your workout the day after. Whenever you choose to weigh yourself, always try to do it at that time, along with keeping whatever you're wearing consistent too, whether it is just underwear, PJ’s, or even nothing.
After the two weeks we’re going to take the average weight we have been logging and then edit our profile in our calorie tracking app, but leave our goal at maintain weight. This will have the app give us an updated recommended daily calorie intake that we will finally use. Next we want to take the average of the amount of calories we’ve eaten per day over the past 2 weeks and compare it to the calorie estimation that our app gave us. With doing this we’ll either have one of three options, we will either be under the estimation, right around it, or above it.
What to do if your
Under it
Many people I speak to believe the secret to fat loss is to just eat less. Now many times that may be case, it’s really a look at calories in versus calories out, but it’s not always that simple. Our bodies need certain levels of food to function properly. Without healthy calorie levels, it starts to mess with all sorts of bodily processes, one being fat storage.
So if you are an excessively large amount under, like 1000 or more calories, you may want to contact a health care professional to help get you on track. This would be an extreme case that may be seen with someone who has an eating disorder.
If you are a few hundred calories under what your estimated maintenance may be, a good goal would be to try and get to consistently eating at that maintenance level. To get to that point maybe add 100-200 calories every other week until you reach you reach maintenance level. So you would continue to track overall calories, and hit your new target number.
Example:
You are eating 1500 calories on avg. but the app tells you that you should be eating 2100 calories. So for the next two weeks you should try and eat a consistent 1700, then the next 1900, then 2000 the third week, and 2100 during the fourth.
This would be a good way to slowly assimilate the calories you need to put you in a good place for achieving fitness goals. As a bodybuilder I actually try to press the envelope and slowly increase my calories more and more whenever I can, to the point of right before I gain weight. Once you get closer to maintenance level calories, you might even see a small amount of weight loss, due to the fact your body is no longer in a starvation mode. You may also very well see weight add to the scale, but this is nothing to worry about. Once your body is used to a maintenance level of calories, you are ready to move to the next step. Once you get your calories up to eating at maintenance, we don’t want to start dropping them right away. We want to eat at our maintenance level for a month or two to ensure our body is used being fed and not in starvation mode. After we have created the habit of tracking our calories and gotten used to eating at maintenance, we are ready to move onto the next step.
Right around the maintenance estimation.
If you end up consistently eating within 200 calories above or below the estimation, I would say you are close enough to eating at maintenance. In that case you would be able to jump to the next step.
Above maintenance
If you are eating way above what your maintenance estimation is, you would be able to skip to the next step as well. All the following steps would help aid in bringing your calories down closer to a range that would help aid you in reaching your fitness goals. You would not want to just slash the calories down to maintenance. Not only will it be very difficult to deal with, you also will have a high probability to rebound back to where you were.
Starting to track protein.
Now that you have gotten into the habit of tracking your overall calories, the next step would be to start tracking your protein intake. Other than overall calories, tracking protein is one of the most important things you can monitor when figuring out your diet. It is the most satiating compared to carbs and fats, and aids in building and maintaining muscle. A good way to figure out how much protein you should be eating is take your bodyweight and multiply it by .85, 1, or 1.25. Any one of those are good levels to eat at, especially for people who are learning or just want to live a healthy lifestyle. The range of numbers is because there is really no single best ratio to eat, and some people have a hard time eating enough protein, while it is easy for others.
So an example of how to do this is:
I usually weigh 155lbs
155 x .85 g/lbs = 132grams
155 x 1 g/lbs = 155 grams
155 x 1.25 g/lbs = 194 grams
Only use one of those multipliers though. Don’t jump back and forth between all of them, the key is consistency. If you want to eat more or less protein you can change that over time, after you have established good eating habits. Also don’t get all of it from protein shakes. Obviously a few shakes are not bad, but try to get a decent amount from actual food as well. If you go back and look at your calorie logs and see that you were already eating in this range, it should not be too hard to eat at a consistent protein level.
If you have a hard time remembering how much to eat or have an excessive amount of weight to lose, I find one of the best strategies is to eat at what your goal weight is. It kinda plays off of the 1 gram per pound ratio, but takes into account your body weight is going to change. If your 200lbs and want to be down at 180lbs, eat 180 grams of protein a day. If you weigh 130lbs and want to stay around there, eat 130 grams per day.
Now that we have our protein goal, we want to try and hit that number. Our calorie tracking app should make this easy to check throughout the day. The best way to hit this number, is by eating some protein source 5-6 times a day. If you only eat twice due to work or other obligations, just split it up between those two meals. Same thing goes if you only eat 3 or 4 times a day as well. Along with hitting that protein goal, we also want to keep our calories consistent. The first two groups Under and At Maintenance should continue to eat at a maintenance level, while also hitting the protein goal. For those of you that were above the maintenance level, subtract 200 calories from the your average amount that you have been eating, and eat at that amount along with hitting your protein goal.
Example: If your average calories that you tracked was 3000, but your maintenance estimation was 2500, your new calorie goal will be 2800 calories.
You should try to eat at this level for a few weeks until eating a higher protein diet is a habit for you. During this time, I don’t want you to focus on the amount of carbohydrates and fats you are eating. The main goal is to build upon your calorie consistency and focus on protein intake. I know your tracking app will tell you how much you are eating, but it is not that important at this point. For some people they may be able to go to the next phase after a few weeks, but it may take a little longer for others to create this habit. Just continue to do your best and focus on your goal.
If you do take longer than a few weeks to create this habit, that’s totally fine. There is just one small additional task you need to perform every two weeks. Just like we did before with our profile adjustment, you need to do this again. By changing you eating habits your weight may change up or down. If your weight has gone up, but you do not wish to gain more, do not increase your calories to the new amount. Instead just continue to eat at your current calorie amount or slightly under it. If your weight has gone down, your calorie need should have gone down too. You can either follow the app and adjust your calories to match, or you can continue to eat at your current calorie level. The key to this is to understand your calorie needs may change over time and with your habits. So you need to be able to make the necessary adjustments when needed. If you are jumping to this next step, rather than making the adjustments over the extra weeks, perform the adjustment advised above now.
Tracking Macros:
Now that we are pros at consistently eating our calorie goal along with hitting our protein goal for the day, the next step is to track macros. Tracking macros is the combination of counting our overall calories and the individual macronutrients that make up these calories, protein, carbohydrates, and fats. It may sound intimidating to track all three, but that's why we have been taking this step by step. You’ve already mastered the overall calories and protein, so all that is left is tracking carbs and fats.
Our app is here to help us out in doing this. In your profile settings you should be able to edit your calorie amount along with the percentage distribution on how protein, carbs, and fats are added up to make that calorie amount. So first you would adjust the percentage for protein to make sure it is at our goal we have been hitting. Then you need to play with the other two. This part there is a lot of personal preference and how your body reacts to carbs and fats. So when starting out it’s good to take a moderate approach so you can learn your body. Since there are baseline fat levels you should hit, it is easier to choose how much fats you have in your diet, and then let carbohydrates fall where they may. To set fat you would take between 20%-30ish% of your total calorie goal. We use a range because everyone is different and responds to consuming fats in different ways. As a safe bet you could take a middle ground approach and use about 25%. From this number you would divide it by 9, and this will give us the amount of fat we should consume in a day. We divide the individual calorie amount going to fats by 9 because one gram of fat equates to 9 calories.
I have provided an example (left) of how I set mine up, but luckily our app does most of the work for us.
Just like when we started tracking protein, we want to eat at our maintenance calorie goal, but rather than just track protein, we will be tracking all three macronutrients. Now you don’t have to get crazy and count to the single gram for all three. For most people, being within +- 10 grams is fine. To do this it may take some time on your part to pre plan meals in advance. I can tell you from experience, it is very hard to go throughout the day without a plan and still hit those numbers. It is much easier to create a meal plan to act a guide. You may obviously deviate from your meal plan, but it is much easier to correct for one meal, than to fly by the seat of your pants for the whole day. Also just like the protein, some people may be able to create this habit in a few weeks, where it may take others much longer. It is a lot of work to think ahead, create meal plans/guides, and then to track every macro. Now that we are fully committed to tracking macros in their entirety, a good goal would be to try and do this for a more weeks to allow for the habit to get ingrained in you, along with allowing your body to get used to that amount of food before moving into a fat loss phase.
Life after Tracking:
For most of us, tracking every single day for the rest of our lives would be very difficult, and may even become stressful. We went through this process to create healthy eating habits. Not only did we create good habits we learned how much food we need to eat to sustain ourselves at a healthy level and understand what it feels like to eat that much.
So after following through with these steps, if you are happy with your current fitness level you can actually stop tracking. Rather than be so focused on counting every calorie, you can use the habits you have formed to guide your lifestyle. Still try to eat that protein goal, be mindful of how your meals are split up, and how many calories you have eaten in a day just from a memory guesstimate. Then if you feel like you are starting to put weight back on, or you know your protein has been really low, you can go back to counting macros for a short period of time to pull you back in and keep you on track.
For those of you who still want to lose weight you are now set up to move onto a fat loss phase, which I have laid out in another article. It was crucial to learn a healthy way of eating before you could jump into what people would consider a traditional “diet”. There are other ways to set up how you eat, but through experience I have found this to be straightforward and helpful in building a strong foundation.
I hope this serves as a helpful guide to create healthy and sustainable eating habits. After mastering these skills, we have set ourselves up perfectly to move onto any further fitness goals. If fat loss is your main goal, I’ve outlined the next steps to take in this article.