Foundational Nutrition (How To Set Up Your Diet)

The goal of this foundational nutrition article is to give you a resource you can use to learn how to set up your diet using good evidence-based information and the latest science.

While we can discuss all of the nuances of nutrition and go deep down the rabbit hole of some relatively meaningless single nutrient or the benefits of certain foods or supplements etc., ultimately, we need to actually have a clear overview of what a good diet looks like with broad strokes. You need to have a good general foundational diet structure before you even begin to look into any fancy or advanced protocols. If you learn the principles behind nutrition, rather than just learning about protocols, you will be able to make much better dietary decisions, and you will be less likely to fall for dodgy diet marketing. However, in trying to provide a relatively short synopsis of how to set up your diet, we, naturally enough, can’t go into extreme detail on every single thing and we certainly can’t cover all the nuances of good nutrition, but we do think by the end of this article, you will have a very good grasp of nutrition in general.

The article is laid out as follows, and you can jump to whichever section you feel is most important to you by clicking the link in the Table of Contents:

We believe in empowerment through education, so we think it is important to have some understanding of why certain targets are the way they are. We want you to be able to master your nutrition for life. While we are going to help you navigate the nutrition landscape, ultimately, the best way we can ensure you get long-term results is to help you understand the basics of nutrition. We want you to be able to do this stuff on your own, and not require a coach. You don’t need to be an expert, but a little bit of knowledge really does go a long way with this stuff. So we will be discussing some of the science behind different dietary targets, but if you simply want to know what to do with no background information, you can skip all the way down to the Review section.

If you want more free information on nutrition, you can follow us on Instagram, YouTube or listen to the podcast, where we discuss all the little intricacies of the diet. We also offer coaching if you need help with your own diet. Finally, if you want to learn how to actually coach nutrition yourself, then consider our Nutrition Coach Certification course. If you don’t understand something, or you just need clarification, you can always reach out to us on Instagram or via email.

 

This article is part of our fundamentals series, where we discuss the key pillars of building “your best self”. Being your best self means you are able to engage with the world how you want to engage with the world and ultimately, accomplish the goals you have. Regardless of what that actually looks like for you, if you can get the pillars set up correctly, you give yourself the best opportunities to accomplish everything you want to in this life. The foundations of the broader society you find yourself in also matter, as do the genetics you were born with or the biology you were born with or acquired (your “biology” could change due to accident or injury, for example, you may have become paralysed, and thus your “biology” has changed), as does your mental and spiritual health, and of course, the health of your local community and support systems. However, much of the foundations are out of our active control, but we can work to set up the pillars as best we can, given the circumstances we find ourselves in. In this article, we discuss nutrition, but we do also have articles on sleep and stress, and we will discuss exercise in a future article (you can sign up to the email list to be notified when it is live on-site).

 

Everyone and their grandmother has some idea of what good nutrition actually is, and if I asked 100 people to choose “healthy foods”, everyone would agree on about 90% of the food choices. But how do we know what good food is? How do we even decide that? Not just from a daily life point of view, but even from a scientific point of view?

Well, we at Triage​ believe that a good diet should give you three things;

• Health 
• Performance 
• Your Optimal Body Composition 

 

 

Now, in an ideal world, a “perfect” diet would help us to accomplish all three of these and we would find ourselves slap-bang in the middle of the intersection of all of these. However, quite a few, perhaps even most, diet strategies very often prioritise chasing one of them at the expense of one or even two of the other goals. It is understandable why this happens, everyone wants results yesterday after all. It’s unfortunately the world we live in now. However, the increased focus on achieving one of the goals very often compromises the others.

“Want to get really lean really quick? Eat this meal replacement food (that I sell for a huge profit) and follow this 800-calorie diet”, you will hear one salesman, sorry I mean fitness professional say. Never mind that the diet leaves you with no energy to get your work done throughout the day, your relationships are suffering as a result, your hair has started falling out from the lack of nutrition, your body is starving, your health is failing, your hormones are out of whack, your sex drive is in the toilet etc. etc. No, no, no, none of that matters, because you look great on the beach. You got that 6 pack you always wanted, yeah it compromised your health, but I mean you look good in the photos? You finally got the girl/guy you always wanted so the diet was a success, it doesn’t matter that you have no sex drive now and don’t want to do what couples do because you got that 6 pack!

I hope you can sense the sarcasm in my words.

However, it’s not only limited to people gunning for aesthetics and compromising their health and performance (both mental and physical) in the process. You will often see people obsess over eating the best whole foods, they eat only the best organic free range non-GMO produce available to them, but they are still compromising their health because they are overweight because they have no knowledge of calorie balance. They are likely looking after their health to some extent (although being overweight is a cardiovascular risk factor) and their performance likely isn’t that bad, but their body composition isn’t optimal for them.

So let’s define these terms so we are all on the same page.

Health is defined as the absence of disease, traditionally at least. I don’t know about you but I want to think of health as more than the absence of a state of disease. I want to feel as good as possible, I want my blood work to be perfect, and I want to radiate vitality. That is health. We can boil it down to numbers and figures on a page, but it is as much a mental as it is a physical state. We generally think of health as resilience to and against insults to your life and well-being.

Performance is both physical performance and mental performance. You should be able to do whatever you wish with your body. Need to run for the bus? You should be able to. Want to play with the kids? Need to lift up that heavy box? You should be able to. Your body should be able to perform in the ways you need it to, to make life easy for you. But so should your mental performance. You shouldn’t be feeling tired/dull or foggy-brained as soon as 3 o’clock rolls around. You should feel mentally acute all day. You should be waking up in the mornings with both mental and physical vigour. That’s what good performance is.

Your optimal body composition is the level of body fat and musculature that both allows you to feel and perform at your best, and also allows you to feel sexy and confident when you look in the mirror. People like hard and fast rules (you should be X% body fat) and we will give you a rough guide later in this article, but these are just very rough guidelines and aren’t specific to you as an individual. Optimal body composition is not something we define for you, it’s the optimal body composition that leaves you with the physique and health that you desire.

So when we think about dieting we want to think in an outcome-based manner. We want our diet to be based on the outcomes we see before us. Not on some theoretical result. The actual results we see from the dietary adjustments we make.

If our dieting strategies aren’t working, something needs to change. As has been discussed, there is no one size fits all diet, but to complicate matters further, dieting strategies that worked for you in the past may not work for you now. Your metabolism is in a constant state of change based on your activity levels, your body fat levels, and muscle mass levels (and other factors).

 

Calories

Firstly, we must actually understand a little bit more about what makes up metabolism. You see, metabolism gets described as if it is some sort of magical, unquantifiable thing that you either have a “fast one” or a “slow one”, and this really just isn’t the case. Metabolism (in this context) is simply the sum total of all the chemical reactions in the body. Building (anabolism), breaking down (catabolism) and getting rid of waste in the body, all require energy and we can measure this. This energy, we call calories. Now, a calorie can be related back to other measures of energy, such as joules, and there is a really annoying quirk where the commonly used term “calories” is actually referring to kilocalories and this can be initially confusing as you will see multiple terms thrown around depending on where you read your nutrition information (you may see kilocalories (kC), kilojoules (kJ), calories (C), Joules (J), and potentially even other ones!). I am just going to use the commonly accepted meaning for calories here and throughout.

If you look up the definition of a calorie you will likely find something like: A calorie is a unit of energy. A calorie is the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of 1 litre of water by 1 degree Celsius.

However, this isn’t really all that helpful when we are discussing human nutrition, as we aren’t trying to heat up a litre of water with our food. We are trying to fuel our metabolism (the chemical reactions in the body). So, to understand how to really relate calories back to nutrition, we need to learn a little bit more about metabolism.

 

 

When we talk about metabolism, it isn’t the chemical reactions that people are generally talking about, it is the sum of the energy required for those chemical reactions. But we can actually break this number down into smaller categories, based on where that energy is being used in your metabolism. Metabolism can be broken down into the following categories:

• Basal metabolic rate (BMR) (this is the energy you burn at rest, just to keep you alive),
• Non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT) (this is the energy you burn doing all the stuff you do each day that isn’t exercise, such as walking around, fidgeting and so on),
• Exercise activity thermogenesis (EAT) (this is the energy you burn while doing exercise),
• Thermic effect of food (TEF) (this is the energy burned in the breaking down, digesting and assimilating of the food you eat).

 

All of these energetic values can then be added together and this is your total daily energy expenditure (TDEE). So for simplicities sake, you can think of TDEE and metabolism as the same thing. So when someone says their metabolism is slow or fast, what they are saying is that their TDEE is low (slow metabolism) or high (fast metabolism). This is important to understand because we know what constitutes TDEE and luckily for us, some of this is actually modifiable.

(It should be noted that the system isn’t “perfect” and some heat energy is lost in the processes. This sounds bad, but it is actually a benefit, as it means we can keep our body temperature higher, and this allows us to live in more varied terrains, unlike some “cold-blooded” animals.)

You see, we actually have control over our metabolism to some degree.

 

 

Metabolism (and thus TDEE) is a measure of the activity of the chemical reactions in our body, and as a result, bigger humans generally have a bigger TDEE because they simply have more cells, and thus more cellular activity. However, not all cells are equally burning through energy. A muscle cell, even at rest, uses more energy just to maintain itself than something like a fat cell, which is mainly just sitting there as stored energy (fat cells do other things too, but we don’t need to discuss this here). More cells, more energy being used. While it isn’t a perfect correlate, body weight is still a good proxy for this, and we can assume that a 100kg person burns more calories each day than a 60kg person (at least as far as BMR goes, or in other words, if each individual just lay in bed all day, the heavier person burns through more energy). Heavier individuals do also burn more energy for a comparable amount of NEAT or EAT, as moving more weight around requires you to burn more energy. You can test this out by wearing a weight vest while you do your daily activities. You will quickly see that doing your everyday tasks is far more energetically demanding when you wear the weight vest.

Now, this brings up a rather perplexing point to the average person, because generally, you will see bigger individuals complain that they have a slow metabolism, while smaller individuals complain that they have a fast metabolism. However, in reality, this usually isn’t actually the case and it is actually generally reversed. This is really just semantics, but it does actually help you to understand metabolism better if you get this straight in your head. It is also important to realise that body weight is just a proxy for what we want to know, and the composition of the weight does actually influence energy expenditure too. Just because you weigh the same as someone else, this doesn’t mean you will burn the same calories each day, even if you do pretty much the exact same stuff each day. If someone is the same weight as you, but they are 10% body fat, and you are 30% body fat, they are likely burning more calories even at rest, as muscle is more energetically costly to maintain than fat. So the common way of thinking about slow and fast metabolisms is correct if you are the same weight but have different body fat levels. In this example, the leaner individual will (likely) have a “fast” metabolism (high TDEE) and the fatter individual will (likely) have a “slow” metabolism (low TDEE) despite them both weighing the same. This is because the leaner individual has more lean mass (often called fat-free mass). To compare individuals, you have to correct for lean mass, and when you do this, you very often see that each individual kilo of lean mass is pretty much identical between individuals (there is some variance though). The difference we may see between individuals is down to the fact that some individuals just have more lean mass than others, despite weighing the same weight (i.e. they have more muscle and less fat).

However, this is rarely the stuff that we actually care about in the real world. It is important to understand that being more muscular and leaner is a modifiable part of the metabolism, and you should likely aim to get a bit leaner and build some more muscle, but it isn’t the main driver of differences between individuals. The stuff that really makes the difference between individuals is NEAT and EAT. Some people just move much more each day than others. They have higher step counts (which is a good proxy for NEAT) and they work out multiple times per week (EAT). That is where the vast majority of difference actually occurs, and where your attention should be, and I will bring your attention back to this when we discuss “calories in vs calories out” (CICO).

Just to round things out, there is some difference in terms of the TEF depending on the food choices we make. High protein and high fibre foods generally require more energy to break down and digest, and as such have a higher TEF and this has a small impact on TDEE. So it makes sense to eat more protein, fruits and vegetables if (among other things) you want your metabolism to be ticking along nicely!

 

 

Now, it is also important to understand that metabolism is adaptive and it isn’t just a fixed number. If you eat less, your metabolism will go down (as TEF, NEAT and BMR (due to lean mass loss) will all go down) and if you eat more, your metabolism will go up (as TEF, NEAT and BMR (due to lean mass gain) will all go up). This is a normal part of metabolism, and it isn’t anything to worry about. Despite what you may hear, you can’t break your metabolism. This adaptive nature of the metabolism is an evolutionarily conserved advantage, so you don’t starve to death during periods of famine. You will also see sex hormone changes too, in response to the diet, and this is part of the same phenomenon. It isn’t usually a good idea to be pregnant during a famine, so sex hormones do go down when calories are low. This can more easily be seen in women, as they tend to have more adaptive metabolisms, and they will lose their menstrual cycle if calories go too low or for too long. Men will still get lowered sex hormones, but as they don’t have a menstrual cycle, this is less obvious and usually first presents itself as lowered sex drive (although this is also the case in women too). However, it must also be understood that it is different in different people, and some will see more adaptation than others. The sex hormone stuff is part of the BMR category of the metabolism, for those wondering.

Further to this, metabolism isn’t completely additive either, and instead it is constrained. What I mean by this is that while it may seem to be the case that if you just keep doing more and more exercise (EAT), you will be able to burn an indefinite amount of calories (an additive system). However, in reality, it seems to be a somewhat constrained system, where doing more exercise will usually just result in lowered BMR and NEAT to compensate (this is usually seen over a longer period of time, whereby you do a lot of activity one day and then the subsequent days you see reductions to BMR and NEAT). This is potentially another evolutionarily conserved adaptation both due to a limit on the amount of nutrients the digestive system can absorb, and a system designed to stop you from exercising yourself to death. However, this constrained nature of metabolism is rarely a concern for people, and really only matters for athletes who are training for hours upon hours each day. While you will see people try to use this information to say you can’t exercise to lose weight, this is simply not the case. The average person is unlikely to exercise enough for this to be a concern and even if it was, overcoming this is usually as simple as ensuring that NEAT doesn’t drop too much. This can be done surprisingly easily by ensuring you keep your daily step count high.

 

 

Now, that was a slight bit of a detour from discussing calories directly, but it was necessary to iron out those few things before we get stuck into the main thing you need to understand the foundational component of all diets. This is the concept of “calories in vs calories out” (CICO) that I mentioned earlier.

What CICO is describing is the broad equation that describes the relationship between your metabolism, the calories you consume and your body weight.

If you eat the same amount of calories (calories in) that you expend (calories out), your body weight will remain the same. This can (and should) be viewed over a larger time course than just a day, but if your daily/weekly/monthly/yearly calorie intake matches your daily/weekly/monthly/yearly calorie output, you will remain the same body weight. There are some cases where this doesn’t hold perfectly true, but this is mostly at the extremes of timescales (i.e. if you didn’t eat anything for a year and then ate all the food in one day, your body weight wouldn’t remain the same, because you would die trying to do that), and in practice, it is 100% accurate when we look at things on the daily/weekly/monthly scale and assume you are eating at least the bare minimum to survive each day.

If you consume more calories (calories in) than you expend (calories out), your body weight will trend upward over time. Again, there are some extremes where this doesn’t hold true, notably if you try to eat the vast majority of the calories for a week (or longer) in a short period of time, as you will likely not actually digest and absorb these calories (for example, this happens when people do those 10,000 or 20,000 calories challenges you see online, as these individuals reach the limit of their digestion and don’t digest a lot of the food, either vomiting it up or pooping it out relatively undigested).

If you consume fewer calories (calories in) than you expend (calories out), your body weight will trend downwards over time. Again, there are some caveats here, but of all of the three possible equations, this is actually the one with the least exceptions to the rule.

 

 

Earlier on I discussed a situation where someone is said to have a fast or slow metabolism, and in reality, the issue is usually that the person with the fast metabolism simply consumes less food over a time given time period, and likely also moves more, than someone with a slow metabolism. Most fat gain occurs over years, not swiftly over a few days or weeks, and thus you can’t compare two individuals on a week of data alone. Averages over time matter.

Now, how do we use all that information to actually design our diets?

Well, we want to find out how many calories we need to consume to maintain our current body weight. You may want weight loss or weight gain, but the first step is to find out what calories will cause weight maintenance, as this does actually make things much simpler in the long run.

You can find out your maintenance calories in two ways. The calculator method or the “average and adjust” method. To most people, the calculator method seems more scientific, but the average and adjust method is actually usually better in practice.

The calculator method involves using one of the many calorie maintenance calculations that have been devised. For example, you could use the Harris-Benedict calculation, which would involve the following:

 

Metric Harris-Benedict for Men

BMR = 66.5 + ( 13.75 × weight in kg ) + ( 5.003 × height in cm ) – ( 6.755 × age in years )

Metric Harris-Benedict for Women

BMR = 655.1 + ( 9.563 × weight in kg ) + ( 1.850 × height in cm ) – ( 4.676 × age in years )

 

You would then use this figure and multiply it by an activity multiplier to account for the previously discussed NEAT and EAT. The multipliers are as follows:

• Little to no exercise – Daily kiloCalories needed = BMR x 1.2
• Light exercise (1–3 days per week) – Daily kiloCalories needed = BMR x 1.375
• Moderate exercise (3–5 days per week) – Daily kiloCalories needed = BMR x 1.55
• Heavy exercise (6–7 days per week) – Daily kiloCalories needed = BMR x 1.725
• Very heavy exercise (twice per day, extra heavy workouts) – Daily kiloCalories needed = BMR x 1.9

 

This will give you a rough idea of where your maintenance calories are at. However, this number isn’t infallible and you will still have to see how your body responds in the real world after you actually eat that amount of calories consistently.

To do the average and adjust method you need to keep a food diary (most people just use an app like MyFitnessPal for this) for a week (ideally 2 weeks), and quite literally log everything you ingest (including liquid calories, and “bites” of food). Now the tricky thing is, ideally, you would eat as you normally would, as this will give you an idea of where the diet has been and make the process of figuring out maintenance calories easier. However, even with you trying your hardest to eat “normally”, you will likely still adjust your caloric intake by virtue of just being more aware of it because you are now tracking. Now, along with tracking your food intake, we also recommend tracking your body weight first thing in the morning. Changes in your body weight will allow us to see if the calories you are eating are putting you in a surplus (weight gain) or a deficit (weight loss). At the end of the week of tracking, total up the calories from each of the 7 days and divide that number by 7, to get your average daily calorie intake. But also make a note of how your weight has changed in this period. We do actually learn a lot if your weight has reduced or you have gained weight, as we can estimate how your daily average intake has affected your body. If you gained weight, we know we are eating a surplus of the calories required to maintain your body weight. Alternatively, if you lost weight, we know you are eating fewer calories than is required to maintain your body weight.

It requires roughly a surplus/deficit of 7,000 to 9,000 Calories to gain/lose 1kg of body fat. Utilising this knowledge we can make an educated guess as to what your maintenance calories are. I say educated guess because it isn’t really that simple and the body does a lot of strange things, especially in relation to water balance that makes accurately correlating weight to calories a very difficult task. If you gained 200g in the week eating your normal diet that means you were roughly in a surplus of ~1540 calories over the 7 days. Conversely, if you lost 500g you would have been in a deficit of 3850 calories for that week (using 7700 as the number of calories required to lose/gain 1kg). From this, you can work out roughly where you are in relation to your maintenance calorie needs, and although it isn’t a precise method it is actually more accurate than the calculator method, because it actually takes into account you as an individual and isn’t just a theoretical average. Eating where you now think your maintenance calories are, you can see how it affects your weight. If you are eating “at maintenance”, and you noticed a decrease or increase in weight for that over time, you may need to make adjustments to what you think is your maintenance calories. To do this you would simply reduce your daily calorie intake by 100-200 calories if you gained weight, or increase by 100-200 calories if you lost weight. You want to make adjustments to your “maintenance” calories, and not to a surplus or deficit, so finding roughly where your maintenance calories are is essential for long-term results. Then from your maintenance, you can make adjustments based on your goals.

 

Weight Loss

If your goal is weight loss and you now have a rough idea of your maintenance calorie intake, then eating at a roughly 10-15% calorie deficit will allow you to lose fat slowly while remaining healthy and performing well. For most people, this will be somewhere in the range of a 200-500 calorie deficit. There is an urge to immediately drop calories drastically (by some arbitrary number like 500 or 1000) but this will generally lead to poor performance, poor health, bad adherence, and poor long-term results. We want to optimise your health, performance and body composition. By actually fuelling the body (even in a deficit) you will be able to build (or maintain more) muscle and strength while you lose body fat, and you will feel much better than if you were eating low calories.

 

 

However, we can get a bit more specific than just saying eat a 10-15% deficit, and we can set our deficit based on our desired rate of loss. As a very rough and ready rule, a 0.5-1% drop in body weight per week would be considered a good rate of fat loss. We should also note that, just because in our head it is handy to use the 7-day Gregorian Calendar as our gauge, doesn’t mean that the body works on a 7-day clock. We need to look at the diet over longer time periods, and not view it purely on a week-to-week basis.

For example:

Week 1 2.5% body weight drop

Week 2 0.5% body weight drop

Week 3 0.5% body weight drop

Week 4 0.5% body weight drop

… and …

Week 1 1% body weight drop

Week 2 1% body weight drop

Week 3 1% body weight drop

Week 4 1% body weight drop

…equal the same rate of fat loss when looked at on a monthly scale. However, the first example when compared on a week-to-week basis with the second may look like they are making less progress, despite their monthly rate of fat loss being EXACTLY the same.

So think big picture.

When averaged over a few weeks, an average rate of fat loss of 0.5-1% is our rough recommendation. Although faster and slower rates do occur we find this to be the sweet spot. Remember it is the general trend in fat loss we are looking at. One bad day or week isn’t going to ruin progress, it may simply slow it down momentarily.

If we are looking for somewhere in the range of 0.5-1% bodyweight drop per week during our fat loss phase, you should actually work this out and see what that actually means for you. Just get your body weight and divide it by 100 to get 1%, or 200 to get 0.5%. Now that you have an idea of how much you should be losing, you can work backwards and create a deficit based on that. If the rate of fat loss desired is 1kg per week, then you are going to have to eat at a weekly deficit of roughly ~7,700 calories. Which translates to a ~1,100 calorie deficit per day.

But let’s work this out on some actual real-world examples to make it much clearer.

• 100kg individual, rate of fat loss 0.5kg to 1kg per week, calorie deficit 550 to 1100 per day.
• 80kg individual, rate of fat loss 0.4kg to 0.8kg per week, calorie deficit 440 to 880 per day.
• 60kg individual, rate of fat loss 0.3kg to 0.6kg per week, calorie deficit 330 to 660 per day.

 

Now, this is not to say you have to lose fat at these rates. You will likely also notice bodyweight drops quite fast after the first week or two on a diet, and this is purely due to a drop in muscle glycogen and water. So the first one to two weeks of dieting it is always hard to judge whether you are in the correct deficit or not. But you should be trending towards a drop of ~0.5-1% body weight per week, or whatever your preferred percentage drop is. Again, you can go faster than this, but we need to factor in whether even losing at 1% is actually sustainable for you, and if it is your first time dieting I would caution you to use the lower end of the range, as you will likely encounter some issues as you diet and make a few mistakes along the way. There is no reason to make the diet harder with a steeper calorie deficit, if you haven’t already got a firm base of counting calories/staying on plan. If you eat a big deficit, the likelihood that you will binge is much higher. So do keep sustainability in mind.

This is similar for smaller women or guys who maintain their weight on lower calories. If you somehow worked out 1500 as your maintenance, and I am suggesting a 660-calorie deficit, eating 840 calories per day is obviously highly unsustainable. In this case, you would be much better served to keep your calories high, by both aiming for a much slower rate of loss, and trying to increase your activity. If calories are that low as maintenance, you are likely not very active or you are just a smaller individual to begin with, which would make me more inclined to suggest dieting slower as a rule.

This brings me to my next point which is that you don’t always have to eat less to lose weight. If you are eating at your maintenance, you can induce a calorie deficit by increasing your activity levels. You can induce a calorie deficit by introducing some exercise, especially cardio exercise into the routine. A 500-calorie deficit is still a 500-calorie deficit if you eat 500 calories less or you do 500 calories more activity. You can also do a combination of both. There are differences in some of the adaptations you get, but from a thermodynamics perspective, it is still all calories. (This is not entirely true, as you do get increased mitochondrial biogenesis from doing more cardio, which potentially allows you to lose fat more easily, but it is likely a very small difference. You do also burn some more calories after you finish exercising, which you wouldn’t burn from just eating less, not to mention you likely are more active if you are making your way to the gym to exercise. However, the overall difference isn’t likely all that big). When you are adding cardio to your routine, you should be tracking the calories you burn in that session rather than just time doing cardio. Tracking time is a pretty useless measure, and all these people doing an hour of cardio could have a huge variance in how many calories they burn day to day. So when tracking cardio, track calories not time. It isn’t perfect, but it is a better standardisation than time, especially if you are using something like a fitness tracking watch that is calibrated to your weight.

Standardising your NEAT as best you can is also a surefire way to stop you from running into those negative metabolic adaptations that accompanies dieting. We like a target of over 10,000 steps per day, but the target itself is arbitrary, it could be 9,000 it could be 20,000. You just have to be consistent with it. I wouldn’t even think about adding cardio if you are not already accounting for steps. You will burn extra calories doing cardio, but you will just down-regulate your NEAT for the rest of the day if you don’t actively account for it.

So to summarise, create a deficit of calories that leads to a loss of ~0.5-1% body weight per week either reducing calories from maintenance or doing more cardio to make up the deficit. This should be adjusted based on real-world outcomes. The first one to two weeks are the hardest to gauge progress as you will lose water and glycogen, but overall you should be able to see if you are losing at the rates we prescribe. This is of course as long as you are consistent with tracking. There is literally zero point in being in a deficit Monday to Friday and binge eating on Saturday and Sunday. We want consistency across the whole week.

 

Weight Gain 

If your goal is weight gain and you have a rough idea of your maintenance calorie intake, then eating at a 5-10% calorie surplus will allow you to gain muscle slowly, while minimising fat gains. For most, this will be in the range of a 100-300 calorie surplus. As with fat loss, there is an urge to make drastic calorie increases (500+ calories) but this will just lead to unnecessary fat gain and won’t enhance your muscle-gaining abilities more than a slight increase in calories will.

 

 

In general, the most genetically gifted for muscle gain are probably still gaining less than 1kg of muscle per month, and as such, you probably don’t want to be gaining much more than 1kg of body weight per month, as a higher and higher percentage of that gain will simply be fat gain. The more advanced you get, the less return on investment you will get too. In general, most men are going to get the best results by aiming to gain somewhere between 0.5-1kg of body weight per month, and women will get the best results by aiming for about half of that (0.25-0.5kg per month). As you get more advanced, expect a smaller and smaller monthly weight gain.

 

Body Recomposition 

There is a third option, and it’s not really something that people talk about because it is super, super slow and it’s not really optimal. You see, technically speaking, you can gain muscle and lose fat at the same time, and muscle can be gained in both a deficit and at maintenance, however, these scenarios are generally not optimal. However, for the sake of those that want to maintain roughly the same weight they are currently at and just want to super slowly gain some muscle and drop some body fat, we will cover this option. If your goal is body recomposition and you have a rough idea of your maintenance calorie intake, then you have three options if body recomposition is the goal. You can eat at this level, 3-5% below this level (if you want to favour fat loss a little more), or 1-3% above this level (if you want to favour muscle gain a little more). These options will allow you to very roughly maintain your weight, while very slowly adding muscle and reducing body fat. But this option is just incredibly slow and in the real world, you would simply be better off just fully committing to weight loss or weight gain if either of them is your goal. Practically speaking, eating a very small surplus or deficit is incredibly tedious and realistically there is already a large degree of error involved with calorie tracking that trying to eat in this manner is just a very low return on investment.

 

Making Adjustments 

The hardest part about any diet is knowing when to make adjustments. People either become too trigger-happy and feel they must make adjustments every week to see continued progress, or people stay on the same calories for too long when progress has stalled. Just because you have spent a lot of time working out your maintenance calories and you have been diligent with your diet, that doesn’t mean everything will run perfectly smoothly with your progress. There will be ups and downs, and you will eventually (more than likely) stall (and this is entirely normal in the presence of bodyweight change, as energy expenditure scales up and down with those changes).

So how do you know when to make adjustments? And what adjustments should we make?

Firstly, as we have discussed previously, your diet should be outcome-based. If you aren’t achieving the outcome you want then something must change. However, before you wake up and decide one day that you aren’t achieving the outcome you want, you must consider the bigger picture. If you are consistently losing 1kg per week and then one week you only lose 0.5kg, that doesn’t necessarily mean you need to make any changes. We are looking for the overall trend in weight loss or weight gain, combined with the feedback from the mirror. Generally, we don’t make adjustments unless you have stalled for 2-4 weeks weight-wise.

We also tend to prefer very minor tweaks to the diet. Just because weight loss or weight gain has stalled, doesn’t mean you have to reduce or increase calories by 500-1000! Small changes in the range of 100-300 tend to yield the best results, as you are able to diet on higher calories, performance is better and adherence is generally also much better.

Generally, we like calorie increases to come from carbohydrates, although based on your preferences and overall calories the increase could come from fats, and we like calorie decreases to come from fats (but rarely would we suggest dropping below ~0.5 grams per kilogram of body weight)(we will discuss macronutrients more in-depth in a minute). Keeping carbohydrates high while dieting will allow you to keep your performance in the gym high, while also allowing you to eat a larger volume of food (as 1 gram of carbohydrates has 4 calories, while 1 gram of fat has 9 calories).

So if you have stalled for more than two weeks, dropping or increasing calories by 100-300 based on your overall calorie intake and goals will ensure you continue losing or gaining.

 

Measuring Success 

Now, even though we have just spent ages talking about how the scales should be moving in response to your goals, diet and training, we actually don’t believe the scales is all that important. It literally only tells you your relationship with gravity. You see if you drink more water one day, the scales will go up. Weigh yourself later in the day, the scales will be up. Didn’t eat much vegetables/fibre the last few days, weight will be down. Haven’t gone to the bathroom for a while, scales will be up. So scale weight is highly variable, and shouldn’t be your sole measure of success.

We like a combination of:

• scale weight, 
• progress pictures (we highly recommend you take these weekly as you will really wish you did once you have leaned out and/or gained muscle, and they really are a great way to measure progress), 
• the mirror, 
• how clothes feel on you,
• and finally a tape measurement of the waist. 

 

If you keep track of all these things you are guaranteed to find a metric that is changing over time. From this, we can make the necessary adjustments. Consistency in your measurements is required for them to be accurate, however. The more times you measure per week the more data points you will have, but daily measurements can really mess with some people’s heads. So you may need to measure less frequently. But regardless of the exact schedule, you should aim to standardise the schedule and circumstances of the measurements as best you can (for example, always do your weigh-ins in the morning after you have gone to the toilet, as it isn’t accurate to compare them to night time measurements after a full day of food and drink).

 

Calorie Summary

What we’ve learned so far leads us to some very simple rules about calories by which weight loss and weight gain can be explained. These rules are absolutely fundamental to determining how much you weigh.

• If you burn more calories than you eat you will lose weight. 
• If you eat the same amount of calories that you burn your weight will not change. 
• If you eat more calories than you burn you will gain weight. 

 

 

When trying to set up a diet, you want to work out your maintenance calories either using a calculator or the average and adjust method, and then depending on your goals, make a small adjustment up or down in calories to that you are losing/gaining at an appropriate rate. As we are dealing with a complex system (metabolism), we don’t want to be too aggressive with our calorie increases/decreases, and we also want to try and control as many of the variables as we can (it is especially important to try to control for NEAT, thus we recommend setting a daily step target).

 

Macronutrients

So far we have only focused on setting up the calories for the diet, but we also need to set targets for the macronutrients. The macronutrients are the nutrients you have to eat in big (macro) quantities in the diet, and they are the things that are actually contributing to the calorie content of the diet. The macronutrients are protein, carbohydrates and fats, although you could argue that alcohol, water and even fibre are all distinct macronutrients in their own right. Generally, when discussing the diet, we tend to just talk about protein, carbs, and fats, and that is mostly what I will be discussing, although I will briefly touch on some of the other macronutrients too.

Once you have an idea of what kind of calories you should be eating to achieve your goals, then we need to set specific macronutrient (protein, carbohydrate and fat) goals. Ultimately calorie balance is what determines whether you will lose weight or gain weight, however, macronutrients are what determines whether the weight you lose or gain is body fat or muscle (not entirely, but to a large extent) and there are also minimum targets (and optimal targets) for some of the macronutrients that we must eat to ensure we are healthy. Most of you are likely looking to build/maintain your muscle mass, and also lose body fat, and I will be keeping this in mind when I discuss the targets. I am noting this, because there may be slightly different targets if you do no exercise at all, and I am assuming you are doing some exercise as that is part of our general recommendations.

 

Protein

Protein is generally the first macronutrient target we set, as protein is arguably the most important macronutrient from a health, performance and body composition perspective. But before we get stuck into what your protein targets should be, we must first discuss a little bit about why protein is important.

Proteins are these large molecules that are made up of individual amino acids. Proteins are used to make all the different things that you are made of, from your skin to your liver, your heart to your hair, and everything in between, they all use proteins. Protein is often considered to be the building block of life. However, it isn’t just a building block, proteins (and amino acids) also serve as signalling molecules within the body. For example, insulin is a protein, and it plays a very important role in human health and metabolism in general. The various enzymes your cells use to carry out the chemical reactions they need to carry out are also proteins. Your immune system only works because of proteins (antibodies). Your muscles are made of proteins. When we talk about genetics, what your genes are actually doing is telling your body which proteins to make. Proteins are vital to life as we know it.

 

 

Your body is constantly building and breaking down protein structures, as they get old and wear out, new structures are required and so on. There is a constant turning over of these proteins, and they get broken down into their individual amino acids, so they can then be reused. However, the system isn’t perfect and the processing of protein does result in some products being created that the body can’t really deal with, so it excretes them. Furthermore, the body can’t create all the amino acids it needs to build all the various proteins it needs, and if even one amino acid is limited, then the protein can’t be made (the way proteins are created is like beads on a string, so you can’t skip one and come back to it later). As a result, you need to consume protein each day to ensure you remain in a positive protein balance (i.e. you are retaining more protein than you excrete each day) and you also need to ensure that you are consuming all of the amino acids that the body can’t make itself. These amino acids are called the “essential amino acids”. Now, you don’t need to go excessively out of your way to ensure you consume these essential amino acids, as they are in decent quantities in meat and dairy, which will generally be the main protein sources for most people. However, if you eat a diet that doesn’t include meat and dairy, or you eat these in very limited quantities, then you will have to pay more attention to your amino acid intake.

As we are talking about amino acids, it is also important to understand that while proteins can serve as signalling molecules (remember insulin), so too can certain amino acids. You don’t need to really go down the rabbit hole with understanding this, however, it bears noting that a particular amino acid, leucine, is an important signalling molecule for muscle building and growth in general. So those concerned about muscle building should ensure that they are consuming sufficient leucine at each meal (roughly 3g is enough), and if you choose meats or dairy as your protein source, this is usually easy enough to do, but as before, if they aren’t staples in your diet, then you may need to pay more attention to this. The muscle-stimulating effects of leucine do have a refractory period (basically a rest period) before it can stimulate again, and this informs our protein timing recommendations. In general, if we want to maximise muscle building/retention, we want to try and spread protein intake out throughout the day with 3-5 protein feedings fairly evenly spaced across the day.

Protein can also be used as an energy source, although this isn’t the body’s preferred energy source. Dietary protein does also have a significant thermic effect of food (TEF), and you do have to spend some more calories to actually digest and assimilate protein. So if you were to eat the exact same amount of calories as you do now (let’s assume it is maintenance calories), but you just started consuming more protein, you would actually end up burning more energy and be in a slight deficit. Protein is also very satiating, meaning it keeps you feeling fuller for longer. As an energy source, protein does contribute about 4 calories for every gram consumed, although this is just an average and it doesn’t fully account for the TEF. But for all practical purposes, we say that protein has 4 calories per gram.

Most people need a lot more protein than they’re likely eating currently. This is the area people usually struggle with most when implementing dietary changes, but more on this later. The question now is, how much protein do we need?

 

 

As a very rough and ready rule 1.5-2.5 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight is what we generally recommend (although there are some cases and populations where higher intakes are needed, so this should be seen as a very rough starting point). There’s not a huge benefit from going beyond the higher end (outside of specific cases), and going below 1.5 really isn’t generally sufficient for people who exercise (although if you are sedentary, you can probably get away with intakes as low as 0.93-1.2g/kg/day). We like somewhere around 1.8-2.2 grams per kilogram for the vast majority of people, and I very often just say 2g/kg/day to make things easier to remember. Narrowing the range ensures that you do actually get enough protein each day, as some people may still be eating suboptimal amounts of protein at 1.5g/kg/day and some people will simply not need to consume 2.5g/kg/day. However, the vast majority of people who train will fall within the range of 1.8-2.5g/kg/day. So this is probably where you should set your target intake.

Ideally, we would set this target based on your lean mass, as body fat doesn’t contribute massively to protein intake requirements, however, getting an accurate lean mass figure isn’t really all that easy or practical. So you will simply have to use figures that work for your body weight, rather than lean mass, but we can still take it into account. To set your protein target, you simply take your body weight in kilograms and multiply it by 1.8 to 2.2, and this will be your protein intake in grams. If your body fat is quite high, I would stick to the lower end of the range (1.8-2), whereas if you are already quite lean, it may be prudent to stick to the higher end of the range (2.2 or even higher). If you have a lot of body fat to lose and are quite a bit above a healthy weight for you, especially for women, a protein intake of closer to 1.5g per kilogram may even be more appropriate, although higher protein intakes may still be beneficial in this case, due to the fact that higher protein intakes are quite satiating (hence why we still generally suggest 1.8g/kg/day as the lower end).

For example, if you are 70kg, your protein intake will fall in the range of 126-154 grams per day.

If your maintenance calories were 2000, and we set our protein target as 126g, this would leave 1496 calories for carbohydrates and fats (remember, every gram of protein is 4 calories, so 126 multiplied by 4 equals 504, and we then subtract that from 2000 to get the remaining calories).

Quick summary: Aim for 1.8-2.2g per kg of protein per day, spread out across the day relatively evenly.

 

Fats

Most people have unfortunately only been exposed to negative nutritional education on fat, and this has led to a fear and misunderstanding of fat intake in general. While we do certainly want to make good choices around how we make up our fat intake, we shouldn’t be afraid of dietary fat. We do need to consume fat, it is impractical to try to eliminate it from the diet and trying to drastically reduce fat intake very often leads to a poor relationship with food in general.

You need to understand what fat is and why we need to consume it to make better choices around both how much fat to include in your diet and what types of fat you should include. So what is fat? Most of you kind of already know what fats are, as you have likely eaten a fattier cut of meat or consumed some sort of oil with your food, but you may not really know what fat actually is. For this discussion, we can make a very broad statement and say that dietary fat is composed predominantly of triglycerides. These triglycerides are composed of a glycerol backbone and three individual fatty acids. These fatty acids can actually be quite diverse, as they can have different lengths (i.e. they can contain more or less carbon atoms) and they can also be saturated or unsaturated with hydrogen (if they are saturated, that simply means that all the carbons of the fatty acid has the maximum number of hydrogens bonded to it, and it contains no carbon-carbon double bonds). Dietary fat is either saturated, monounsaturated, or polyunsaturated, based on the number of double bonds that exist in the fat’s molecular structure (with polyunsaturated having more than 1 double bond). There is a fourth category, trans fats, which are simply unsaturated fats with a slightly different “shape” than the traditional unsaturated fats. This causes trans fats to act more like saturated fats. Now, you don’t need to know too much about the biochemistry of all of this, however, it is important to understand that not all fatty acids are exactly the same and they do different things in the body.

 

 

Now, we don’t need to spend too long on the digestion of fats (although it is quite interesting because it isn’t exactly the same as other nutrients in the diet), but it is important to know what the body is doing with the various fatty acids we eat and to also understand why we need to consume fats in the first place. The first thing fats do is act as an energy substrate. The fats we eat are actually an incredibly dense source of fuel, and each gram of fat consumed contains roughly 9 calories per gram. Carbohydrates only contain 4 calories per gram, so fats are over double as calorie dense as carbohydrates. Fats can also be stored for future use in a much more efficient manner, as they can be neatly packed together as triglycerides, whereas carbohydrates are stored as a very branching, spraying structure called glycogen, which also pulls in a lot of water molecules to store it. Fats pack more of a punch when it comes to energy density and they can be more easily stored, so your body has evolved to be pretty damn good at storing them for future use. The ability to store fat has allowed humans to conquer the world, and our primate cousins can’t do this like we can. Being able to store fat makes it much more likely that we will be able to survive periods of starvation, which was obviously very advantageous throughout our evolutionary history, but may not be as beneficial in the current era of abundance. Now, it does bare repeating the fact that things are still governed by calories here, and just because fats are easily stored doesn’t mean they will be. Fat will only be stored when you are in a surplus of energy. When you are in a surplus, your body will see that you have fats available and decide that it would be better to store the surplus of energy coming in for future use. If you eat fat and you are in a calorie deficit, the body won’t decide to just store it, it will use the dietary fat as energy and it will also tap into your previously stored body fat to make up the deficit in energy. It is important to understand that eating fat doesn’t mean you will gain body fat, eating a surplus of calories does. However, as fat has 9 calories per gram, it is easy to see how those calories can rack up fast and push you over the edge and into a calorie surplus.

However, there is a slight downside to using fats as your energy source, and that is the fact that they require oxygen to be burned for energy. This means that fats don’t really fuel higher-intensity exercise all that well, and carbohydrates would be a much better fuel for this. The only reason I mention this is that some people will do very low-carb, high-fat diets and still stay within their calorie and protein targets, but wonder why their workouts aren’t as good as they used to be. We will discuss how much fat and carbs to include in the diet in a moment, but for now, just understand that a mixed diet (moderate carb and fat intake) is likely better for fuelling exercise. The other reason I wanted to bring up the fact that fats need oxygen to be used for fuel is that some people will suggest that you must do low-intensity aerobic cardio to lose fat, and this isn’t true. Your body is mostly using the aerobic system for everything you do, and if you simply eat in a deficit, your body will use the stored fats as needed. You don’t need to do any specific fat-loss exercises or training protocols, you simply need to be in a calorie deficit.

Beyond fats being used as an energy substrate, fats also play a structural role within the cells of our body. You see, every cell has a lipid (fat) membrane that encloses it, and well, keeps it together. The various small organelles within the cell, like the mitochondria and nucleus, also have cell membranes. Fats are also used in various other structural roles within the cells of the body, but we don’t need to dive too deep into this. All we need to know for now is that the fats we eat act as building blocks for these cellular structures.

Now, your body can actually make fats if it needs to (from carbohydrates (and protein to a lesser extent) via pyruvate in a process called de novo lipogenesis), however, there are certain fatty acids that it can’t make. The fats that the body can’t make are called essential fatty acids (EFAs) and they must be consumed in the diet. There is a lot of background stuff that we would have to discuss to fully understand the EFAs, but all you really need to know is that in the real world, when we discuss EFAs, we are discussing two specific fatty acids, EPA (eicosapentaenoic acid) and DHA (docosahexaenoic acid)(these are made (converted) from ALA (alpha-linolenic acid), which the body can’t make itself, but the conversion is actually quite poor, so we are better off just consuming EPA and DHA directly). Arachidonic acid (AA) is also an EFA (technically linoleic acid (LA) is the EFA, but it is converted to AA), but it is quite abundant in food, so we don’t need to worry about it in the real world. We will come back to these EFAs in a moment as it does influence our recommendations, but don’t feel like you have to remember all of these as I am only discussing them to help you build a more complete picture.

Fats are also used as signalling (communication) molecules within the body or are required for the creation of certain signalling molecules. For example, there is a family of signalling molecules called the eicosanoids (which are made from AA (arachidonic acid) and EPA (eicosapentaenoic acid)) which play a role in inflammation (among other things). Many sex hormones (such as testosterone and estrogen) are made from fats (specifically cholesterol, which isn’t a triglyceride but does form part of the category of dietary “fats”). Certain saturated fatty acids also serve as signalling molecules leading to a decrease in LDL receptor expression (and thus increase LDL (the “bad cholesterol”) in the bloodstream), whereas certain polyunsaturated fats serve to increase LDL receptor expression (and thus decrease LDL in the bloodstream). And there are many more examples, but the basic takeaway is that specific fatty acids do play a role in signalling in the body, and this does actually influence how we think about food selection.

Now, we have been talking a lot about what fat does in the body, but what we are really here to discuss is how to set up your diet. So the question we need to answer is how much fat you need to eat. After we have set our calorie and protein targets we generally move to setting a fat target next. For various reasons, we like a range of 0.6-1.5 grams of fat per kilogram of body weight. Practically, setting fat intake at roughly 0.8-1 gram per kilogram of body weight seems to work for the majority of people, as this means you aren’t hugely limited in your food choices but also that you aren’t just adding high-fat foods to try and hit your numbers. In general, we don’t want to go too low with our fat intake, as this generally leads to increased hunger, more restriction in food selection choices, and it potentially reduces the overall healthfulness of the diet by negatively influencing food selection. Most people tend to do well within that 0.6-1g per kg range, and most people don’t necessarily need more than this and most people don’t do well with less than this, so 0.8-1g per kg is a decent starting point.

So we want you to take your body weight in kilograms and multiply it by 0.8-1, and this will be your fat intake in grams.

So using our theoretical 70kg person, their fat intake will be between 56-70 grams per day.

Using the 2000 calorie maintenance we used previously, and accounting for the protein calories, using the 70g per day value we now have 866 calories left for carbohydrates, as every gram of fat is 9 calories (70 x 9 equals 630).

However, we do also need to set some targets around how we actually make up this fat intake. We discussed quite a bit about the various roles of fat in the body, and if we want to ensure good health, we have to take this stuff into account when setting our targets. Certain profiles of fat intake seem to be better for health than others. The first concern is in ensuring you do actually consume sufficient essential fatty acids (EFAs). As previously stated, in the real world, you likely only really need to concern yourself about your EPA (eicosapentaenoic acid) and DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) intake. Generally, marine-derived food sources are higher in EPA and DHA than land-derived food sources, so most people should be consuming some sort of seafood in their diet. In general, we want to consume at least 1g of EPA/DHA per day, although there seems to be a dose-response curve with intake, with higher intakes being associated with better health outcomes. We generally recommend people consume 1-5g of EPA/DHA per day, with 0.5g being the bare minimum in healthy populations. Intakes of at least 2g per day seem to be the minimum threshold for where you start seeing tangible benefits to EPA/DHA (rather than just preventing deficiency). You can get this from food, however, it can be difficult and thus fish oil supplements can be beneficial in hitting this target (for reference, 100g of salmon has ~1g of EPA/DHA, and most fish oil capsules have somewhere between 500-750mg of EPA/DHA per 1g capsule).

Now, saturated fat is also something we have to set a target for within our broader fat intake target(s). Higher intakes of saturated fat are associated with increased cardiovascular disease risk, and as such, we want to ensure we are not consuming too much. Saturated fat itself is not bad, and you certainly don’t need to completely eliminate it from the diet or demonise it, however, we do need to keep our intake in a good place (on average). Eating foods that lead your fat consumption to be overly skewed to a higher proportion of saturated fat (eating greasy fry’s every day, putting butter on everything etc.) isn’t that great, and most people would do best consuming less than 10% of their calories from saturated fat. If you currently eat a lot of saturated fat, replacing it with monounsaturated fat or complex carbohydrates is likely a good idea. Using the example of 2000 calories as our maintenance from earlier, we would ideally consume less than ~22g of saturated fat per day.

 

 

Further to this, we would also be best served by eliminating trans fats from the diet, as they really don’t offer much and only increase the risk of heart disease. However, this isn’t something you will likely have to think about too much, as artificial trans fats have been largely eliminated from the food supply, although you can still find them in countries that haven’t legally mandated their removal from the food supply. In general, you will see trans fats “hidden” as partially hydrogenated vegetable oil on the ingredients list.

As I mentioned cholesterol earlier, I just want to round out this discussion by making a note of intake recommendations for cholesterol. Dietary cholesterol doesn’t really need to be monitored too closely, as dietary cholesterol doesn’t seem to have a major impact on our levels of LDL. However, for some sensitive or at-risk populations, it may make sense to reduce dietary cholesterol intake. For most people, you don’t need to worry about dietary cholesterol.

Quick summary: Aim for 0.6-1g per kg of fats per day, with 1-5g of EPA/DHA per day, and less than 10% of total calories as saturated fat.

 

Carbohydrates

Now we get to carbohydrates, the final “main” macronutrient. Carbohydrates are actually quite a contentious part of the diet, and much like fats, there is a lot of (mis)information put out about carbs that really just serves to confuse the nutrition landscape.

What are carbs exactly? Most of you have likely eaten carbs before, so you are at least familiar with carbs to some degree, but you may not have a deeper understanding of carbs beyond the fact that they taste delicious. Carbs are really just molecules made up of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, and their base unit (i.e. the simplest form) is called a monosaccharide in nutrition spheres, but colloquially we call these base units “simple sugars” or just “sugars”. There are a variety of different types of these (such as fructose, glucose, and sucrose), and this depends on the specific configuration of the carbon, hydrogen and oxygen that make up these sugars. We don’t need to go too deep on this, however, these different sugars are all handled slightly differently in the body. Now, these sugars (monosaccharides) can be joined together to form more complex molecules and these are called disaccharides, oligosaccharides and polysaccharides. Again, don’t need to go much deeper on this, however, what is important to understand is that the monosaccharides and disaccharides (2 sugars joined together) are similar enough in how the body treats them, as are a lot of the oligosaccharides (3-9 sugars joined together) so we can just bundle these together as “simple sugar” (although some of these, especially the oligosaccharides don’t quite act like sugars in the body). Polysaccharides (10+ sugars joined together) are considered to be “complex carbohydrates”. Now, this distinction is important, as simple sugars are more easily digested than complex carbs, and this influences our recommendations. However, it is important to understand that ultimately, when any of these carbohydrates are digested and metabolised, they all eventually end up being used for energy in the same way. There isn’t anything inherently fattening or unhealthy about sugars, as they pretty much all get used similarly once broken down and metabolised.

Carbohydrates are used for a variety of things in the body, but the main one that people think of is their use as an energy source. They are the preferred energy substrate of most cells/tissues in the body, so much so that the body has a variety of ways that it can make carbohydrates from other molecules such as protein or fats. Carbs can be used for energy production in both aerobic (lots of oxygen) and anaerobic (low oxygen) conditions, which makes them especially beneficial for those of us who are engaging in higher-intensity exercise, as fats can’t really be used quickly enough to produce energy when oxygen is low. Similar to protein, carbs provide 4 calories per gram, and this is less than half of what you get from fats on a gram-per-gram basis. Much like with fat, carbs can be stored in the body, however, this is much less efficient than the storage of fats. While fats can be relatively neatly packed together as triglycerides, carbs are stored as glycogen, which is a highly branched molecule and thus it isn’t possible to neatly store it. Glycogen also attracts lots of water to it when being stored, and generally stores 3g of water for every 1g of stored glycogen (although this figure can actually be much higher, and figures as high as 17g of water to every 1g of carb have been seen in research). This means that storing glycogen as a fuel source is less efficient, compared to fats, as storing glycogen just takes up a lot of space whereas storing fats doesn’t. So your body preferentially stores fats for future energy needs. However, glycogen is generally stored in the muscles (and organs, especially the liver), where it is more readily available as a fuel source. Thus, while carb storage will increase your weight, it will usually just make your muscles look bigger, whereas this is not the case for fat storage. The fact that carbs are stored with more water leads to a situation where many people are sold a lie that low-carb diets are better for fat loss, and while they do potentially lead to quicker weight loss compared to low-fat diets, this weight is simply water weight and it also serves to make your muscles look smaller (which is not what you want if you want to look toned). It is ultimately calories that determine fat loss, not the degree of carbs or fats in the diet.

Carbs also serve as building blocks in the body. Carbs play an incredibly important role as they serve as building blocks, or key components of many compounds within the body. Most people ignore this role and focus solely on the energetic contributions of carbohydrates, however, carbs do play a vital role as building blocks within the body. For example, DNA (the molecule that contains our genetic instruction manual), and its little brother RNA, both are partially made of carbohydrates (deoxyribose in DNA and ribose in RNA). Carbs also play a role in cell recognition and signalling. Many cells and molecules are “tagged” with specific carbohydrate signatures, which allow other cells/molecules to recognise them and interact with them. Carbohydrate availability is also one of the most potent signals for energy regulation and balance in the body, with higher carbohydrate availability generally correlating with greater energy availability and thus “better” hormonal health (higher carbohydrate, calorie-deficient diets tend to keep hormone levels more optimal (higher leptin and higher testosterone levels) than calorie matched low(er) carbohydrate diets).

Now, carbohydrates do serve a variety of other roles in the body too, but that isn’t why we are here. You want to know how much you should be consuming. Well, the fact of the matter is, unlike protein or fats, there are no “essential carbohydrates”. Your body will simply make whatever carbohydrates it needs from other molecules within the body. So there is no lower limit, technically speaking, however, in practice, most people would be better served by eating sufficient carbs for their activity levels. How do we know how much this is? Well, it clearly relates back to our calorie needs, as those that are more active will have higher calorie requirements, and those with lower activity levels will have lower calorie requirements. So as a result, carbohydrate intake is set last, and we generally just use the remaining calories for carbohydrates, after protein and fats have been set. So with the remaining calories in our theoretical example, 866 calories, we would set our carbohydrate intake as 216g per day (866 divided by the 4 calories each gram of carbohydrates contain equals 216.5, so you can round up or down, as 4 calories really are not going to make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things). It should be noted that fibre does fall under the category of carbohydrate intake too, but we will discuss this in a moment.

 

 

We believe that for most people, keeping carb intake high while dieting for fat loss, and especially when trying to gain muscle, is a good idea. However, you do still need to address individual preferences here. Some people subjectively feel better while eating lower carbs and higher fat. So if that is you, you will have to adjust these targets accordingly. You may eat on the higher end of the fat target, and thus have fewer calories left to use up with carbs. That is perfectly fine, but we are still on the same page as we are just using whatever calories we have left after we have set our protein and fat targets as carbs. In general, we wouldn’t recommend going below ~50g of carbohydrates per day, unless you were specifically trying to do a ketogenic diet for medical reasons (and if this was the case, you would also lower the protein intake substantially too).

Now, to finish this section off, I just want to mention that while simple and complex carbs both theoretically provide 4 calories per gram, and if you focus purely on counting calories and macros, it may seem like there is no difference between the two, there is still good reason to reduce your consumption of simple carbs and instead focus on eating more complex carbs. A higher intake of complex carbs, compared to simple carbs, is highly correlated with better health outcomes and generally results in a better diet overall. We don’t need to be afraid of simple carbs (sugars), but we also generally shouldn’t be consuming them in large quantities in the diet. For most people, we generally advocate for something like an 80:20 rule, where 80% of your diet is from whole unprocessed foods, and then there is that 20% available for some of the more “fun” foods. This seems to work well and still results in robust health for most people, but for some people, this may need to be adjusted (some individuals who struggle to gain weight or are particularly active may need to eat more “fun” foods to get enough calories in, and some individuals who really struggle to adhere to their diets may struggle more when including “fun” foods in the diet (although some may struggle by excessively restricting them), so we need to be flexible).

Quick summary: Whatever calories you have left after you have set your protein and fat targets should be allotted to carbohydrates. Carbohydrate intake should preferentially be obtained from complex carbohydrates rather than simple carbohydrates.

 

Fibre

While we have been discussing carbohydrates, we have actually ignored a segment of carbohydrates, fibre. While there is some controversy over exactly what constitutes fibre, we are just going to stick with the rough definition of fibre as being the carbohydrates that we can’t digest. Now, if fibre can’t be digested, you would be forgiven for thinking that it doesn’t really contribute much to the diet overall, and can be disregarded, however, you would be wrong. You see, while humans can’t digest fibre, the bacteria in our guts can digest fibre. Fibre is digested (fermented) by gut bacteria, and this does actually provide some caloric value to humans. It also feeds the gut bacteria, which serve many vital roles in human health, not least of which is keeping our immune system working effectively. Fibre plays a role in slowing down digestion, which can help to keep you feeling fuller for longer and thus more likely to stay within your calorie intake goals. Dietary fibre also plays a role in providing bulk to our stools (poop), and this helps to keep our digestive system moving regularly. Fibre is also essential for helping us to eliminate many (waste) products, and it plays a role in regulating our blood cholesterol levels too (by virtue of bile acid sequestration and excretion).

There are two types of fibre; soluble (can be dissolved in water) and insoluble (does not dissolve in water), and these are often found together in the same source. There are technically other types of fibre, but for our purposes here, we don’t need to dig into them right now. I only mention these types of fibre, as you will often see them discussed and you may wonder which one you should focus on, and in the real world, you really don’t need to prioritise one over the other and will very often just eat food sources that contain both. However, you may choose to supplement with fibre, and that is where this becomes more of a question (soluble fibre may be better for keeping you fuller and improving blood lipids, while insoluble may be better for gut health). Some people may also find that certain types of fibre do not sit well with them, and understanding the various types of fibres may be important for this, but this is beyond the scope of this article.

Fibre is a vital part of the diet, despite “technically” not being digested. Higher fibre intakes are consistently correlated with better health outcomes, and while you can technically get away with very low fibre intakes, this is associated with many adverse health outcomes. The best sources of fibre are generally fruits and vegetables, and unfortunately, a lot of people don’t eat enough fruits and vegetables and thus they not only miss out on the fibre benefits, but they also miss out on all of the diverse array of micronutrients that fruits and vegetables offer.

Tracking fibre intake, and by extension fruit/vegetable intake is a bit of a bone of contention in the fitness industry. Some people say you shouldn’t track vegetables and fibre as they are so low calorie and fibre isn’t really metabolised by the human digestive tract, while others say you should track every single iota of calorie-containing particle that passes your lips. We are pretty laid back on this and the polarised right or wrong view on this, in our opinion, doesn’t really help anyone. We generally suggest people get roughly 10-15 grams of fibre for every 1,000 calories they consume. Most people who have never really tracked their fibre (or food in general), will usually struggle to hit their fibre targets, as most people really do under-consume fruits and vegetables in their diets. As a result, most people are going to have to track their fruit/vegetable and fibre intake for a while, and build an understanding of how much fruit/vegetables they have to actually eat to achieve their fibre goals. After you know what is required, then you can stop tracking your fruit/vegetable intake if you want, but you will still need to keep eating the same volume of fruits/vegetables each day. Those of you who like more accuracy in your diet, can of course keep tracking fruit/vegetable intake. Most people will eventually move to a more intuitive style of dieting, and thus stop actively tracking fruits/vegetables, but again, you do actually need to keep eating them to achieve your daily fibre requirements (I am labouring this point because so many people don’t eat enough fruits/vegetables, and if they aren’t actively tracking their intake, they generally revert to low intakes).

 

 

Using our previous example of the person eating 2000 calories per day, we would set their fibre target somewhere in the range of 20-30g per day. If they were in a deficit and were quite hungry, we might even go higher than this (as fibre will keep you fuller for longer), and conversely, if they had higher calorie requirements, we would initially hang out at the lower intake (10g per 1000 calories) and assess levels of fullness (if they were struggling to eat enough because they were too full, we would dial back intake).

Quick summary: Set your fibre target somewhere in the range of 10-15g per 1000 calories.

 

Water

Although technically not classified as a macronutrient, water is essential to life and needs to be consumed in macronutrient-sized quantities. So we are going to class it as a macronutrient for this discussion. Water is the basis for the various fluids of the body, and is incredibly important for cellular processes (including all of the stuff we have discussed so far, as water is vital to metabolism!). It also helps prevent constipation by moving food through the intestinal tract and eliminates waste from the body through filtering by the kidneys. Water makes up more than two-thirds of the weight of the human body, which means we are mostly water. The human brain is around 80% water by weight and is very sensitive to dehydration. Poor brain hydration likely leads to cognitive impairment, and in the context of this article, it will likely lead to poor food and exercise choices. Adequate hydration is just as important, if not more important than adequate nutrition. In a survival situation, hydration is much more important than nutrition. Without water, humans would die in a few days.

Without labouring the point, water is needed for life, and when you are setting up your diet, it also makes sense to set a water target, so you know roughly how much you should be consuming each day.

We can set our targets based on our weight, or more ideally referenced back to our food intake. The reason that referencing it back to our food intake is more ideal is because this generally accounts for people who have higher activity levels, and thus are more likely to lose more water per day via sweat (a sedentary 70kg person likely doesn’t need the same amount of water as a highly active 70kg person). However, if you live in a very warm climate, or feel like you personally sweat excessively, then you may need to adjust the recommendations.

We can work out how much water to consume based on our weight, as we recommend consuming roughly 40 ml of water per kg of body weight. So for a 100kg person that means 4L water daily. For a 50kg person that means 2L per day. The majority of people fall somewhere in that range, so a blanket statement of 2-4L per day is often used, but you can work out how much you need for yourself based on your own weight.

We can also reference back to our food intake, and we recommend consuming 1.5 mL per calorie (kcal) of food. So someone consuming 2000 calories would need to consume 3L (3000mL) per day.

 

 

There will generally be some discordance between these two numbers, and your intake should probably fall somewhere between the two numbers. However, we can further refine our recommendations based on the feedback our body gives us. The more hydrated you are, the lighter (or less yellow) your urine will be. We ideally want to consume enough water per day, and distribute it throughout the day, so that you have ~5+ clear urinations per day. If you are exercising that day, at least two of them should be during/after your workout. We can use this to refine our water intake and distribution throughout the day, and even if you are consuming the amount recommended by either the weight or food referenced calculations, you may still not be consuming enough or you are not consuming it spread out enough throughout the day. It should be noted that this refinement strategy of 5+ clear urinations per day can be hard to follow if you are taking a multi-vitamin (or certain drugs), especially if it is a more than once-per-day multivitamin, as it will likely make your urine more yellow than it otherwise would be.

Now, all of this doesn’t need to come directly from water, and you can still get a decent amount of water consumption by virtue of eating foods that are very high in water content (such as fruits and veg). Stuff like coffee and tea, milk, juices and even soft drinks do contribute to hydration status, so you do have multiple options to get your water intake up.

Quick summary: Consume somewhere around 40mL of water per kg or 1.5mL of water per calorie, and refine this intake and distribution so that you are urinating relatively clear ~5+ times per day.

 

Alcohol

Finally, we get to alcohol. Alcohol is also a macronutrient, and while you certainly don’t need to consume alcohol in the diet, enough of you do to warrant discussing it. Considering that the body has no need for alcohol, I am just going to skip past the discussion of how alcohol is dealt with in the body and the ramifications thereof. All of you are aware that alcohol isn’t healthy to consume and it leads to major health issues if consumed frequently and in sufficient quantities. What is surprising to most, however, is just how low the recommend maximum daily/weekly alcohol consumption targets are, especially if you are from a culture where people drink a lot. High alcohol intakes are normalised, but that, unfortunately, doesn’t mean that this is not having ill effects on health. Most people are going to see ill health effects from intakes that are seen as normal, and people very often knock years off their life both in terms of quantity and quality (poor sleep as a result from alcohol causing you to underperform in daily life is actually an incredibly common phenomenon). The guidelines differ from country to country, but a very rough target is 14 units per week, with one unit being 8-10g of actual alcohol. If consuming the 14 units in a week, it is advised that this is spread out over at least three days, ideally non-consecutive days. More than this is generally seen as problematic and begins getting into the territory of alcohol dependence syndrome/alcoholism. I know that isn’t what people like to hear, and as soon as they hear it, they come up with all kinds of excuses as to why their alcohol use is not problematic and that they just have a glass or two of wine/beer each night to wind down. However, this is the guideline for a reason, and even this level of intake isn’t risk-free or even safe, it is just considered to be lower risk. There are certainly cases to be made to decrease or increase this guideline, depending on your genetics and size. However, we are talking about decreasing/increasing by about 1 unit either way (13-15 units per week), and for the vast majority of people, a stronger case can be made that very low intakes would be better for health.

 

 

To put it in perspective, here is the breakdown of some common alcoholic beverages and their units of alcohol:

Beer: Common alcohol content is 3.5-5.5% ABV, so one pint (568mL) is about 3 units. (Stronger/weaker beers will obviously make this number variable, but you can think of a pint to be between 2-4 units). So roughly 3.5-6 pints depending on the strength is 14 units of alcohol.

Wine: A medium glass (175mL) has roughly 2 units. Some wines, especially red, are higher percentage alcohol though, and for the same amount (volume) so this can be as high as 3 units. It is easier to think in terms of a bottle of wine, a 750mL bottle of 12% ABV has about 9 units, while a 16% ABV wine has about 12 units. So between 1 and a half bottles, and 1 bottle and a medium glass of wine is 14 units of alcohol.

Spirits: At roughly 40% ABV, a shot of spirits is between 1 and 1.5 units, depending on the size of the shot (it can vary between 25-35mL). So roughly 9-14 shots is 14 units of alcohol.

Alcopops: These vary quite a bit, depending on the exact alcohol in question, but a rough figure of between 1 and 1.5 units is where they are commonly thought to be. Again, roughly 9-14 alcopops is 14 units of alcohol.

You more than likely know people who regularly consume more than this regularly (or you may even do so yourself). Unfortunately, even this seemingly low level of intake (I think it is fair to say that most people would consider ~4 pints of beer or 1.5 bottles of wine per week to be quite low) is at the very limit of what is low-risk. Even this level is not safe. It is especially not safe if you drink and drive, both for you and those around you.

Anyway, this is not an article about getting you to be abstinent, even if that would be better for your health, performance and body composition. What you want to know is how to fit alcohol in the diet. Alcohol itself contains ~7 calories per gram, and when looking to fit alcohol in the diet, we generally just substitute carbs and fats for alcohol. So if you want to have a glass of wine, you would simply account for the calories, subtracting them from the calories you have allowed to carbs and/or fat. Ideally, you would consume the alcohol away from sleep, as it does generally reduce sleep quality which does tend to make the diet, training and general life harder the next day(s). Ideally, you would also stay below the 14 units of alcohol per week too, if you want to reduce the various health risks associated with alcohol intake.

As some of you will want to drink more on maybe a single day, you may soon realise that you can’t fit that amount of calories into your overall plan. We can deal with this similarly to dealing with meals at events where we know we will be consuming more calories than would normally fit in our diet. It can help to view your calories over the week, rather than only for a single day. It is calorie intake over time that dictates results, so looking at things across the week, rather than a single day can help us to even out the calorie average. So if you want to consume more on a Saturday, you may just consume slightly less across the rest of the week, to allow for more calories on that Saturday. Eating 100 fewer calories Monday to Friday will allow you to consume 500 extra calories on that Saturday, and assuming your Sunday intake is where it normally would be, your weekly average calorie intake will be the same. However, this is usually an incredibly slippery slope, especially when dieting. Most people will try this method and just end up hungrier across the week, and then end up binge eating on the Saturday because they have felt so restricted, and this is especially the case when you also add alcohol to the mix. This does still happen even when the calories saved through the week aren’t even that high. So a better way of dealing with events like this is to simply drink less alcohol. I know that isn’t the answer you want, but unfortunately, it isn’t easy to deal with alcohol in the diet unless you engage in practices that aren’t generally conducive to a good diet.

Quick summary: Ideally, consume zero alcohol, but if you must consume it, aim to consume less than 14 units of alcohol per week, spread out over at least 3 (ideally non-consecutive) days. Account for the calories of the drinks you consume, substituting out fats and/or carbs to allow for the alcohol intake.

 

Calories and Macronutrients Summary

Now, we covered a lot there, so let’s just quickly recap things. The targets so far are as follows:

• Calories: Set appropriately based on your goals (deficit, surplus, maintenance).
• Protein: Aim for 1.8-2.2g per kg of protein per day, spread out across the day relatively evenly.
• Fat: Aim for 0.8-1g per kg of fats per day, with 1-5g of EPA/DHA per day, and less than 10% of total calories as saturated fat.
• Carbs: The rest of your available calories after you have set your protein and fat targets should be allotted to carbohydrates. Carbohydrate intake should preferentially be obtained from complex carbohydrates rather than simple carbohydrates.
• Fibre: Set your fibre target somewhere in the range of 10-15g per 1000 calories.
• Water: Consume somewhere around 40mL of water per kg or 1.5mL of water per calorie, and refine this intake and distribution so that you are urinating relatively clear ~5+ times per day.
• Alcohol: Ideally, consume zero alcohol, but if you must consume it, aim to consume less than 14 units of alcohol per week, spread out over at least 3 days. Account for the calories of the drinks you consume, substituting out fats and/or carbs to allow for the alcohol intake.

 

Now, we didn’t discuss this too much (although we touched on it while discussing metabolism), but it also makes sense to try and somewhat standardise your non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT). To do this, we generally just set a daily step count target. While the figure of 10,000 steps per day gets thrown around a lot, it doesn’t actually need to be this number, and we really just want to try and standardise things to some extent. So a daily step count somewhere in the range of 5,000 to 15,000 steps per day is a good idea. Pick a number that makes sense to you and your life situation, and try to stay relatively consistent with it (we can set a weekly target, however, very often people will then remain very inactive Monday to Friday and they try to get 50,000 steps (or whatever ridiculously high number) over the course of the weekend, which is usually very hard to do, and it likely will leave you very fatigued. So while you can set a weekly target, we do still want to relatively evenly spread our step count out across the week.

You can use our diet set up calculator or our calorie and macronutrient calculator to help you to calculate your targets for you.

 

 

Diet Priorities

That’s how you set up a diet, from a nutritional science perspective! The beauty is in its simplicity, the hard work is in the actual implementation. Be under no delusion, dietary adherence can be very hard for some people and there may be numerous barriers in the way of you even being able to eat in alignment with these targets. Ensuring adherence and actual calorie tracking methods are as accurate as possible is tough, and you should expect that there are going to be many ups and downs along the way. Just because you know what your targets should be, doesn’t mean you will actually be able to consistently achieve them. One way we have found to really help with this is knowing what your priorities are with the diet itself. If you know what is more important, you can at least focus on the more important things, even if you can’t get everything “perfect”.

In terms of the diet itself, the order of priorities are:

1. Calories
2. Protein
3. Energy substrates (carbs and fats)  
4. Other recommendations

 

So the most important thing is to consume a calorie-appropriate diet. Even if the rest of the diet is a bit all over the place, if you consume the right amount of calories, you will usually be able to still move towards your health, body composition and performance goals.

After that, protein intake is the next most important thing. If you can get your protein intake where it needs to be, then this usually has a very positive impact on your diet overall and usually allows you to really progress nicely towards your health, body composition and performance goals. If all you did was set a calorie target and a protein target, you would actually get incredibly far with your diet.

After that, carbs and fats are pretty equal. While we have given specific targets for both, you can actually get away with quite a range with intake. Higher and lower fat/carb intakes can work, and while we think the targets we have outlined make the most sense for the vast majority of people, as long as you stay within your calories and hit your protein target, you do actually have a good bit of leeway with carbs/fats. If you are trying to optimise things, then obviously you are going to have to be closer to optimal intakes, however, if you just want to eat a “good enough” diet, then you do have quite a bit of wiggle room.

After that, the other various recommendations are the priority. Saturated fat intake is one that I would personally prioritise, as heart disease is one of the biggest threats to your life, but if you follow good food selection practices (outlined further on), this does actually look after itself quite easily. Omega-3 intake is also relatively easily looked after with good food practices, as is fibre intake, so you can prioritise them less.

 

 

Of course, the ideal would be to prioritise everything, but this can be overwhelming at first, and in reality, nobody ever gets the diet perfect anyway. But if you can get your calories dialled in, and then eat enough protein, you will usually have put yourself in a really good position with the diet. For certain populations or goals, this order of importance may be changed (for example, someone at a high risk of heart disease may need to put a bigger priority on lowering saturated fat and salt intake than someone looking to lose a few kilos), but this generally holds true as a baseline order of importance.

 

Ranges vs. Set Targets

Another thing that can make the diet much easier is to realise that there is actually quite a lot of leeway with the numbers. As you can see, with all our recommendations, there is actually a broad range of what you could actually set your macronutrient targets as. There are minimum numbers, more optimal numbers and then higher numbers. As long as your minimum targets are met you will have a better diet setup than the vast majority of people. Of course, you may want to really try to nail optimal, and you can aim for those numbers then. Perhaps you just really like a certain macronutrient, and as a result, you may want to consume a bit more of that macronutrient, even if it means you get to eat less of another one as a result. So what we very often suggest is having a rough range for your macronutrient intakes. Know what the bare minimum is, and know where the more optimal number is. Some days you will be more dialled in, and other days will be more of a struggle. But in general, unless you are trying to get super lean under a certain time constraint (like a bodybuilding competition or photoshoot) or you are an athlete trying to milk every last improvement you can possibly get from the diet, shooting for macronutrient ranges is actually much better than aiming for an absolute fixed macronutrient target.

So for example using that theoretical 70kg person with a maintenance of 2000 calories, protein would be set at a range of 126-154 per day and then we can play around a little bit more with the fat and carbohydrate ranges. We could easily set the range of fats to 56-70g per day and then we would just eat the rest as carbohydrates. Alternatively, you could set a carb minimum and then eat fats and carbs to fulfil whatever calories remain. If you eat more carbohydrates than your macronutrient targets dictate, you can simply lower your fat intake to compensate, and vice versa. There is a lot of flexibility in this. However, what can very often happen is that when people use ranges, they find themselves under-consuming protein or not staying within their calorie target. So if we are going to use ranges, we have to still keep the priorities of the diet in mind and we still need to have some structure to the diet. If you are constantly missing your targets because you are using ranges, you need to rethink whether your targets are manageable, while also assessing whether you are actually planning your diet out accordingly and not just “winging it” and hoping you hit your targets by the end of the day (this very often happens, and you will see people try to consume their entire protein target at the end of the day, as they have simply not prioritised it during the day, and this rarely works).

 

Individual Differences 

Some people feel fuller for longer with a higher fat intake, while others feel fuller with a higher carbohydrate intake. Protein is generally the most satiating of all the macronutrients. However, you have to take into account the subtle nuances of how your diet affects you as an individual. So after setting initial numbers, you must constantly assess how eating meals to achieve these numbers actually affects you.

Perhaps you notice that eating carbohydrates for breakfast leaves you feeling tired and groggy for the rest of the day, or you experience that post-lunch slump when you eat a certain meal composition. Well, we need to reevaluate that meal. The numbers may fit your overall day, but this must take into account how that meal breakdown affects your performance. So if you notice eating carbohydrates earlier in the day leaves you feeling lower in energy, then you can either adjust your intake to a higher fat intake, or you can move more of your carbs to later in the day.

Those of you with higher activity levels (you have a more physical job, you walk a lot, etc.) will likely find yourself performing better with a higher carbohydrate intake, while those that are more sedentary may find that a higher fat intake suits you better.

However, the biggest factor that affects the individuality of your diet, is preference. Adherence is the most important part of actually achieving the results you desire, so if you can’t sustain the numbers that you have chosen because it stops you from eating the foods you prefer then you won’t be able to adhere long term. If you prefer eating foods that are higher in fat, set your fat intake higher and set carbohydrates lower, and vice versa. It doesn’t have to be an all-the-time thing either. If you notice that you do actually perform better with a higher carbohydrate, lower fat diet, but you have a hot date and they want to go get a meal that is going to be higher in fat and lower in carbohydrates, adjust your number for that day. Long-term adherence is more important than transient dietary “perfection”.

 

Making Adjustments 

There will come a time, even if you set the diet up “perfectly” to start with, when you will need to adjust the diet. This could be because results are as predicted, or have slowed, your circumstances or goals have changed or a variety of other reasons. So how do we adjust the diet?

The main variable to adjust, for most goals, is calories. When we make calorie changes, we generally want to make small changes, rather than large changes. Unless you have drastically changed your activity habits, and now need a lot more food to even maintain your body weight, more often than not, we are only going to make calorie changes in the order of 200-500 calories. If weight loss/gain has stalled for example, we might adjust calories by ~300 calories and then wait and see how the body responds. Generally, we will also wait at least 2-3 weeks to allow the dietary changes to actually manifest in bodily changes. It is very rare that you would need to make drastic calorie changes, and it would be even rarer that you would need to make drastic calorie changes on a very frequent basis. If things are moving in the right direction at an acceptable rate, you don’t need to make changes.

Now, what macronutrients would you adjust to make these calorie changes? We will generally keep protein intake fairly stable, and any changes will generally come from fat or carbs. If fat loss is the goal, for most people, it is easiest to change fat intake first and foremost. This way you keep carbs higher, and thus reduce muscle loss and keep performance high. When trying to lose fat, we will generally reduce fat intake, as dictated by the calorie reductions. So if you were dropping 200 calories, we would reduce fat intake by ~22g. However, we generally would move to carbs for any calorie reductions once fat intake reached the bottom end of the threshold (<0.6g of fat per kg). Conversely, if you were trying to gain weight, we would prioritise calorie increases from fat until you were at least consuming ~0.8g per kg. Once you are consuming that much, we would generally prioritise any additional calories to be increased via carb intake. In practice, it is rare that you would just change only one macronutrient, and it will generally be a mix of carbs and fats. This is in accordance with the priorities of the diet, and once you are at least consuming the minimum intake recommendations for fat, you do have quite a lot of wiggle room. However, it should be noted that for most athletic, performance and muscle gain goals, carbs are likely going to be the biggest bang for your buck macronutrient (assuming protein requirements are met).

 

We have been discussing things from more of a quantitative perspective so far. You now know HOW much you should eat, but we also have to discuss WHAT you should be eating. This “what” aspect, we will call the qualitative aspect (e.g. the food quality aspect). Just because you get the quantitative side of things dialled in doesn’t mean you have everything dialled in. We know that there are better and worse ways to set up a diet from a quantitative aspect (i.e. a diet can have better or worse calorie and/or macro targets), but it should be fairly intuitive (and I would say common knowledge) that there are better and worse ways to actually eat to hit those targets. Eating a diet that is composed of lots of fruits, vegetables, complex carbohydrates and lean meats, is obviously different from a diet that is composed of refined carbohydrates (sweets/candy/sugar) and protein powder. While we may be able to set both of these diets up in a way that they still have the same calories and macros, there is clearly a difference in how the body will respond to these diets. This is obviously very hyperbolic, and nobody would generally suggest you eat sugar and protein powder as your diet, but it does illustrate the fact that we know that there are better and worse ways to set up a diet. However, like most things, there is actually a continuum or spectrum with this. Just because there are better and worse ways to hit your calorie and macro targets, this doesn’t mean that we can never consume “junk food” as part of a good diet, and in reality, it is the broader diet that really matters, rather than any singular food (i.e. your diet isn’t “bad” just because you have one “worse” choice in there, as the broader, average diet quality dictates things rather than singular foods or nutrients, especially if they are consumed infrequently). The diet quality does seem to matter, and there seems to be a synergistic effect when you get both the diet quantity and diet quality dialled in.

 

 

To more fully flesh this out, we have to actually discuss why the qualitative side of the diet is important. There are a variety of reasons why diet quality is important, but the main ones of importance for us right now are:

• Micronutrient intake.
• Health.
• Satiety.
• Dietary adherence.

 

Micronutrient intake: Certain diet patterns increase the likelihood that you will actually be able to achieve your daily micronutrient (vitamin and mineral) requirements more than others. We want to make dietary choices that allow us to get the micronutrients we need, as micronutrient deficiency or inadequacy will hold us back from accomplishing our health, performance and body composition goals.

Health: Certain diet patterns are more closely correlated with better health outcomes, both in terms of lifespan (amount of years in your life) and health span (the quality of those years). While this is somewhat related to micronutrient intake, certain diet patterns are also associated with better health outcomes by virtue of what they don’t include too (such as high saturated fat). Certain diet patterns are associated with better health span, which isn’t easily measured (compare to lifespan which is easily measured by virtue of your age). While we may not know all there is to know about why certain diet patterns are associated with better health outcomes, we do know quite a lot about what these diets look like, and thus can make food choices that are more in line with the healthier diets.

Satiety: Certain diet patterns tend to leave you more or less satiated (satiety is the feeling of fullness, so a high-satiety diet is one that leaves you feeling fuller for longer). Higher satiety diets seem to be a key part of both facilitating weight loss, and then also maintaining that weight loss long-term. We don’t just want to optimise body composition in the short term, we want to maintain good body composition long term, as that is more closely correlated with better long-term health outcomes (especially with regards to the various “lifestyle” related health conditions like cardio-metabolic disease(s)).

Adherence: Certain diet patterns are associated with better dietary adherence (to both the quantitative and qualitative aspects of the diet). While this is related to satiety to some degree, these don’t fully overlap. While feeling fuller for longer (higher satiety) generally improves adherence, sometimes diets on paper that are high satiety can lead to a lack of adherence. This may be due to individuals craving certain foods or feeling excessively restricted from eating certain foods.

So we want to make food choices, and create a diet pattern, that increases the likelihood of us getting all the micronutrients we need and that keeps us feeling adequately satiated, while also maintaining/increasing our dietary adherence. A diet set-up like this will more than likely lead to better long-term results in health, body composition and performance. The thing is, most people already know what good food selection looks like. So I am not going to labour the point and make a mockery of your intelligence and tell you that fruits and vegetables are better for you than “junk food”. You already know this. While you may have some questions about certain foods, you would probably be able to identify “good” and “bad” food choices 99% of the time. So I am not going to spend much time or energy on ranking various foods in order of “goodness” or “badness”. Instead, I want you to think broader and understand what a better diet pattern looks like.

 

Generally Good Food Guidelines 

The diet should be calorie appropriate.

Regardless of the individual, they are simply not going to reach their goals if their diet is not calorie appropriate. This doesn’t mean everyone should be in a deficit, eating at maintenance or a surplus, or any generic calorie target. It means that the diet should have the right amount of calories for that individual’s goals. You, unfortunately, see it all too often, people eating good food choices, but eating too little or too much for their goals. While their food selection may be good, their diet is not calorie appropriate for their goals. Alternatively, you will see people that eat an appropriate amount of calories, but their food selection leaves a lot to be desired. However, when used correctly, making sure the diet is calorie appropriate gives you a base from which to make better food choices. Better food choices also make eating a calorie-appropriate diet easier. It is far harder to stick to a calorie deficit if you are always hungry, so choosing foods that are low calorie and high satiety will obviously make sticking to the calorie target easier. Conversely, someone who struggles to eat enough food for their caloric demands (i.e. athletes and people with manual labour jobs) may actually be better served by choosing (some) foods that are more refined and less satiating. So the calorie allotment will dictate food selection, and food selection will dictate whether you can adhere to that calorie allotment. They are both very intimately intertwined.

 

Focus on lean proteins.

Most healthy diet patterns put a large focus on choosing lean protein sources. There is nothing inherently bad about fattier cuts of meat, however, it is much easier to craft a diet that is conscious of calories, the other macronutrients and overall health, if you select leaner cuts of meat. It is very easy to overeat calories when selecting certain cuts of meat, especially if their fat content is quite high. So it is a good idea to select leaner cuts of meat. However, the exact types of meat will still vary based on the individual’s goals and needs. If you have an individual that has low iron levels, you may need to choose more red meat, however, you may have someone with an elevated risk for intestinal cancer, and for them, you may need to select very low levels of red meat. So the exact source may change, however, by keeping your focus on lean protein sources, you have much more ability to really dial the diet in to the individual’s needs. The only real exception to this would be including fatty fish in the diet. This is because these fatty fish usually contain higher levels of omega 3s, which can be hard to get in the diet elsewhere (other than supplementing with them).

 

Focus on fruits and vegetables.

One aspect of the diet that seems to be universally healthy across the globe is fruits and vegetables. Regardless of the exact diet paradigm followed, the healthy diets all seem to have a high intake of fruits and vegetables. There are some exceptions, but this is usually due to a lack of fruits and vegetables in that environment. So it makes sense to include more fruits and vegetables in the diet. This is one of the easiest ways you can ensure you get the vitamins and minerals you need. You can micromanage this stuff on an individual micronutrient basis, or you can simply focus on getting enough fruits and vegetables in the diet. In general, good food selection practices are to eat a variety of colours of fruits and vegetables, and try to get somewhere between 5-15 servings of fruit and/or vegetables per day (a typical serving is half a cup of cooked vegetables, one cup of raw leafy vegetables, or a medium-sized piece of fruit). Getting a variety of colours and keeping intake high, will ensure that micronutrient needs along with fibre needs are looked after, but it will also ensure that a variety of phytochemicals and bioactive compounds are consumed.

 

Focus on slower-digesting carbohydrates.

Generally speaking, focusing on slower-digesting carbohydrate sources is better for most goals. There are exceptions to this (such as post-workout or for individuals with high carbohydrate requirements), but in general, it is best to try and steer food selection towards slower digesting carbohydrate sources. Whole grains and minimally processed carbohydrate sources seem to be best.

 

Focus on healthy fats.

Focusing on foods that contain healthy fats and foods that are higher in omega 3’s is generally a beneficial practice. We generally want to focus on the mono and polyunsaturated fats, and have them make up the bulk of our fat intake. Foods that are high in saturated fats should be de-emphasised in the diet and ideally, keeping saturated fat intake below ~10% of the diet is recommended. Learning what foods are higher in saturated fat, and then trying to reduce their inclusion in the diet or swapping them out for monounsaturated fats or complex carbs generally is associated with better health.

 

Eat a diversity of foods throughout the day/week.

Most people eat the same foods day in and day out, and thus only expose themselves to a narrow range of nutrients. Focusing on consuming a diverse variety of foods both each day and throughout the week will ensure that nutrient deficiencies are less likely, and that the diet is actually contributing to both a better dietary nutrient profile and dietary enjoyment. Eating the same foods every day is generally not all that enjoyable, and if you don’t create a diet that you can see yourself doing years into the future, then you are just creating a plan that leads to failure at some stage.

 

Eat a generally minimally processed diet.

It is generally a good idea to avoid processed foods. While in some cases it may make sense to include some processed foods, the basis of the diet should be minimally processed foods. Some people like to call this the “JERF” principle, with JERF being an acronym for “Just Eat Real Food”. Real food generally refers to foods that your grandparents and great-grandparents would recognise as food, and avoiding foods that bear very little resemblance to their “natural” form. Eating this way generally leads to a better micronutrient intake and it also reduces the quantity of salt (sodium) consumed, both of which are generally good for health. There are some issues with this though, as some people become obsessive about what foods are actually “real foods” and some people can actually make their diets objectively worse by being excessively focused on this. So we generally advocate people follow an 80/20 or 90/10 approach to this. The vast majority of your diet (80-90%) should be minimally processed foods, and only a small portion of your diet should be processed foods (20-10%). This generally works for most people, but you will have individuals that respond better to more or less processed foods, so we do still have to consider the individual in this conversation, but in general, the focus should be on eating a minimally processed diet where possible.

 

Eating with these general food guidelines generally leads to a diet that is of higher quality. While there are barriers to eating this way at times, and for some people/populations, if you can follow these guidelines (or at least most of these guidelines) then we would expect to see a positive return on investment in terms of health, body composition and performance. While a variety of diet patterns can be healthy, the vast majority of healthy diets will follow most if not all of these guidelines. So if you can follow these guidelines with your diet the majority of the time, you should be in a good place with things. The guidelines also allow you to evaluate various diets that you will see promoted (marketed) online. If a diet follows the vast majority of these guidelines, then it is more likely to be a healthy diet. However, if the diet that is being promoted doesn’t follow these guidelines, or actively suggests these guidelines are wrong, then you have to question the rationale behind that diet and its healthfulness. This doesn’t mean that healthy diets must follow all of these guidelines, but if someone is trying to convince you that a certain diet is healthier than all other diets, and it seems to run counter to the generally consistent components of various healthy diets from around the world, you should expect overwhelming evidence from the person making that claim.

 

Translating The Guidelines

While the guidelines outlined above are generally quite robust, they aren’t actually all that easy to implement in your daily life. This is both because dietary change is just hard (as there are so many barriers and potential reasons that steer you off track), but also because most people don’t generally think of the broader picture when making food choices on a day-to-day basis. So, what this next section aims to do is give you some idea as to how to can organise your diet on a smaller scale. In my experience, if you can create some sort of framework for your weekly food intake and some sort of structure for your daily meals, you drastically increase the quality of the diet on average. Basically, if you have a plan and structure, you are more likely to follow the plan and structure and thus eat a generally healthy diet and accomplish your goals. If you have no plan or structure, and you just have vague guidelines, you can still eat a healthful diet, but you just reduce the likelihood that you will consistently follow a healthful diet and you actually make your diet harder because you have to constantly think about the diet. What we ideally want to do is make following a good diet automatic. Effectively, we want to automate the process so that you don’t have to think too much about the diet each week, you simply follow the structure and then you get the improvements in health, body composition and performance that you desire. We don’t want the diet to be all-consuming, we want to make it something that adds to your life, not detracts from your life. To do this, we will initially need to create a bit more structure and rigidity, but these should be seen as training wheels rather than the end goal. Having a bit more structure will actually make things easier in the long run, even though it can actually feel a bit restrictive initially.

 

Weekly

What we generally recommend for most people is that they set up some sort of plan for their week, and don’t try to just “wing it”. While this can feel a bit less spontaneous and restrictive for some, it does help quite a bit. Also, most people view dietary spontaneity as ordering fast food from the same 2-3 fast food places each week. It isn’t spontaneous if it is just your average diet. So, how do we set up some sort of structure for our week? Well, we can do this a number of ways, but what most people find is the most productive is planning out 2-3 breakfasts, 2-3 lunches and then a variety of dinners for the week, and then buying the ingredients ahead of schedule (i.e. doing a weekly shop rather than more frequent shops) and ideally preparing some of the meals ahead of schedule too.

 

 

While planning out your weekly meals, there are some rough guidelines you can follow to ensure you get a range of nutrients in the diet and don’t just end up eating chicken, broccoli and rice. These guidelines are relatively vague because they aren’t meant to be incredibly restrictive or to tell you exactly what to do, they are simply meant to guide you towards a better diet structure overall. You don’t need to follow them all perfectly, but they can be quite helpful when mapping out a week’s worth of food.

 

Protein:

• At each of your planned meals, ask yourself, “where is the protein?”, as many people under-consume protein across the day with dinner being the only protein-containing meal in most diets.
• Ideally, you would eat a variety of different types of meat and different cuts of meat each week, focusing on leaner cuts of meat. So don’t just plan to eat chicken at each meal.
• For most people, aiming to eat red meat 2-3 times per week is generally a good idea. Some will potentially need to aim for less, especially if choosing high saturated fat red meat, however, some will potentially need to eat more, for example, those whose iron status is low. This generally means choosing 2 evening meals that have red meat as the protein source.
• For most people, aiming to eat fatty fish 2-3 times per week is a good idea. Some will need more, especially if they have not regularly been consuming enough omega-3s or they have an increased need for omega-3s such as during pregnancy, while others may need less (usually only those who supplement regularly with sufficient quantities of omega-3s).
• For most people consuming dairy products is also a wise idea, as it is a great source of protein and calcium (and many other nutrients) in the diet. However, this will obviously need to be culturally and biologically appropriate (i.e. in non-lactose intolerant people).
• If primarily plant-based, you will likely need to pay a bit more attention to protein as it can be quite difficult to get sufficient amounts on a plant-based diet, and you will also need to pay extra attention to food combinations so as to get a better amino acid profile.

 

Fruits and Vegetables:

• Eating lots of fruit, vegetables and legumes (i.e. peas, beans and pulses) is a great idea, but you simply won’t eat 5-15 servings per day unless you have a plan for achieving it. So when creating your weekly diet plan, you need to have a plan for how you are going to get 2-5 servings of fruit/veg/legumes at each (or at least most) of your meals.
• Ideally, you would also eat a variety of different colours at each meal and throughout the week. This means not just sticking to the 2-3 vegetables you marked as “ok” to eat as a child. If you don’t regularly consume fruits and veg, you will have to spend some time trying a variety of different fruits and vegetables, prepared in different ways, until you really figure out what ones you like best.

 

Carbohydrates:

• Ideally, most people should be eating a variety of whole grains, tubers (such as potatoes) and low GI carbohydrates as their main sources of carbohydrates. In practice, this means having 2-3 different carb sources that work for each of your main meals. There doesn’t need to be a massive amount of diversity, and some meals (like breakfast) may be something you have a staple 1-2 carb sources for, but it makes sense to have a few options for your evening meal, so you eat a greater range of nutrients across the week and also reduce dietary boredom.
• For most people, reducing the intake of refined carbohydrates, like sugar, sweets, and chocolates is a good idea, but that doesn’t mean you must NEVER include them in the diet. Some people do well with having a small amount of “fun” food every day, while others prefer to have slightly larger portions less frequently (unfortunately, large portions consumed frequently doesn’t work for most people). Understand which one you are, and plan accordingly. Planning to include some “fun” foods in the diet is something that most people don’t do, and it usually leads to excessive cravings and feelings of excessive dietary restriction. Don’t get me wrong, some people don’t want/need to include this stuff in the diet, or they may only include it very infrequently, but having a plan for this stuff, that respects your unique needs, can really help. This is especially the case during the transitionary phase from eating a poorer quality diet to a higher quality diet.

 

Fats:

• For most people, eating different fat sources throughout the week, with a focus on monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats is generally a good idea. When planning out your week of food, you will both have to account for the fatty content of meat and the cooking oils you are going to use for those meals. Obviously, some meats are higher in fats, such as red meat and fatty fish, so on the days you consume those, you may want to reduce your use of cooking oils (like olive oil), or fat sources at other meals. Most people, when choosing leaner protein sources, won’t have to think too much about baseline fat intake, and will only really have to worry about added fats (such as cooking oils).
• Reducing saturated fat intake is a good idea for most people, but that doesn’t mean you need to eliminate it. However, you won’t need to focus on this too much, if you are generally choosing leaner protein sources and use more plant-derived cooking oils.

 

Misc.:

• Consuming a variety of (low sodium) herbs and spices can add to the diet quality, and make the diet more enjoyable.
• Reducing table salt intake, or switching to a low-sodium brand can help. If table salt is to be consumed, iodised and potassium based is generally preferred.
• Fermented foods may be of benefit to the diet, so if you can plan to include them in the diet, wonderful, but this is not necessary.
• Organ meat consumption would also likely increase nutrient density for most people, and it is more environmentally sustainable to eat more than just the muscle meat of an animal, but some people are hesitant to eat organ meats.
• Eating out can be difficult, but it doesn’t need to be eliminated. Most restaurants care more about the way the food tastes, rather than the calorie/macro content of the meal, so when eating out, you will have to try to make better choices where you can and not just throw in the towel because it isn’t “perfect”. However, most healthful diets usually don’t frequently involve eating out multiple nights per week, so ideally, eating out (or getting takeaway) should be a low-frequency occurrence in the diet.

 

Daily

Now, I do realise this is still a bit abstract, and what really helps a lot more, is thinking about things on a meal-to-meal basis, and then pushing that out to a day-to-day basis. We still want to create 2-3 options for each major meal and to keep our eye to the week overall, but what can really help is actually having a rough structure for your meals, and knowing how to make better choices on any given day. This will need to be adjusted to fall in line with your unique calorie and macro targets, but for most people, most of their meals are going to look something like this:

 

 

We want roughly 50% of our plate to be vegetables, 20% to be protein, 20% to be carbohydrates, and about 10% to be healthy fats. You don’t need to have all your meals look exactly like this, but you should ideally strive to get the majority of your meals to look something similar to this (or at least follow a similar kind of structure). The exact proportions can be tweaked, and you may want to adjust this for your specific preference at each meal. This will usually mean playing around with lower or high carbs/fats at any given meal. However, the vast majority of your meals are going to be centred around some sort of protein source, some fruit/veg, and then you layer on the carbs/fats to meet your goals (be aware that the fats may be part of the protein choice or have been added during cooking). So having a rough idea of what a plate should look like for each of your meals, actually makes it quite easy to make a rough daily and weekly meal plan and then also adjust things when making food choices out and about in the real world. Of course, it won’t look perfectly the same for every meal, and some meals are especially tricky, but this is just a rough template to begin with and you are going to create an individualised plan of action for yourself. The beauty in the simplicity of this is that you can use this when you go out to eat, just as easily as you do when you make your own food at home. When you are out for a meal, by all means, enjoy yourself, but keep this general guide in your head and order accordingly. 

If we know what our plates need to roughly look like for each of our meals during the day, then we can actually start actually selecting foods to hit the targets for each of those meals, and ultimately create a few meal options, and then a rough weekly meal plan. Humans don’t eat macronutrients, we eat food, and the whole time we have been talking about macronutrients, you may have been wondering “what does that actually mean in terms of food?”, so let’s actually start thinking about what kind of food choices we can make to help us hit our targets.

 

Protein

It can be hard to conceptualise what foods actually contain protein, unless you have been actively trying to get more protein into your diet for a while already. Below you will find a list of protein sources, that should give you a better understanding of where you can find protein in your diet.

 

Meats

This is where you should get the majority of your protein (barring special dietary requirements).

• Poultry: Chicken, turkey, goose, game birds, etc.
• Red Meat: Beef, elk, buffalo, kangaroo, deer, wild game etc.
• Other Meats: Pork, lamb, lean ham, etc. (Ensure you buy the leaner cuts as these meats can be quite fatty.)
• Fish: Cod, salmon, tuna, sardines, kippers, mackerel, and canned fish. (Most fish are lean but the fattier fish are high in healthy fats)
• Shellfish: Mussels, oysters, scallops, prawns, lobsters, etc.
• Eggs: Eggs (Egg whites are almost pure protein, egg yolks contain fat and protein)

Dairy

Dairy protein is usually a very high-quality protein source, which also contains many other beneficial nutrients that are hard to get in the diet (such as calcium).

• Milk: Whole fat, low fat, protein milk, super milk, etc.
• Cheeses: Cheddar cheese, ricotta cheese, cottage cheese etc. (Cheeses can be very high in fat, so be aware of portion size and this is why we talk about foods rather than macronutrients, sometimes high protein foods may be even higher in other macronutrients too.)
• Yoghurts: Greek yoghurt, quark, natural yoghurt etc. (These foods include the benefits of bacterial cultures to improve gut health, but again can be high in fat or can contain undesirable additives like sugar)

 

Vegetable Proteins

Vegetable proteins are often “incomplete” (meaning they don’t contain all the amino acids we need), so it is wise to eat a variety of them or add dairy/meat.

• Raw Nuts & Seeds: These are also generally high in healthy fats and contain carbohydrates.
• Bean/Vegetable Protein: Soybeans, lentils, chickpeas, kidney beans, broccoli, rice, peas etc.
• Mycoprotein: Quorn.

 

Protein Supplements

These are available in powders/bars/drinks/etc. and there are a few types available.

• Whey Protein: A fast-digesting milk protein. Available in various forms, which can be confusing, but sticking with whey isolate will steer most people right.
• Casein Protein: A slow-digesting milk protein.
• Egg Protein: Primarily the protein albumin, this is a slow-digesting protein
• Vegetable Proteins: Can be found in the form of soy, pea, spirulina, hemp, etc
• Protein Bars: The protein found in these can actually vary in quality quite a bit. Some use very low-quality proteins (notably low leucine content proteins), and even though they contain higher amounts of protein than you would expect from a “chocolate bar”, they may not be ideal. Some of them do also contain other ingredients that can be beneficial or not, depending on the goal (for example, they often contain high amounts of sugar alcohols, which don’t sit well with some people’s digestive systems).

 

Now, some of these are higher or lower in protein, or they come along with other macronutrients, but hopefully, this has given you a rough idea of the types of food you should be consuming to get your protein intake up. For most people, you are going to mainly focus on meat as your main protein source in the diet, and the other sources are just additive to that. However, some of you may be more plant-based and thus may have to get your protein from the other options.

 

Fats

Fats can be quite easy to get in the diet, and for most people, they will get enough by virtue of eating animal products, using some sort of cooking oil, and then having them add up from the various little bits of fat in their other food choices. However, it can help to know where to focus your attention with fat, and what foods can be quite high in fat and thus can contribute to calories quite significantly despite not being a huge volume of food.

 

Animal Fat Sources

These can be high in mono/poly-unsaturated and saturated fats and very often contain essential fatty acids (EFAs).

• Fish: Salmon, cod, tuna, shellfish, sardines, kippers, mackerel, other fatty fish and fish oil capsules (fish are generally high in unsaturated fats and EFAs).
• Lean meat (Even when trimmed and skinless, these do still provide fat and depending on the source, they can be high in saturated fat so choose appropriately).
• Dairy (Can vary in fat content and can contain high levels of saturated fat).
• Eggs (Only the yolk contains the (mainly saturated) fat).

 

Vegetable Fat Sources

These are mostly high in mono and poly-unsaturated fats, and some do contain the EFAs.

• Flaxseed, canola/rapeseed, olive and other plant oils. 
• Nuts, nut butters and seeds.
• Avocados.
• Pre-made and homemade sauces (usually these contain some sort of vegetable oil, although some do contain butter and/or eggs).

 

Now, these are the main sources of fat in a good healthy diet, but they certainly aren’t all the potential sources of fat in the diet. But remember, right now we are just looking to create a rough list of foods we can use to make up our daily macro targets. In general, we do want to place some extra emphasis on getting enough omega-3s in the diet (the ones marked with EFA’s will generally be good sources for this). However, most people will struggle with this unless they do regularly consume fish. If you don’t your only real option is to supplement. Similarly, we do want to try and avoid excess saturated fat intake, and thus it would usually make sense to choose leaner cuts of meat where possible.

Fats are actually quite easy to overconsume or “accidentally” include too much of in the diet, and this even happens when people are “eating healthy”. For example, you will often see people make these “healthy” salads, but when you actually total up the calories and macros on them, you quickly notice that they are full of fats and the calories. All the avocado, nuts, seeds, olive oil and whatever other sauces quickly add up and lead to the “healthy” meal being an extremely high-calorie meal. Many snacks also just have a high fat content, and if you choose fattier cuts of meat or eat out at restaurants a lot, it is very easy to consume lots of fat. So usually, most people will initially have to pay a bit more attention to their fat intake, and as I said earlier, most people will usually easily hit their fat targets by virtue of their meat selection, any oils used while cooking and then any small amounts of fat in various other foods.

 

Carbohydrates 

Most people are familiar with carbohydrates and where to get them in their diet. Sourcing your carbohydrates usually isn’t too difficult, although there are still better and worse options to choose from. Usually, the better choices are the ones that have higher fibre content (although this isn’t always the case). While we do advocate setting a fibre target, if you make good carb selection choices and eat your vegetables, this is rarely something you have to focus on too much. It can be helpful to break the carbs down into two categories, complex and simple carbs, and very often I will tell people to think of these as “slow” and “fast” carbs. The reason this can be helpful is because you sometimes want to include stuff that is faster digesting (such as around workouts), and it can be helpful to know what choices you have.

 

Complex Carbohydrates

• Wholegrain cereals and wholegrain cereal products (like wholegrain wheat pasta or wholegrain bread).
• White and brown rice.
• Potatoes, yams, pumpkin, squash and other tubers.
• Carrots, parsnips & other root vegetables.

 

Simple Carbohydrates

• Refined cereals and cereal products.
• Fruit and berries (some of these can actually be quite high in fibre).
• Honey.

 

These categories certainly aren’t comprehensive or perfect, but they aren’t meant to be. For most people, figuring out where to get carbs in their diet isn’t an issue, and in reality, a bigger issue for most people is figuring out how to reduce their carbohydrate intake (as they eat too much to stay within their calorie targets). For the most part, you are likely going to select a handful of carbohydrate sources, such as rice, pasta, bread, potato etc and then you will modify the quantities of these to stay within your calorie needs. Fruits kind of straddle the two lanes of carbohydrates and vegetables, as they can be quite high in carbohydrates while also being quite high in fibre. I tend to just classify them as carb sources, and not worry too much about it.

Additionally, I am just going to put artificial sweeteners in this section, as they are usually used to mimic carbs (sugar) in the diet. For most people, there is no need to avoid artificial sweeteners in the diet, and they can be a very helpful tool in reducing your overall calorie intake (i.e. switching regular soft drinks to sugar-free versions). There are some concerns about these artificial sweeteners being carcinogenic (i.e. cancer-causing), and this is generally just fear-mongering. The quantities you would have to consume of these things to cause cancer are simply not something that normal humans would be able to do. However, having said all of that, I wouldn’t necessarily make artificial sweeteners a major focal point of the diet. They can be a nice addition, but they aren’t something that you necessarily NEED to be consuming every day.

 

Vegetables

The final thing that will make up most of your plate is vegetables. I don’t think we need to spend too long here, as most of you are aware by now that vegetables are good for you. Choose a variety of different colours and types of vegetables, some beans and other pulses, and add them to your plate. You don’t need to overthink this side of things. The vast majority of people don’t consume enough vegetables and arguing over which vegetables are better or worse really doesn’t help, you simply just need to eat more. Select 5-10 different vegetable options and some different bean/pulse options, mix and match them and that is your vegetables sorted.

Nutrients Of Concern

When we discussed “diet quantity” we noted the order of importance of things, so you could make better decisions with your overall diet structure. Well, similarly here, we need to know what we should prioritise to improve our diet quality. However, this is actually a much more complex topic, as different populations will need to prioritise different things. We also need to look at this from a general diet pattern perspective, not just a single nutrient perspective. We want to improve the overall diet pattern, and to do that, we need to know what things we should be prioritising. The previously discussed “good food guidelines” are helpful in giving you a rough framework for what a good diet pattern will generally look like, however, we can also be a bit more specific with things. You see, there are certain nutrients in the diet that people regularly under-consume. Now, of course, this is going to be influenced by the exact population you study (i.e. the diet of the average American is different than that of the average Irishman), but it does give us a launching point to start work on improving the diet quality. If we can focus on the nutrients that are most commonly under-consumed, then we can quickly get some big wins with diet quality. If you go from under-consuming certain nutrients, and potentially being in a state of (sub)clinical deficiency, to getting enough of those nutrients in your diet regularly, we would expect to see improvements in your overall general health. So, what nutrients are commonly under-consumed in the diet, and what foods should we be focusing on to ensure we get enough of these nutrients?

 

(Note: These are not ranked in order of importance, and some of these are going to be more or less important based on your previous/current intake and your unique needs)

Protein is commonly under-consumed in the diet, and can easily be solved by including a protein source (refer back to the discussions of where to get protein in the diet) at each of your meals. Aim to consume at least 1.5g of protein per kg per day, but ideally more (~2g/kg/day).

Fibre is also generally under-consumed in the diet, and this can be easily solved by eating more fruits, vegetables and legumes/pulses in the diet. Aim to consume 10-15g of fibre per 1,000 calories consumed.

Omega-3 fats are also generally under-consumed in the diet. Aiming to consume at least 2 servings of fatty fish per week or supplement with capsules of fish or algal-derived omega-3s can help ensure adequate omega-3 intake.

Iron is a nutrient that is very often under-consumed, especially in populations that have a greater need for iron (such as menstruating women). Ideally, you would get blood work done to assess where your iron intake needs are, and then with the advice of a doctor/dietician, eat or supplement accordingly. But as a baseline, aiming to consume red meat ~2 times per week can help to ensure adequate iron levels.

Iodine is very frequently under-consumed, especially in populations that don’t eat much seafood. You can improve your iodine intake by using iodised salt, iodine-fortified products (milk is often fortified), and seafood (especially stuff like seaweed and other sea vegetables as may be found in sushi for example).

Vitamin D levels are often quite low in many populations, and while you mainly get vitamin D from sun exposure, I am including it in a discussion of the diet because the easiest way to ensure you have adequate vitamin D levels is to supplement with vitamin D3. Ideally, you would supplement based on blood work, but for most people, consuming 1,000-2,000iu of vitamin D3 daily during the winter is generally safe and effective. You may want to continue this throughout the year, depending on where you live, what level of sun exposure you get and how your body responds to supplementation (some people will need to consume more or less to maintain adequate levels).

Vitamin B12 intake can be inadequate in some populations, especially those eating a predominantly plant-based diet. You can ensure adequate intake of B12 by eating animal products, fortified foods, or supplementing (you have 3 options here, supplementing with just B12, a B vitamin complex or a multi-vitamin).

Calcium intake can also be quite low in the general public, especially for certain populations who may need more. Dairy products, fish with small (soft) bones, and fortified products can be quite good sources of calcium. You can get calcium from dark leafy greens, but due to their phytate content, they may not be as good of a source. Higher protein intake does also enhance calcium absorption, so getting enough protein may also help with calcium levels.

Vitamin A intake can be insufficient in the general public. You can get vitamin A via conversion from carotenoids, and thus you can increase vitamin A intake by consuming brightly coloured vegetables (such as tomatoes, peppers, and some fruits) and various green leafy vegetables. Vitamin A can also be obtained from eating liver, eggs, some oily fish, certain dairy products, and fortified foods. You can supplement with vitamin A too. High intakes, especially in some populations (such as pregnant women), aren’t advisable, and while you should prioritise getting some of these foods in your diet, you don’t need to go overboard with your intake.

Magnesium is another nutrient that people generally under-consume, especially because most people under-consume fruits and vegetables (and fibre sources in general), and these are the best sources of magnesium in the diet. If you focus on eating enough fibre, from an array of fruits and vegetables (especially green leafy vegetables), you likely won’t have to overly focus on magnesium intake. Magnesium can also be found in many fortified breakfast cereals and other fortified foodstuffs, along with (dark) chocolate and certain seeds (pumpkin for example) and nuts.

Similarly, potassium is generally under-consumed in the diet of most people. You can remedy this by eating sufficient fruits, vegetables, and potatoes. You can also switch any sodium-based salt you use to a potassium base salt and further increase your potassium intake (while also reducing your sodium intake).

Vitamin E is another nutrient that is frequently under-consumed in the average diet. This is fairly easily solved by including nuts, seeds, and some vegetable oils in the diet.

Vitamin K is also very frequently under-consumed in the diet. Eating more fruits and vegetables (especially green leafy vegetables) will usually lead to sufficient vitamin K intake.

Choline is another nutrient that is very frequently under-consumed in the diet. To get sufficient choline in the diet, your focus should be on eating liver, meat, fish, dairy products and eggs.

Folate intake can also be quite low, especially in certain populations who may benefit from higher folate intake levels (such as those trying to become pregnant or who are in the early phases of being pregnant). You can get folate from vegetables (especially dark green leafy vegetables), fruits and fruit juices, nuts, beans, peas, seafood, eggs, dairy products, liver, meat, poultry, and grains. Many products are fortified with folate, which can make it easier to get sufficient folate in the diet.

Vitamin C intake can also be quite low in certain populations, such as students, who don’t eat a lot of fruits and vegetables. Eating enough fruits (especially citrus fruits) and vegetables will generally ensure you get enough vitamin C in the diet.

 

Tweaking your diet to try and ensure you are eating the foods that contain these nutrients will generally lead to a higher quality diet overall. You can use certain apps (like Cronometer) to help you assess your current intake of various nutrients (although this isn’t perfect). You can also take a multi-vitamin supplement to help you ensure you are getting an adequate intake of the various nutrients, however, this should generally be done alongside dietary improvements rather than instead of (i.e. you can’t just pop a multi-vitamin and call it all good, as you do still need to focus on improving the quality of your diet).

It should also be noted that there are some nutrients that are frequently consumed in excess, and improving the diet may involve reducing the consumption of certain foods alongside increasing the consumption of other foods.

Calories are very often over-consumed in the modern diet, and as such, you may simply have to eat less food overall to improve your diet quality.

Salt (sodium) is also very frequently consumed in excess. This is from a combination of adding salt to food and eating pre-packaged foods, snacks, fast food, takeaways and meals outside of the home in general. Reducing your intake of salt will likely improve your diet quality, and can be quite easily done once you pay attention to the salt content of foods and make better choices.

Saturated fat can also be frequently over-consumed, and this can usually be quite easily solved by reducing butter intake and choosing leaner cuts of meat. Saturated fat doesn’t need to be excluded from the diet, but reducing it to below 10% of calories is likely a good idea.

 

All-or-Nothing

Now, with all of that information, you will be able to choose foods to create a meal that roughly looks like the “average plate” discussed previously. Make 2-3 different breakfast, lunch and dinner meal options and you now have a rough week’s worth of meal ideas. You should be set! However, even with this, most people will still likely run into issues. The most common issue is falling into an all-or-nothing mentality, and finding yourself frequently “starting again next Monday”. This thought process isn’t helpful, but it can be quite difficult to get out of. One of the ways we find most effective for dealing with it is to use something like an 80/20 rule, where 80% of your food is dialled in and follows the guidelines, and then there is 20% wiggle room for “fun stuff” (it doesn’t have to be perfectly 80/20, it could be 90/10 or 70/30, but you get the idea). Having this 80/20 kind of thought process and system in place can be quite helpful in keeping you on track, as it isn’t a catastrophe that you make some poorer food choices, as you already know that you are only really aiming to be dialled in 80% of the time. Now, ideally, you would still stay within your calories and also hit your protein target, but sometimes this isn’t possible.

One reason it may be more difficult to stay on track is if you fill your diet with hyper-palatable foods that increase the likelihood that you will overeat. Some people do well with the 80/20 rule applied to every day, and can eat small amounts of very tasty foods each day and stay on track, while others would try to eat a small amount of those foods each day and simply end up eating more of them because they are very tasty. These individuals may be better off applying the 80/20 rule to the week or even month, rather than every day, and having bigger portions of these “fun” foods less regularly. There is no perfect generic system for this, and you have to find the systems that work for your lifestyle and needs.

 

Diet Quality Summary

Food selection doesn’t need to be complicated, you just need to put a system in place that allows you to eat a generally healthful diet and facilitates you hitting your calories and macro targets. This will usually mean making a plan for the week and having 2-3 different options for each of your major meals. If you know what generally good sources of each major macronutrient look like, you actually have a pretty robust system in place. Layering on a system to allow you to fit some “fun” stuff in the diet and you have a system that will serve you incredibly well in most situations.

 

Now, I know we have covered quite a bit so far, but we aren’t done yet. We have to discuss how you distribute your food across the day (and across the week). Some people call this food timing, but that doesn’t quite capture everything we need to discuss on this topic, so I am calling it food distribution. This section will be a lot quicker than previous sections, because while there is actually quite a lot of “noise” surrounding this topic, the topic is actually relatively simple (especially when you actually live in the real world and have to take into account the (im)practicality of different interventions).

 

Calorie Distribution

While we have briefly touched on food timing and how you distribute your food across the day when discussing the different macronutrients, calorie distribution warrants its own discussion and elaboration (we will further expand on the distribution of the macronutrients in a moment too). Now, there is actually quite a lot of background we could cover when discussing this topic, but as I said earlier, the conversation on this topic is very often a discussion of minutia and it doesn’t actually massively impact on our real-world practices. Having said that, we do still need to cover some stuff here, because you will be bombarded with various calorie distribution-based diet information from stuff about chrono-type diets, calorie cycling diets, intermittent fasting diets and much more. So we have to have a basic framework to work through this stuff and decide what makes sense in general, and then also how we can modify that to suit our lifestyle and unique response to the diet.

 

 

In general, calories should be relatively evenly spread throughout the day. Most people will sleep for ~8 hours, and that means you will have a 16-hour feeding window each day. Now most of you are simply not eating from the second you wake up until the second you go to sleep, so this isn’t exactly a perfect 16 hours, but you get the idea. We have roughly 16 hours to distribute our food across the day. What most people do is distribute the vast majority of calories towards the evening. They have a light breakfast (or skip it), maybe a medium-sized lunch, and then they have a big dinner and usually also some extra snacks/food after dinner too. So the food distribution across the day is heavily biased towards the later half of the 16 hours we have in our feeding window. Unfortunately, research would seem to suggest that this is actually one of the less healthy ways to distribute our calories. There is a field of research called “chrono-nutrition” which researches how nutrition and our circadian rhythm (basically our body’s internal body clock) interact, and to (almost comically) distil an expansive research base down to a few words, research in this area suggests that eating more of your food later in the day isn’t optimal from a health perspective and has many ill effects ranging from an increased risk for cardiovascular disease, metabolic disease and even some cancers. Now, there are actually quite a lot of complex interactions going on here, both with circadian rhythm (and its disruption) affecting eating patterns and eating patterns affecting circadian rhythms, but again, for this discussion, the nuances aren’t all that important. We want to know what to do. What the research in this area seems to suggest is that spreading your intake out throughout the day, and potentially even biasing more calorie consumption to the earlier part of the day, may be the best option for health, performance, satiety and potentially also body composition. Even if you can’t or don’t want to spread your intake out more evenly, the research in the field of chrononutrition and the research in the field of sleep science would seem to suggest that you should ideally leave some time between your last meal and the time you go to sleep. Something like 2-3 hours seems to be what works and is most practical for most people, which means if you go to sleep at 11 pm, you would have your last meal at 8 pm or 9 pm.

Eating in this way means you are left with a rough eating window of 13-14 hours, from when you wake up, to roughly 2-3 hours before you go to sleep (we discuss this all more in the sleep article). Within that window, you want to spread your intake out relatively evenly, potentially even biasing higher calorie intakes to earlier in the day. Now, having coached a lot of people, the most frequent objection to this is people saying they just aren’t hungry in the morning. To be fair, some people are just not hungry in the mornings and they may just do better with allocating more of their food to later in the day (by later I mean towards the middle of the day, not necessarily to the end of the day/feeding window). However, in most cases, the reason people say they are not hungry in the morning is because they have eaten a lot of food late in the evening the night before, or they are just very highly stressed in the morning (which can blunt hunger). People also often mask their hunger by taking stimulants like caffeine, which can also blunt hunger. If you reduce the stress in the morning by doing stuff like going to bed a bit earlier, not having 30 alarms wake you up, having things prepared and ready to go so you aren’t rushing around the house looking for things in the morning, not looking at your work emails or social media first thing upon waking, not hammering down huge quantities of stimulants (i.e. coffee) and any other things you can do to lower morning stress, and then you combine this with not eating 2-3 hours before bed, and in almost every single case, morning appetite returns. As I have seen this play out time and time again with clients, I know that a large portion of you reading this (to who this information directly applies to), will simply think, “Nah, that isn’t me” or “Nah, I can’t possibly reduce morning stress because of X, Y, Z”, and while that may actually be the case, for most of you, it isn’t and you would actually do a lot better if you did actually spread your calories out a bit more and eat in the morning. However, even if you can’t fully buy in to this, you can still improve things by more evenly spreading your calories across your own eating window, not saving the majority of your calories for the evening, and trying to keep 2-3 hours before bed a food free period. Basically, we just want a more even spread of things, rather than the extreme evening bias with calorie distribution that most people do.

Now, you may be wondering about protocols like time-restricted feeding (TRF), where you decrease your eating window to something like 8 hours instead of 16 hours. This is often called intermittent fasting, although that is technically something different (and we will discuss it in a moment). There are actually a variety of protocols out there for intermittent fasting, however, most of them are set up to continue the fasting period (the non-feeding window) further into the day. So with something like a 16-hour fasting window, you would stop eating at 9 pm at night and then not eat again until 1 pm the next day. I know all of you out there that identified with the “not hungry in the morning” discussion in the previous paragraph are foaming at the mouth now, and love to hear that there is an actual name for what you have been doing! However, the research on these types of diets still generally shows that biasing your eating window to earlier in the day, rather than later (often discussed as early TRF and delayed TRF in the research) is better and almost every protocol still has people not eating 2-3 hours before sleep. There may be some benefits to TRF, but this usually revolves around getting people to eat fewer calories (by having a cut-off for eating rather than allowing people to eat all day), and I am not convinced that the benefits are all that much better than just having a relatively even distribution of calories across the waking day, while also having 2-3 hours before bed as a food-free period. There is research ongoing in this area, but unfortunately, TRF with the majority of calories biased towards the later half of the day, especially if there is a high-calorie intake close to sleep, don’t seem to be optimal for health (again, I will refer you to the sleep article for an expanded discussion). While TRF protocols can be a tool in the toolbox, especially for those of you who are on low calories, they are not a magic bullet and they shouldn’t be used as a tool to just allow you to get away with poor diet habits. You will, unfortunately, see this very often in the fitness industry, as people who are on low calories save up large amounts of their calories for the end of the day, and to do this, they effectively just don’t eat all day and call it “intermittent fasting”. It is very often just disordered eating patterns, and these people very often just have very poor relationships with food in general. It is understandable to want to bias calories towards the evening and to come up with protocols that allow that, as a lot of the “fun” foods that people want to eat are seen as dinner foods or desert foods, and this is even more attractive if you have fallen into the habit of always having lots of “treats” in the evening (as an aside, this desire to treat yourself in the evening usually also resolves itself when you more evenly spread calories across the day, as you aren’t starving and feeling restricted all day), however, it isn’t an optimal practice and we would not recommend it as your baseline diet structure.

Now, the only thing that further modifies how we distribute our calories across the day is exercise. While we generally want to relatively evenly spread our calories across the day, we may want to also bias some more calories around exercise. This doesn’t have to be excessive, but it does make sense to ensure you are well fuelled for exercise (so calories biased before exercise) and that you recover from exercise effectively (so calories biased after exercise). Now, as I said, this doesn’t need to be excessive, but it is something that should be on your radar. It isn’t always possible, especially if you train first thing in the morning (most people aren’t going to get up 1-2 hours before their 6 am training session just so they can get a meal in, and we certainly wouldn’t recommend that, in general), but we can still have a general rule in place that suggest we try to ensure we are well fuelled before and after training. This obviously becomes more important the more serious or advanced your training is (i.e. there is a difference between how important this would be for those of you who are trying to perform at the highest level versus those of you who want to train for general health and fitness) and it also becomes a bigger concern if you are training multiple times per day (because you need to make sure you are well fuelled each session and recover as much as possible between each session). So we want to relatively evenly distribute our calories across the day, but have a slight bit more around when we train. This can be a bit difficult if you train very close to bedtime, but most people are not generally training within 1-2 hours of sleep anyway (as it generally causes people not to be able to get to sleep easily), so it is less of a concern.

Finally, while we have been discussing calorie distribution across the day, we can also think about this across the week. You see, there is no reason to only think of calories across a single day, and realistically, it is better to think of things on a longer time scale. What you do on average, is the thing that matters most. So theoretically, you could spread your calories across the week disproportionately (i.e. some days higher, some days lower) and once you are in and around the average level of calories you need to be for any given day then you will move towards your goal, especially if you are only concerned about body composition (i.e. you need to eat 2000 calories per day, that is 14,000 calories per week, so you could eat 1500 for 5 days and 3250 on the 6th and 7th day and still be eating 2000 calories on average for that week). This is somewhat true, and it is probably best to think of things on average, as some days are going to be slightly above or below your calorie targets. However, people very often run into trouble with this thought process and try to “save” calories for the weekend, and starve themselves Monday to Friday to do so. This generally doesn’t lead to the best results (as you are under-fuelled most of the time, and even if you are losing fat, you are likely losing muscle and your performance (in the gym and in life) is probably not optimal either), and more often than not, it just leads people to binge eat. The binge eating either happens midweek (i.e. by Wednesday you end up starving at eating way more than 1500 calories), or it occurs on the weekend itself (i.e. you think you are only going to eat 3250 on Saturday and Sunday, but you end up eating way more because you have felt so restricted all week, you simply can’t stop yourself once the brakes are off). So in theory, yeah, you can view things on a longer time scale than a single day, but this only works when the calorie differences are actually quite small (i.e. 100-200 for a given day), and for some people, it isn’t worth it to try as they will actually just end up with a worse relationship with food.

Somewhat related to this is calorie cycling, where you alternate various calorie levels across the week. So you may have certain days as higher calorie days, some days as medium calorie days and other days as low-calorie days. A more extreme form of this would be intermittent fasting where you simply don’t eat (or consume very little food) on some days. There are potential benefits to cycling calories across the week, and certain protocols are set up more intelligently than others. However, this concept oftentimes just makes dieting more complicated. It can be helpful for people with days with very high-calorie output (such as athletes with very high training volumes or manual labourers), but similarly to what we discussed about viewing things on a scale longer than 24 hours, there isn’t a massive benefit to calorie cycling versus just eating relatively consistently across the week. Small differences can make sense, but eating in a deficit a few days per week and then eating in a surplus on other days isn’t going to make you lose fat and build muscle, the average is what matters. There may be some benefits, in certain circumstances, but in general, these approaches generally just make building consistent and sustainable diet structures harder, not easier. It is very easy to fall into the trap of thinking there is some massive benefit to calorie cycling, but as a thought experiment, if you simply count your days from midday to midday rather than midnight to midnight, the calorie distribution of many of these calorie cycling approaches simply cease to make any sense and you will quickly realise that it is average calorie intake that matters the most.

There are potential benefits to fasting, but a surprising amount of these benefits can simply be achieved via calorie restriction itself. It doesn’t have to be “no calories”, it just has to be “less calories”. Some people may need a bigger signal to gain benefits (i.e. the deficit needs to be larger), but most people will get a lot of the benefits that are often touted for fasting by virtue of eating a calorie deficit for a period of time. Some populations may benefit from periods of no food intake, such as may be suggested with true intermittent fasting (protocols such as 5:2 where you don’t eat, or eat very little 2 days each week). However, this is usually because it allows for better adherence to a larger deficit, which may be necessary for time-sensitive medical issues (such as rapidly reducing organ fat deposits in people with the early stages of type 2 diabetes) rather than any unique benefits to fasting itself.

 

Calorie Distribution Summary

I know we covered a lot there, but the rest of this section will be a lot quicker don’t worry. To summarise the information in this sub-section; it makes sense to relatively evenly spread your calorie intake out across the day, potentially biasing intake earlier in the day and around exercise, and ideally stopping food intake 2-3 hours before sleep. If you can do that on most of your days you will be in a very good place with the diet in general (there are always going to be situations like meals out, parties, celebrations etc that disrupt this). While there are potentially some situations where we might need to fine-tune calorie distribution across the day, this generally only applies to athletes who are training multiple times per day and are looking to maximise their performance in each session.

 

Macronutrient Distribution

You will hopefully not be surprised to find out that the macronutrient distribution guidelines broadly follow the calorie distribution guidelines. As we generally recommend eating fairly mixed macronutrient meals, you should have seen this coming. However, there are a few things I want to just briefly discuss to help you make good macronutrient timing choices.

 

Protein Distribution

Is there a best time to eat protein? This is a question that a lot of people wonder about, especially those interested in training performance and muscle building. Luckily, the answer isn’t too complicated, however, some people do find it hard to implement. Ideally, we want to relatively evenly spread our protein intake out across the day. If we want to get really specific, we ideally want to have 3-5 leucine adequate protein feedings spread across the day (leucine is an amino acid, and 3-5g is probably the adequate dose in this context, which is probably ~20-30g of actual protein). This will generally result in better muscle building/maintenance and performance, and it usually results in better dietary adherence overall. Protein is the most satiating macronutrient (i.e. it keeps you fuller for longer), and as such, it can actually make sticking to your diet a lot easier overall. Ideally, you would consume some protein at every meal you eat, and beyond that, you don’t need to think about timing your protein intake too much. Now, one of the issues here is that people very often didn’t grow up consuming significant amounts of protein at the breakfast meal, and thus struggle in adulthood to get a more equal distribution of protein across the day. So it is important to come up with morning meal ideas that do contain protein because you won’t hit your protein target or ideally space your intake across the day by accident.

While you will see quite a bit of hype about protein timing around workouts, a lot of this is actually rather overhyped. Once you are spreading your calories and protein out relatively evenly across the day, then protein timing around the workout becomes less important. Yes, it certainly makes sense to supply the body with protein in either the before/during/after workout period, or some combination of all of them, but if you are following the rest of the guidelines outlined in this article, you will naturally do that and don’t need to put a huge focus on this. Eat a meal within the 1-3 hours before a workout, and another meal within the 1-3 hours after a workout and you are all good (assuming your meals contain protein, which they should). You certainly don’t need to be slamming a post-workout protein shake for your workout to be productive. That can certainly be a good strategy for some, but there is no magic to it.

 

Fat Distribution

Is there a best time to eat fats? To an extent, no there isn’t a best time to consume your fats. Some people will do better with lower carbohydrates, and as a result higher fats, in the morning and vice versa in the evening. But a lot of this is just personal preference. I generally recommend people just spread fat intake throughout the day, and if you are eating mainly whole foods it won’t be hard to get a good spread of fat throughout the day. Fats are also quite satiating, as they slow digestion down a bit and create a more even release of nutrients into the blood. So it is a good idea to spread your fat intake across the day as a baseline practice, although there may be times when you don’t want this slower release of nutrients. For example, if you are trying to get a quicker hit of energy and nutrients before your workout, you may want to have a smaller quantity of fats and prioritise carbohydrates at that meal. Fat timing really doesn’t need to be complicated, just relatively evenly spread it across the day, and don’t prioritise it around the workout window.

 

Carbohydrate Distribution

Is there a best time to eat carbs? There really isn’t a best time for carbohydrate intake, however, there are potentially times when you want to prioritise them more. The same general approach applies, where you just want a fairly even spread of carbohydrates across the day, however, with carbohydrates, you will likely want to bias some of your intake around your workouts. You don’t need to go crazy with this, but making sure you have some carbs in the system before a workout and then restocking carbs after your workout makes sense. So the base is a relatively even spread, and then you just put a bit more focus on them around your workouts.

There is a degree of individuality to this, and you may find certain carbohydrate distribution patterns suit you better than others, but the only way you can figure this out is if you start from that baseline of a relatively even spread across the day. Very often you will see people say that carbs don’t work for them in the morning, and when you look at the meal they had it was like 95% refined carbs (i.e. something like sugary cereal and milk). This isn’t really a fair test of whether carbs work for you in the morning, because if you ate a meal of basically sugar at any time, it wasn’t going to work for you. So to figure out what works for you, you do actually have to start from a baseline of relatively mixed macronutrient meals spread evenly throughout the day. Spread your carbs relatively evenly across the day, potentially biasing more around your workouts, and then also using the feedback of how your energy levels are across the day to help your further refine your approach.

 

Fibre Distribution

There is no best timing strategy with fibre and spreading fibre (and thus vegetable) intake throughout the whole day will likely give the best results. This will help stabilise blood sugar to some extent, but also ensure you are getting a variety of nutrients throughout the day. The only time I am not a huge fan of lots of fibre is just before training as most people find they can feel a bit bloated and somewhat sluggish if they overconsume fibre here. You could also argue that you don’t want to prioritise fibre after training, so you can restock your carb stores a little bit quicker, but this really isn’t a huge issue. The thing most people will usually struggle with here is getting some fibre at breakfast, and maybe even the lunch meal too. Similar to protein, most people really only get their fibre in during that evening meal, so you will likely have to actually focus a bit more on getting more fruits/veg/legumes at the other meals of the day.

 

Water Distribution

I am including this in the discussion because as mentioned previously, water could be considered a macronutrient and a lot of people just kind of ignore it. Similarly to the general recommendations, we just want to space our water intake out relatively evenly across the day. We generally recommend people aim to consume enough water across the day so that they have >5 urinations per day, with at least 3 of them being clear(er). Ideally, we would prioritise water intake before during and after workouts too, and we generally recommend having clear urinations before/during/after your workouts as a marker of good water intake and distribution. You don’t have to obsess over this, but it does make a lot of sense to just drink water fairly evenly across the day if you want to ensure you are well hydrated across the day. Something that can help with this is having a water bottle that you bring with you wherever you go. Another habit that can help is to aim to drink 250-500mL of water first thing in the morning. I don’t mean you need to gulp this down the morning you wake up, but as you are likely to wake up mildly dehydrated from not consuming water overnight and sweating all night, it makes sense to rehydrate first thing. Some people do find that they need to taper their water intake off closer to bed, as drinking too close to bed can cause them to wake up during the night needing to urinate. So while we recommend a relatively even spread across the day, you could argue that biasing your intake earlier in the day and then similarly to not eating in the 2-3 hours before bed, you want to reduce your water intake the closer you get to your bedtime.

 

Macronutrient Distribution Summary

Fairly evenly spread your macronutrients across the day, in line with calorie distribution. Ensure you eat sufficient quantities of protein 3-5 times spread across the day. Bias a bit more nutrient intake around your workouts. Don’t overthink it.

 

Now, before we finish up, I would like to lay out a rough timeline for the diet. What I mean by this is, how to set up the diet to actually produce the results that you want and eventually get to a stage where you can put the diet on autopilot. The vast majority of you reading this are interested in improving your diet so you can improve your health, body composition, performance or some combination of those goals. You aren’t just looking to improve your diet just for the sake of it. So, how do we organise a timeline that allows us to achieve those goals and then eventually put things on autopilot so we don’t have to constantly allocate time to think about the diet? This is actually an easier question to answer when you have a specific person or population in front of you, as you can set things up for their exact needs, however, this is a general article and as such, I have to give you a somewhat generic timeline based on the needs of the masses rather than your specific needs. So you may need to adjust things a little bit for your own needs, or you may want to jump into the timeline at different stages rather than just following it through from start to finish.

One of the most frequent questions you see asked in the health and fitness world is whether someone should focus on losing weight or focus on building muscle and gaining weight first (often phrased like “should I bulk or cut?”). This is obviously going to be dependent on the individual and their starting point, but as the general population in the Western world (and increasingly lots of the other parts of the world too) is overweight and at a high risk of cardio-metabolic disease(s), the answer is quite clear. Most people are overweight so getting to a healthy weight range first and foremost should always be the goal. Now, a healthy weight range is actually quite hard to define perfectly, however, we can use three metrics to help us decide where this is for the average person.

The first is body mass index (BMI), which isn’t perfect, but it is decent for giving us a rough idea of where our weight should probably fall within. BMI is calculated by dividing your weight (in kg) by your height (in metres) squared. You don’t need to get pen and paper out and work this out, there are many calculators or tables online which will work this out for you very quickly. Ideally, we want our BMI to fall between 18.5 to 24.9, and this is often called the “healthy range”. Below 18.5 is considered underweight, between 25-29.9 is considered overweight, and over 30 is considered obese. Now, there are some slight differences in these numbers based on ethnicity and race, but these are rough figures anyway and we don’t need to be dogmatic about them. There are many healthy people that fall just outside the ranges, and many unhealthy people that fall within the healthy range, so they aren’t the be-all and end-all numbers.

This brings us to the second metric we can use to determine what a healthy weight is for us. You see, you can have a healthy BMI but have very low levels of muscle mass and very high levels of body fat, and this isn’t optimal for health. We can use waist circumference measurements to help us identify if we have excess fat despite falling within a healthy BMI. A simple tape measurement of your waist (roughly around the midpoint between the top of your hip and the bottom of your ribs) does actually tell us quite a bit about health. You see, the fat stored around the abdomen, especially inside the abdominal cavity and around the organs, is actually some of the least healthy fat to have. Ideally, you want your measurements to be below 94cm (37ins) if you are a man, and 80cm (31.5ins) if you are a woman. If you are a healthy BMI and your measurements are above that, then you may still be at greater risk for ill health. If your waist measurements are above 102cm (40ins) as a man or 88cm (34ins) as a woman, then you are at a much higher risk of cardio-metabolic disease and fat loss should be a priority, regardless of BMI.

However, all of this still isn’t perfect and what we really want to know is what your body composition ratios actually are. What I mean by that is, we want to know what percentage of your total weight is made up of body fat and what is made up of lean mass (bones, organs, muscles etc). This would give us a much better picture of things, as you would be able to know where you fall with regard to the weight guidelines, waist guidelines and overall body composition guidelines. However, body composition is actually quite difficult to measure, even with our best technology. There are different tools that you can use to measure body composition from callipers to dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DEXA), and while some methods are better than others, none of them is perfect. However, they can still be useful tools, as long as they are consistent. Ideally, you want to aim to have body fat levels somewhere in the range of 8-20% if you are a man and 15-30% if you are a woman. We can argue about the exact numbers for the top and bottom end of the range, but this is both individualised and depends on the exact population of focus. However, on average, somewhere within that range seems to be a good idea for health.

 

 

So, returning to the initial question of “should I cut or should I bulk”, we can now answer this and also set up a rough timeline, that you now have the knowledge to decide where you fit within it. As a very general rule, if you are above 16-18% body fat as a man, or 25-27% as a woman, your goal should probably be fat loss first. If you are in the 10-15% body fat range for men, or 15-24% body fat range for women, then you can either focus on either reducing your body fat further or gaining muscle. If your waist measurement is above 94cm (37ins) if you are a man, and 80cm (31.5ins) if you are a woman, then you probably want to focus on fat loss first. If your BMI is over 25, then you should probably focus on fat loss first. As around two-thirds (somewhere in the range of 50-70% depending on the exact nation) of people in most developed nations are classed as overweight, the chances are, you fall above these ranges. As a result, for most people, the start of the plan of action is going to involve weight loss. The goal will be to actively diet down to the lower levels of the healthy body fat range, or at the very least get into the healthy range. You don’t have to get down to the absolute bottom of the range, but we do want to get fairly deep into the healthy zone of body fat as this gives us a bigger buffer to allow us to do other things in future. Plus it also tends to be the place where most people experience better health outcomes. So our first goal is going to be setting up the diet, to take you from wherever you are currently and get you closer to ~12% for guys and ~20% for women. We also want to do this in a sustainable manner, that minimises the chance of muscle loss, while maximising potential muscle growth. To do this, we ideally want weight loss to average a drop of 0.5-1% bodyweight per week, and we are going to limit the time we spend dieting to 16-week blocks. We are doing this because it tends to limit the loss of muscle, while also minimising the overall dietary restraint required to achieve the results (i.e. it is not a quick fix fat loss phase that results in binge eating behaviours developing), it ensures you have a deadline to work towards and it means you don’t end up just permanently dieting.

Now the individual may not get close to the level of body fat we are suggesting in that 16 weeks, however, we don’t want to keep pushing fat loss and dig ourselves further into a place that has us really feeling all those negative adaptations to dieting. You can, of course, go for longer, and the more experienced you are at nutrition and dieting, the more aggressive you can be with fat loss and still go for longer. However, for first-time dieters with less experience, we feel 16 weeks at a 0.5-1% drop per week is a good time frame to see good results. After this, you should schedule a diet break, where you eat at maintenance for 2-4 weeks. This will help in trying to reduce or completely ameliorate the negative adaptations that may be felt during the diet. It also gets you used to eating at maintenance levels, which is important for long-term success as most people will only work on their diet when looking to lose fat and then they go right back to poor eating habits and gain the fat back. After a block of eating at maintenance, you can either go back to dieting (to try to get to lower body fat levels or to actually reach the healthy zone if you didn’t reach it initially) or you can transition into gaining weight or if you are happy with where you are, you can simply continue to eat in and around maintenance.

If you choose to gain weight, we need to set the diet up in a way that minimises fat gain, pays respect to realistic rates of muscle gain and of course doesn’t have us reaching the top end of the body fat range too quickly. You have two options with this, either you go for a predetermined time frame (12-16 weeks is generally the bare minimum I will recommend here, as muscle gain is very slow) or you keep gaining until you reach the top end of the range. Whichever option you choose, once you reach the goal (time or body fat), you should eat at maintenance again for 2-4 weeks before starting to diet down again to the bottom end of the range. This process can be repeated forever until you reach the ideal physique. Obviously, the closer you are to your genetic limit of muscle gain, the slower the rate of muscle growth you will be able to achieve. Therefore, the closer in body fat you should stay to the low end. There is no point in gaining 8kg of body fat, to go from 90kg to 98kg, if you only gain 100g of muscle in that time period. You will then have to risk losing that muscle by dieting to lose the excess weight. The closer you are to your genetic limit, the less weight you should be gaining, the slower your rate of gain should be, and the leaner you should be staying year-round. We will ideally fall into a rate of gain of less than 0.5-1kg per month (or half that if you are a woman), although the newer you are, the more you can likely gain, while the longer you have been doing this the less you should be looking to gain.

 

 

So the plan will effectively look like this for most people:

1. Eat at maintenance for 2-4 weeks to establish good eating habits and diet structure.
2. Eat in a small deficit for 8-16 weeks, aiming to lose 0.5-1% of body weight per week.
3. Eat at maintenance for 2-4 weeks to have a break from being in a deficit and to practice eating at maintenance.
4. Decide whether you need to gain more muscle or get leaner.
5. If you need to get leaner, then repeat steps 2-4 until you are at your desired body fat levels.
6. If you decide to gain more muscle, then you simply eat in a surplus for a predetermined length of time or until you hit the upper end of the body fat range.
7. After the gaining phase, you eat at maintenance for 2-4 weeks.
8. Most people will then transition back to a deficit and basically repeat steps 2-3 until they are at the body fat levels that they are happy with.
9. This can be repeated until the desired results are accomplished.
10. Most people will then eat in and around maintenance going forward, and focus on good diet habits rather than gaining or losing weight.

 

If you are consistently failing to achieve your fat loss goals and find yourself stuck in a constant loop of getting to step 4 and deciding “more fat loss” is always the next step, you need to reassess the plan of action. Don’t get caught in the infinite diet loop where you get all of the negatives of dieting (having to eat less food the majority of the time) but never actually achieve your fat loss goals, as this is just a terrible place to find yourself. Now, you may actually have large amounts of fat to lose, and you may simply just need to diet for longer to lose all of the fat to get to the healthy range, so repeating steps 2-3 a few times is not actually a problem. Slow and steady does win the race, but it is rare that you would need to spend more than 2 years dieting, and unfortunately, you can very often find people who find themselves in a loop of dieting for 5+ years and never actually getting to their goals. I sometimes just like to have an arbitrary 3:1 rule of dieting phases to gaining phases, meaning you are only allowed to run 3 dieting phases back to back before you have to run a gaining phase. This can be helpful in breaking the cycle of always finding yourself in a deficit, but the rule is somewhat arbitrary.

Now, some people won’t have to follow a timeline like this, and they will just need to eat in and around maintenance calories and can just focus on really improving their diet quality. Unfortunately, this isn’t most people. Most people will need to focus on weight loss if they want to improve their health. It certainly doesn’t need to be and (outside of medical reasons) I would argue that it probably should not be the main focus, but the reality is, most people will improve their health by losing weight. Most people will also improve their health by gaining muscle, and this leaves us in a situation where most people are going to have to dedicate time to losing body fat for a while and then they will have to dedicate some time to gaining muscle. They will most likely have to go through multiple cycles of this. You can certainly accomplish both goals at the same time, but for most, this is unrealistic and just leads to a situation where you end up not making significant progress towards either goal. Again, I am trying to write this article for “most people” and you may fall outside of that, or have very specific goals or needs. However, the baseline foundations laid out in this article will still apply in 99% of cases.

So that’s the rough longer-term plan, but there is some more planning that I like to layer on top of this. That is planning for your longer-term implementation strategies. The goal is usually not to have to use an app to track your calories and macros for the rest of your life. The vast majority of people are not thinking, “I can’t wait to still be using myfitnesspal when I am 90 years old!” As such, we need to have a plan for creating a more sustainable long-term approach. However, the vast majority of people also need some help with staying on track and they need to actually learn how to actually eat in a way that allows them to get all of their calorie/macro needs. So, I am going to lay out a rough timeline for how to get from tracking to eating “intuitively” (in reality, there really is nothing intuitive about eating, as eating intuitively is what has led the vast majority of people to become overweight/obese).

There are many ways to do this, and we teach a few different methods to our coaches on our certification program and we utilise different methods with different coaching clients, but this is the method that seems to work quite well most repeatedly (it is the way that the vast majority of health and fitness professionals went on the journey, even if they now try to sell you a different method).

 

The process is actually quite simple:

• use calorie and macro tracking to learn how to eat in a way that hits your targets,
• build a rough idea of how to structure your day to hit those targets,
• build good food habits,
• and then transition away from having to track food intake, instead relying on those good food habits.

 

It really doesn’t need to be more complicated than that, but very often you will see people fail long-term because they have no process for transitioning away from tracking, or they have not actually built a good meal structure and understanding of how to hit their targets (this usually happens when people just try to wing it every day while tracking, eating at different times, with different foods and overall, they just don’t have an idea of what an average day should look like with good meal structure and food selection habits in place). If you set things up with the goal in mind that you are simply using tracking as a tool to help you create good food habits, then it becomes very easy to transition away from tracking in future. You may struggle initially with moving away from tracking, and some people need to do it slower than others, but the vast majority of people are able to transition away from tracking within 1-3 months. You may periodically go back to tracking, just to ensure that what you are eating is actually aligned with where you think it is. However, overall, if you follow this process, you eventually get to a stage where you just need to make small tweaks to your rough daily meal structure to push you in one direction or another. If you know what meals roughly look like for you when you are eating in a 300-calorie deficit, eating at maintenance, and eating in a 300-calorie surplus, you don’t really need to actively track every single thing you eat. If you have learned how to make changes based on how your weight and/or body composition is changing, you don’t need to change your targets on an app, you can simply just adjust your meals accordingly.

 

We have covered a lot so far, and while we certainly didn’t cover every single possible nuance, you hopefully now have a good general idea about how to set up a successful diet. I know a few of you just wanted the quick summary of what to do, and you have skipped the rest of the article so far, so here you go, here is a quick summary.

 

The general guidelines can be summed up as follows:

• Calories are determined based on your current intake and how your body weight is changing with respect to that. The process is simple enough, track your current intake every day for a week or two using a calorie tracking app such as myfitnesspal. Assess how your weight has changed across that week or two, and that will tell you if you are in a surplus, maintenance or a deficit (if you lose weight you are in a deficit, if you gain weight you are in a surplus, and if your weight stays the same, you are at maintenance). You could use a calorie calculator, but this is just a best guess, and you will still have to use real-world feedback. You must be accurate with tracking your intake over at least a week, as what you eat on a single day is less important than the average over time. Some people eat very little Monday to Friday and then eat an enormous amount on the weekends, which means their daily average intake is much higher than they think. This is one of the most common things we see, and this is why it is important to be accurate in your assessment of your current intake across at least a week (and ideally 2 weeks).
• Set your calories in and around maintenance, focus on dialling in good food habits and getting your macronutrient intake and general meal structure where it should be, and see how your body responds to eating that way for ~2 weeks. If you want to lose weight, reduce calories by a small amount (200-300 calories), if you want to gain weight, increase calories by a small amount (200-300 calories) and only adjust your calories when you have stalled for more than 2 weeks.
• Most people will do best if they fairly evenly distribute their calories across the day, rather than eating large amounts at any singular time or going for long periods of time without food. Most people would be best served by leaving a 2-3 hour gap between their last meal and bedtime, and you could make a strong argument for biasing more of your calorie intake to the earlier portion of the day.
• Protein should be set at 1.8 to 2.2 grams per kilogram body weight, for most people, for most goals. While you can get away with less, there are no downsides (physiologically, and assuming you have no illness that would be affected negatively by increased protein intake) and only benefits from getting your protein into the 1.8 to 2.2g/kg range. Ideally, we would like to see this spread across 3-5 meals per day.
• Fats should be set as 0.8-1 grams per kilogram body weight. Most people would do best to reduce their saturated fat intake to less than 10% of their calories, while also aiming to get at least 1-3g of the omega-3s (EPA and DHA) per day, or 7-21g across the week (as fats can be stored in the body).
• Carbohydrates should be set as the amount the remaining calories allow for. Ideally, you would choose carb sources that are less refined, and offer more nutrients to the diet than just carbohydrates.
• Fibre should be 10-15 grams per 1000 calories. This is usually an area that people fall down on, as they don’t eat enough vegetables. Getting sufficient fibre, without the use of supplements is usually a good sign that food selection practices (i.e. eating enough fruit and vegetables) are in a good place.
• Eat the rainbow and vary your food selection. Food isn’t supposed to be boring. Eat a variety of different foods each week, alternating your protein, carb, fat and fibre sources.
• Water should be consumed at roughly 40mL per kg or 1.5mL of water per calorie eaten, spread relatively evenly throughout the day. You should then refine this intake and distribution so that you are urinating relatively clear ~5+ times per day.
• You should make adjustments that account for you as an individual, while paying respect to the overall guidelines. The guidelines are just a very rough starting point. They certainly aren’t the be-all and end-all, and they will likely need to be modified for you and your life situation, but they do serve as a good general baseline. There is a lot of nuance to the guidelines, and good rationales for doing something slightly different. However, if you are doing something completely counter to these guidelines, you really should have a very clear rationale and explanation for that.

 

If you can follow those guidelines, you will be doing a pretty damn good job with the diet!

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