Now, before we finish up this series of articles on the diet, I would like to discuss longer term diet planning and lay out a rough timeline for the diet. What I mean by longer term diet planning 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?
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Longer Term Diet Planning
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. As a result, 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. Alternatively, you may want to get online coaching to help you dial things in specifically for your needs.
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 cut or bulk?”). 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 generally quite clear.
Most people are overweight so getting to a healthy weight range first and foremost should almost 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.
Body Mass Index
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 and 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, and some athletes may be in the higher ranges, but still be healthy, 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. They simply give us a rough range of what we should be looking to achieve.
Waist Circumference
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.
Body Fat Levels
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.
Fat Free Mass Index
We must also take into account muscle mass, which is a little bit outside the scope of this article to fully discuss because it involves a lot of interplay between exercise and nutrition. But needless to say, you should have sufficient muscle mass if you want to be in peak health. This is somewhat accounted for by being within a good BMI range, and still being in the green for the other metrics, but you can be a bit more precise with things.
How do we be more precise? Well, we can be a bit more precise by assessing fat free mass index (FFMI). FFMI allows us to assess how much muscle mass you have relative to your height, standardised against the general population. So with FFMI we are better able to see if your body composition is actually where we ideally want it to be. This can then go on to inform our decisions about whether you should focus on fat loss or muscle gain.
The following calculators can help you to assess where you currently are, and thus will be able to point you in the right direction with how you should be organising your longer term diet planning.
Should I Cut or Should I Bulk?
So, returning to the initial topic of longer term diet planning, we can begin to answer the age old question of “should I cut or should I bulk?”
We can now answer this and also set up a rough timeline for things, as 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 countries 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.
Diet Down First
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 roughly 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.
Eat at Maintenance
Now you may not get close to the level of body fat we are suggesting or that you ultimately desire in those 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.
Gaining
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.
Longer Term Diet Planning Overview
So the plan will effectively look like this for most people:
- Eat at maintenance for 2-4 weeks to establish good eating habits and diet structure.
- Eat in a small deficit for 8-16 weeks, aiming to lose 0.5-1% of body weight per week.
- Eat at maintenance for 2-4 weeks to have a break from being in a deficit and to practice eating at maintenance.
- Decide whether you need to gain more muscle or get leaner.
- If you need to get leaner, then repeat steps 2-4 until you are at your desired body fat levels.
- 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.
- After the gaining phase, you eat at maintenance for 2-4 weeks.
- 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.
- This can be repeated until the desired results are accomplished.
- 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 series will still apply in 99% of cases.
Longer Term Diet Implementation Strategies
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 and this is why I generally prefer to talk about eating intentionally).
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.
Now, there is more to this, and we go through a more extensive system in our nutrition coaching certification course, but this should hopefully get you started.
Final Thoughts On Longer Term Diet Planning
Most people fail their diets because they simply don’t think long term. They set up the diet for the here and now, and fail to actually map things out into the future. So things go well for a little while, but over time, the wheels fall off the wagon. So, don’t make the same mistake and actually think through your longer term diet planning.
Ultimately, you are going to need to optimise your diet and tailor it to your specific goals. You can do this by reaching out to us and getting online coaching, or alternatively, by interacting with our free content. This article series will show you the basics of how to dial in your nutrition, but if you have specific goals, you will generally need a more specific approach to the diet.
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 exercise and nutrition. You can always stay up to date with our latest content by subscribing to our newsletter.
Finally, if you want to learn how to coach nutrition, then consider our Nutrition Coach Certification course, and if you want to learn to get better at exercise program design, then consider our course on exercise program design. We do have other courses available too. If you don’t understand something, or you just need clarification, you can always reach out to us on Instagram or via email.
The previous article in this series is about Diet Quality Overview and the next article in this series is How To Set Up Your Diet Overview, if you are interested in continuing to learn about nutrition. You can also go to our nutrition hub to find more nutrition content.
