By Sahil Handa. Sahil is a student at Harvard University as well as a health and fitness aficionado.
Healthy Eating as a Way of Life
“Diet” is a bad word, because it implies temporariness. It assumes that one day you will be off the diet; that one way of eating will get you from A to B and then you can go back to what you were doing before. In reality, however, that isn’t how nutrition works at all. When deciding whether to build muscle, lose muscle, gain fat, or lose fat, your body responds to changes in caloric consumption. That is, it stores excess energy or uses existing tissue for energy based upon whether it believes itself to be in a situation of surplus or scarcity. It’s no surprise that so many people massively improve their bodies only to head twice as fast in the opposite direction. If you force yourself to follow a diet that is inherently unsustainable, your eventual continuous cheating on that diet will inevitably undo much of the good work that it did in the first place.
The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good
Enter flexible dieting, a mode of eating based on the idea that dietary adherence is more important than dietary perfection.[1] In short, followers of a flexible approach take note of how their daily food intake aligns with various macronutrient and micronutrient goals. It’s not a diet, but an intuitive approach to eating. No single food is off limits – you can eat ice cream, chocolate, french fries, and pizza – as long as they fit into your daily nutritional goals.[2]
So, what are these nutritional goals, and how do they enable someone to eat junk food and improve their body at the same time? In simple terms, these “nutrition goals” are a calculation of what your body needs to maintain a caloric surplus or caloric deficit. That is, the amount of calories your body needs, given your age, weight, and activity level, to gain weight or lose weight.[3]
See, the body’s fat storage facilities can be thought of like a savings account. When you eat a food, your digestive system doesn’t simply metabolize that food the way it entered your mouth. It breaks it down into its constituent elements – protein, carbohydrates, and fat – along with the vitamins and minerals stored alongside. Along with activity level, it is the total amount of these macronutrients the body receives that dictates whether energy is expended from the body or retained by the body. If the body needs to use more energy that it has consumed, it is forced to lose mass. If the body has consumed more energy than to needs to use, it is forced to store mass. It is certainly true that hormones and food types can also have a small effect on weight loss and weight gain, but science has proven the energy balance theory over and over again.[4]
How does this relate to flexible dieting? Well, the logic goes that if you eat in a caloric deficit with a proper macronutrient ratio, you will lose fat (along with a little bit of muscle.) And if you eat in a caloric surplus with a proper macronutrient ratio, providing you are training well in the gym, you will gain muscle (along with a little bit of fat.) This applies irrespective of the kinds of foods that populate your diet.
The Catch
Before you make a run for the pop tarts, there’s something important to know. Flexible dieting does not mean filling your macronutrient goals with as much junk food as possible without consequences, and there’s a number reasons for this. The first one is obvious; eating lots of junk food is extremely unhealthy. The amount of processing involved in the creation of convenience foods means that they can cause severe insulin spikes and, when eaten in excess, increase your risk for a variety of diseases. High fructose corn syrup, by far the most common in the Western diet, is an example of the kind of ingredient that provides absolutely no benefit to your physical wellbeing. Consuming it frequently is asking for a host of health-related and/or hormonal problems, and these issues can heavily affect performance. This brings us onto the second reason: if your exercise performance is severely negatively affected by your diet, the results will show in your body composition. You won’t be able to improve week to week, and your body will have no reason to adapt. Getting sufficient vitamins and minerals into your food intake is vitally important for feeling good and, as a result, performing well. The final reason is a little more complicated; it’s that the failure to eat a sufficient amount of whole, nutritious foods will make it more difficult to meet your macronutrient goals. Minimally processed, nutrient-dense food items, typically known as “clean” foods, have a greater satiety level. In other words, they keep you fuller for longer. Therefore, making the bulk of your diet consist of fibrous carbohydrates, healthy fats, fruits, vegetables, and lean proteins will help prevent you from overeating, making it easier to stick to your daily calories and macros.[5]
Just how much of your diet should be made up of “clean” foods? A good rule of thumb is that roughly 80-85% of your calories should come from nutrient-dense sources and the remaining 15-20% can be allotted to so-called “dirty” foods. That means you can go out to a restaurant with friends or eat a cookie when your family decides to bake some without feeling like you’ve ruined your progress every time you do so. You don’t need to “cheat” on a “diet,” because your new diet is sufficiently flexible to allow for your favorite foods. Below I have included a list of nutritious carbohydrate, protein, and fat sources[6]; if you populate your diet with these foods and add the occasional treat here or there, your results won’t suffer at all and your mental relationship food will dramatically improve.[7]
- Carbohydrates: Oats, Sweet Potatoes, White Potatoes, Brown Rice, Quinoa, Wholegrain Bread (minimally processed,) Beans, Legumes, Vegetables
- Proteins: Lean meats, Eggs, Cottage Cheese, Greek Yogurt, Protein Powders (Quinoa, Beans, and Legumes also contain incomplete proteins, and, when eaten in combination with grains, can be useful for consuming enough protein on a plant-based diet)
- Fats: Olive Oil, Avocado, Nuts, Cheese, Butter
Get Started
Now that all that’s over with, it’s time that you figured out how to calculate your daily macro targets. Here’s a link to an online calculator here: https://www.iifym.com/iifym-calculator/. It will calculate your daily macros and then allot you 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight. Beyond your protein your requirement, it’s up to you how you divide the rest of your calories between carbohydrates and fats. The best practice is to experiment and see what feels best.
Once you have worked them out, you can download an app – such as “MyFitnessPal” – and use it to see how your current diet stacks up compared to your ideal macro ratios. If you enjoy the knowledge that comes with tracking your food groups, you can continue the practice; just remember that the emphasis in flexible dieting is on the flexible; these macronutrient goals need not be strict numbers, but ballpark figures to aim for.
Although the calculator is a good starting point, the actual best way to figure out your macros is to track your weight on a scale and see how it changes over time. You should weigh yourself at the same time every day (preferably first thing in the morning after going to the toilet.) And don’t be put off by daily fluctuations; your level of tiredness and the amount of water/salt you consumed on the previous day are just a few of the reasons that your weight can change massively on a day to day basis. What you should be looking for are gradual trends in weight loss or gain. If you’re aiming to lose fat, you should look to lose around 1lb per week. If you’re looking to gain muscle, you should look to gain around 1-2lb per month. That way, your rate of fat loss or muscle gain will be sustainable and healthy.
So, you’ve got your calories and macros, you know how much weight to lose or gain, and you’re no longer stigmatizing any one food or food group. You aren’t set on eating eight meals a day ad you don’t feel a need to have the same boring foods every meal, but you also know that you can’t simply stop eating your fruits and vegetables or disregard your health. In other words, you’re a flexible dieter; you’re somebody who wants to get fitter but doesn’t want fitness to consume their life. Congratulations and welcome to the team; you’re never going to have to go on a diet again.
Works Cited
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5618052/
Click to access NutrRC_EBCS_The_Macros_Diet.pdf
https://www.equalution.com/single-post/2016/07/26/The-Science-and-Benefits-Of-Flexible-Dieting
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/20-delicious-high-protein-foods#section21
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11883916
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5618052/
[2] https://www.ebscohost.com/assets-sample-content/NutrRC_EBCS_The_Macros_Diet.pdf
[3] https://www.iifym.com/what-is-iifym/
[4] http://blog.questnutrition.com/the-science-of-iifym/
[5] https://www.equalution.com/single-post/2016/07/26/The-Science-and-Benefits-Of-Flexible-Dieting
[6] https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/20-delicious-high-protein-foods#section21
[7] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11883916
