Best Diet for Weight Loss: Proven Strategies for Fast & Sustainable Fat Loss

What’s the best diet for weight loss?

Well, the best diet for weight loss isn’t complicated, expensive, or even all that difficult.

And you know what…… It’s well within your reach, closer than you think.

However, it does require a bit of planning, commitment, and attention to detail, but it will also guarantee results.

At Mack Performance, I believe the best diet is the one you enjoy while making long-term, objectively based progress.

I’m going to show you the exact strategies I use with my clients, both online and in person. 

There are really just four steps to determining your absolute best diet for weight loss

1. Determining your Calorie Budget

2. Determining how much protein, carbohydrates, and fats you should eat every day.

3. Create a meal plan based on those numbers and the foods you love.

4. Adjust based on how your body responds.

Let’s break this down step by step, shall we?

Step 1: Knowing Your Daily Calorie Budget

You have to be in a calorie deficit to lose weight, which is the first step in setting up your fat loss diet.

The first thing we need to do is determine your maintenance calorie intake (aka the number of calories you maintain your current body composition at)

Here are your options:

1. Use this calculator

2. Multiply your body weight by 13-17 (13 would be a sedentary office worker. 17 is an extremely active construction worker.

3. Start tracking everything you eat in MyFitnessPal for seven days while taking your weight the first thing in the morning. (this is by far the most accurate method).

Regardless of which method you used, you should now have your baseline maintenance calorie intake. The next step is to establish your initial calorie deficit by subtracting 500 calories.

Science has repeatedly shown that to lose 1 lb of body fat per week, you’ll need to eat 3500 calories below your maintenance intake over the course of a week. 

Therefore, by reducing your daily calorie “allowance” by 500 should allow you to lose 1 pound of body fat per week (500 x 7 = 3500) 

For example: 

James, a 200lb man, has a maintenance intake of 2,880 calories per day. 

James’ goal is to lose one pound of body fat per week. So we know that he needs to eat 3,500 calories less than his maintenance across the week or 500 calories less per day (3,500/7=500 calories)

2,880 - 500 = 2,380 calories per day

James’ fat loss intake is 2,380 calories per day.

Generally speaking, creating a caloric deficit of ~3,500 calories per week will lead to ~1 pound of fat loss. So eating 500 calories below your maintenance calories intake every day for 7 days should lead to about a pound of fat loss

Keep in mind that this is just a baseline as you’ll likely have to adjust in the near future as fat loss doesn’t happen linearly :( 

Three important notes for setting up your calorie deficit:

1. No calculator or formula is perfect! When in doubt, eat more calories than fewer calories! You want to lose weight by eating as many calories as possible

2. The ideal rate of Fat Loss: You want to aim to lose 0.5-1% of your total bodyweight per week on average

3. Aim for consistency rather than perfection: For my online clients, I give them a calorie range. For example, if 2000 calories are your target calorie deficit, set a calorie range of 1850-2150 calories. 

Step 2: Determining How Much Protein, Carbohydrates, and Fats You Should Eat Every Day.

In fitness circles, you’ll often hear protein, carbohydrates, and fats being referred to as “macros” which is short for “macronutrients.”

Yet, what exactly are macronutrients anyways?

Macronutrients - A type of food (e.g Protein, carbohydrates, fats) required in large amounts in the human diet.

In other words, it’s the nutrients that build up our calories. Macronutrients contain calories and when we add them up, they equal our total daily intake

All foods are made up of some combination of the following macronutrients (aka macros):

• Protein has 4 calories per gram

• Carbohydrates have 4 calories per gram

• Fats have 9 calories per gram

Macronutrients are important because they heavily influence your body composition, training performance, and overall health and well-being. Each macronutrient plays a critical role in the previously mentioned components of creating a healthy lifestyle.

How to Set Yourself Up for Success

• Set your protein to 0.8-1.2g per pound of bodyweight

• Set your fats to 20-30% of your total daily calories

• The remaining total calories will be your carbs.

By creating your calorie budget, then breaking it down into macronutrient targets is known as flexible dieting.

Flexible dieting is one of the most effective strategies for losing weight quickly.

Now, if you want to tinker with a slightly different mix of macros, feel free to make some slight adjustments to your carbs and fats. However, keep your protein intake within 0.8-1g per pound of bodweight as protein is essential for changing body composition. 

Now that you have your macronutrients are settled, let’s move on to the next step: meal planning.

Step 3: Creating Your Own Flexible Dieting Meal Plan 

The absolute easiest way to lose weight is to follow a structured plan filled with nutrient-dense foods you enjoy eating. 

Most people follow a meal plan, which works great in the short term as they provides structure and removes a lot of the decision-making process to continue to lose body fat. You simply eat your foods, get your daily steps in, and lose body fat.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have Flexible Dieting.

Flexible dieting is an excellent tool as it allows you to eat anything you want (unlike a meal plan). Once my online clients understand flexible dieting, it allows for long-term sustainability.

However, flexible dieting usually fails as it doesn’t provide enough structure. Many people who struggle with a “flexible dieting” approach see very little progress and ultimately give up.

The solution? Creating your own flexible Dieting meal Plan

Basically, we’re working together to combine the structure and easily repeatable nature of a meal plan for the majority of your week while providing some of the freedom and flexibility provided by flexible dieting.

Food Choices: The 80/20 Rule

Overall, I believe in the 80/20 rule. The 80/20 rule is fairly simple and straightforward: 80% of your calories should come from nutrient-dense whole foods. The remaining 20% are the foods you enjoy eating (i.e.pizza, beer, ice cream, etc.)

The 80/20 rule is fairly simple and straightforward: 80% of your calories should come from nutrient-dense whole foods. These nutrient-dense foods are basically one ingredient foods, such as:

• Oatmeal

• Eggs

• All fruits and vegetables

• Chicken

• Rice

• Potatoes

• Greek Yogurt

• Meat

• All fruits and vegetables (yes, I put this on here twice)

Here is another way to look at healthy foods. You want your food item to at one point: 

• Swam in the ocean

• Roamed the earth

• Flew in the sky

• Grew from the ground

If your food item(s) calls into one or both of these categories, then it falls into the nutrient-dense category aka 80% of your diet.

How to Structure Your Meals

When it comes to building your meals, there are a few essential characteristics we want to prioritize:

1. Prioritizing whole, minimally processed foods

2. Fit onto one plate 

3. Fitting your nutritional targets (i.e. portion sizes and/or macros)

4. Being enjoyable

5. Being easily repeatable

At the end of the day, you want your meals to be enjoyable and easily repeatable rather than just hitting your nutritional targets. By being enjoyable, I don’t just mean it taste good.

Rather, I want your meals to taste good, digest well, make you feel good AND satisfying so you’re not snacking afterward.

Now that we’ve covered how to structure your individual meals, let’s dive into creating your own flexible dieting meal plan.

How to Create Your Own Flexible Dieting Meal Plan

1. Choose How Many Different “Template Days” you’ll need for the week.

For the majority of my online clients, it’s usually 1-2 template days. These template days will put your fat loss efforts into an easy mode so you don’t have to make too many food decisions.

From here, you simply plug and play with food via MyFitnessPal to create a plan for these days that aligns with your macros

2. Choose Your Preferred Number of Meals:

For the majority of my clients, 3-5 meals (snacks included) works best. Choose times you can consistently eat each meal and stick to those. This will help you prevent those undereating/overeating cycles and/or playing the “Macro Tetris” game too often.

3. Build each Meal around your Protein: 

You want to build each meal around your protein source and adjust the serving size until it gives you 30-60g protein. My online clients typically choose their top 5-10 protein sources so this provides structure and flexibility from eating the same foods/meals over and over again. 

For example, instead of eating chicken breast for the 10th time this week, you can opt for steak, pork tenderloin, ground turkey, or salmon instead. This way you can have as much or as little variety as you’d like. This method provides the structure while giving you the freedom and flexibility provided with flexible dieting. 

4. Plan your carbs: 

 Once your protein is in place, choose 1-2 carb sources for each meal and adjust the serving size accordingly. Similar to protein, you want to choose your top 5-10ish carb sources for structure and flexibility.

5. Plan your Fats:

Your protein and some carb sources will provide some fat, so this will be the last thing we want to adjust.

 And now, you have a template day planned out. Again, most online clients have found that 1-2 template days are adequate for repeating throughout the weekdays, so you know how much food to get while prepping. 

 I wrote an entire article on meal prepping that you can check out here.

There are many different ways to create your own meal plan, yet I’ve found by adhering to these principles to be the most effective. This is a lot of information, so let’s put this into practice.

For example, let’s take a look at the ever classic bodybuilding template meal:

• Chicken (protein)

• Rice (carb)

• Broccoli (veggie)

• Butter (fat)

After a few days, you’ll get tired of eating this same meal over and over again. So, now let’s swap our macro source for something else

• Steak (protein): 

• Potatoes (carb)

• asparagus (veggie)

• Cheese (fat)

This way you can have as much or as little variety as you’d like. This method provides the structure while giving you the freedom and flexibility provided with flexible dieting. 

It’s ok to keep things the same week to week. Most clients will find that one meal is getting a bit old and will swap it out for another option but all meals don’t need to change weekly

An effective weight loss program should generally be:

1. Within +/- 100 calories, +/- 10g of protein and carbs, +/- 5g of fats

2. Spread out protein intake fairly evenly throughout the day

3. Specify exactly how much to eat of each food in each meal

4. Provide an abundance of whole, minimally processed nutritious foods

As long as the majority of your food choices are coming from whole foods, you won’t have a problem with insane cravings or constantly overeating.

This is why 80% of your nutrition should be coming from whole, minimally processed foods. This means you can use your other calories and macros for whatever you want (pizza, burgers, drinks, etc.) as long as your total calories are in check.

Step 4: Adjusting based on How Your Body Responds

The litmus test for any type of diet or exercise routine is twofold:

1. Does it work for you?

2. Is it sustainable?

The first point is fairly obvious. No matter how good a diet or exercise program sounds, if it doesn’t work for you aka deliver the results you’re looking for, you need to move on.

The second point is as obvious but equally as important.

If a program cannot get results and can’t be sustained over the long term, whether due to complexity, difficulty, or anything else, it too should be abandoned because it won’t help you keep your results.

This is why we want to go for the sweet spot: Consistent, encouraging results without any of the pain or suffering that most people go through when trying to get fit.

For weight loss, the sweet spot is losing 0.5-1% of your body weight per week, which usually equates to 0.5-2 pounds per week. If you have a lot of weight to lose, then you should shoot for the upper end of that range.

If you’re at a normal body fat percentage and looking to get lean, you should be in the middle (~1 pound per week). And if you’re already pretty lean, then you’ll be on the lower end (0.5 pounds per week).

So, as long as things are progressing according to those guidelines, then just keep at it. Don’t fit it if it ain’t broke!

However, if you’re not losing enough weight or losing it too quickly, you may need to adjust your diet.

How to Adjust Your Diet

So, if you want to lose or gain weight, you simply manipulate energy (i.e. calories) by:

1. Changing calories in aka increasing/decreasing the calories you eat

2. Changing calories out aka increasing/decreasing the calories you burn

This is just a 10,000-foot view of energy balance. To make this more concrete, let’s deep dive into the factors that impact calories in and calories out

How to Manipulate Calories in:

---> Adjust food intake:

Here, your only option is to increase or decrease the number of calories you’re eating

That’s it?? Damn. Ok then

How to Manipulate Calories out:

---> Physical Activity Level (PAL)

Lifting weights, cardio, etc. Contrary to popular belief, exercise doesn’t burn that many calories. For example, you could burn 600 calories by running for an hour, then eat a Big Mac to completely derail your hard-earned progress.

This is why trying to “burn it off” is sooo unsustainable and satisfying. Also, this is why having a smart nutrition protocol my online clients follow is so important.

---> Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (N.E.A.T) 

This is all the calories you burn outside the gym in your everyday life. N.E.A.T is the most controllable variable of calories out.

Adding in some additional daily movement adds up to hundreds of extra calories burned over the week. This is why my online clients with fat loss goals will also have a step count goal

---> Thermic Effect of Food (TEF)

These are the calories burned during digestion. It takes energy to turn the food you consume into energy.

---> Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) 

Your BMR is the number of calories your body burns to stay alive. Generally speaking, the heavier you are, the higher your BMR is.

Now, the sum of these four components of calories out is what we call our metabolism.

Making Intelligent Fat Loss Adjustments

As we discussed earlier, we know to lose body fat, your calories in must be less than calories out aka you need to eat fewer calories than you burn in a day.

Before making any dietary adjustments, you need to determine if your progress has actually stalled.

Now, we don’t want to solely depend on the scale of we’re making progress. The scale can be a slippery slope since scale fluctuations are completely normal. This is why we want to make multiple measurements throughout your journey to measure your progress, including body measurements, gym performance, etc.

So if you are sure that fat loss has stalled and it’s not due to mismanaging calories in (or decreasing movement), here’s how we’d adjust your nutrition and training. 

Basically, we have three options

1. Decrease calories in

2. Increase calories out

3. A combination of both

Of course, we need to get a bit deeper into each of these

Option #1: Decreasing Calories in.

If you're not making progress, normally a 5-10% reduction in weekly calories will be enough to get fat loss resuming again in a fat loss phase.

---> If progress has just dipped slightly (i.e. you’re still losing, but slower than 0.5% of body weight per week), your adjustments will likely be closer to a 5% decrease.

---> If progress has stalled hard (no weight or measure changes in 2+ weeks), we’ll go towards a 7.5-10% decrease. This is super aggressive and I’ll rarely go with this approach. 

Overall, this reduction in calories can come from carbs, fats, or a combination of both.

• We’ll pull from fats if….. You’re still above the fat threshold (0.3g/lb) and are chasing as much muscle gain as possible.

• We’ll pull from carbs if….. You’re at the fat threshold or just prefer a higher fat diet.

• We’ll pull from carbs and fats if….. Your food choices are the most important factor in sticking to your diet.

This will allow you to keep the same foods in your diet (just in smaller portions), instead of having to drastically cut back on carb-heavy or fattier foods.

Option #2: Increase Calories Out

Your second option is simply moving more (i.e. additional cardio or increase daily step count goals). This is generally much less practical than controlling calories.

It’s usually easier and takes less effort to decrease calorie intake by 200 calories (you just eat less) than it does to increase calories burned by 200 calories (which roughly equates to an extra 30-45 minutes of movement per day.)

So, your options here are:

---> Increasing daily step count goals: This is my first preference when we need to increase calories out. We would generally start by increasing your step goal close to the realistic limit you can hit (~10K steps for most).

---> Increasing cardio work: This is my second preference to start here when increasing calories via movement. Aerobic work is easier and actually helps aid in your recovery. An example would be an incline treadmill walking for 20 minutes.

---> Increase training volume: we’ll strategically add more sets of compound movements to your training session or add in another training day. This strategy usually works best for those newer to proper training and have only been following a smart training program 2-3 days a week.

However, this becomes a problem the more you increase volume as the more recover your body needs to repair itself, so this is why I preferred to focus on adding more lower-intensity movement throughout the week.

Option #3: A combination of both:

This is pretty self-explanatory. If you would rather increase movement a bit (i.e. add in an additional cardio session) and decrease calories by a smaller amount (i.e 100 calories) instead of a large decrease or increase in either, that’s perfectly fine as well. 

While this may be technically correct as weight loss ultimately comes down to calories in vs calories out, there are other reasons why the weight loss stagnates.

It can be possible that your body is actually losing fat, yet holding onto the water or gaining muscle, which is masking your weight loss. If this is the case, you’ll probably find your weight stagnates for a week or two before dropping several pounds. This is known as the “whoosh effect.”

Also, it’s possible you’re gaining muscle almost as fast as you’re losing body fat, known as body composition. In this situation, you’ll notice your clothes are becoming looser and your muscles are becoming more defined, even though your scale weight hasn’t changed much.

If neither of these situations applies to you, then the honest truth is that you're not losing weight because you’re still eating too many calories and not burning enough. In this situation, make sure you're accurately weighing everything you’re eating, look for ways to sneak in more movement in your day, and/or add some cardio to your exercise routine.

If you are losing weight too quickly, double-check your calorie intake and expenditure. No matter how lean you are when starting a cut, you can expend a rapid weight loss in the first week or two as your body sheds water and glycogen. 

After that, things will slow down to that sweet spot. If not, then chances are you’re eating less and/or burning more calories than you realize.

So, if you’re losing weight too quickly, double-check your estimated energy intake and expenditure to ensure they’re accurate so you're not running too large of a calorie deficit.

The Next Step:

The goal of this guide (and online coaching) is to empower you through education. 

I want to help you stop guessing when it comes to making sustainable progress and start achieving the results you desire. 

So, what is your next step?

Realize that all the knowledge you’ve gained from this guide doesn’t equal real change.

If you’re fed up with how COVID fucked up your year, invest in a coach.

If you’ve read LITERALLY DOZENS of guides like this in the past and still haven’t made the change nor the confidence you want, invert in a coach. 

If you’re overwhelmed by the content in this article, invest in a coach.

If you cannot be consistent with the strategies within this article, invest in a coach. 

If you are ready for a change, I’m here to coach you.