The Definitive Guide to Flexibility Dieting
Too many people spend their entire life dieting and never getting to the part where they actually get to enjoy their lives.
Now, if you look at the dieting culture surrounding us, it is not surprising that most regain weight over and over again. The reason is simple, every mainstream diet is based solely on severely restricting your food choices.
Paleo. Ketogenic. Intermittent Fasting. Atkins. South Beach. All these diets work. How? They focus on restricting your nutritional choices, so you eat fewer calories.
Now, while eliminating foods does often lead to a reduction in calorie intake, yet this immediately leads to another problem of not creating sustainability.
To create sustainable results, you have to use sustainable methods, not restricting yourself from eating your favorites foods for a few weeks. Most people won’t be able to spend the rest of their lives
---> Not eating carbs
---> doing juice cleanses
---> Only eating paleo foods
---> Refusing to socialize with friends at happy hours or gatherings.
The list goes on and on, but you get the idea.
Say, you follow the keto diet to lose weight. You completely eliminate carbs and watch the pounds fall off.
The problem? You love carbs and cannot see yourself giving them up forever. If you only know how to lose weight by eliminating carbs, then you’re extremely likely to eat carbs again in the near future. Therefore, as a carb lover, your low carb diet approach, doesn’t really fit your lifestyle.
If your diet makes the rest of your life miserable, then you won’t be able to stick to it.
This is why the power of individualized nutrition is so powerful and I’m extremely passionate about it. It truly changes your ability to create the body you want, and more importantly, your confidence.
If you can only stick to something for a few weeks, it will never create lasting change.
The most powerful thing I do as your nutritional coach, and biggest goal with this article, is to teach you how to make your diet work for you and your lifestyle, instead of fitting the rest of your life into your diet.
Creating a Lifestyle with Flexible Dieting
You want to create a sustainable nutritional lifestyle that keeps your training performance high, keeps your physique looking lean, strong, and athletic, AND sustainable so you can stay with it long term.
After working with hundreds of clients over my coaching career, these are the three essential pillars your nutrition must be built upon.
---> Pillar #1:
Your nutrition needs to provide adequate nutrition to optimally fuel your training, metabolism, and everything you need to stay healthy long term. This means it much more than just hitting your macros as the composition of your macros determines your performance, recovery, and health.
---> Pillar #2:
Your nutrition needs to allow some flexibility so you can live your life without feeling like a social outcast. You should be able to enjoy some drinks, pizza, and burgers occasionally without feeling guilty or losing your results.
---> Pillar #3:
Your nutrition needs to have some structure. Without a plan, your nutritional plan will not work. Clear diet parameters need to be in place to give you structure and create a simple, long term plan for you to follow even after we’re done working together.
Specific results require a specific plan.
So, if you’re ready to get leaner and stronger than ever while fueling your body for optimal health, let’s dive into how to create your own sustainable lifestyle diet
Creating Freedom within your Diet Structure.
When it comes to dieting, it can be absolutely difficult, stressful, overwhelming, time-consuming, boring, and a pain in the ass. It’s no wonder dieting pushing people away from trying or causing them to quit prematurely.
As a coach, this frustrates me beyond belief. How can I get my clients to adhere to a long-term diet plan??
The best way to adhere to a long term plan is to create a sustainable diet structure that fits your lifestyle.
Of all the diet structures I’ve worked with my clients, tracking macros by far allows the best amount of flexibility and greater results.
When it comes to counting calories, what is the first thing that pops into your mind? I bet the first words you think of are “pain in the ass”, “annoying”, “obsessive” or anything along those lines.
And you know what?
I agree; it definitely can be. However, here’s is the thing,
Tracking macros actually gives you freedom while building a solid nutritional foundation.
→ Freedom from the pain of never feeling confident within your body. As mentioned above, if you’re not following a clear nutritional structure, then creating the body you want will be very difficult.
→ Freedom from the guilt associated with eating certain foods (i.e pizza, burgers) By tracking your macros, I can teach you how to eat your favorite foods while still making progress. Once you realize that you can stay lean while enjoying the occasional happy hours and burgers, that guilt is replaced with happiness and more flexibility in social situations.
---> Freedom from worrying that you overate or underate. Tracking your macros allows you to make up for overdoing it, with no harm done to your progress.
This makes tracking macros the perfect fit for creating your own flexible, sustainable lifestyle.
Setting your Macros
The first step in achieving the body you want is setting the proper macros.
Regardless if you want to
Get leaner
Maintain your current body composition
Build muscle while stay lean
You have to have your macros set up properly to achieve the results you want.
Step 1: Find your Maintenance Calories
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
Use this calculator
Multiply your body weight by 13-17 (13 would be a sedentary office worker. 17 is an extremely active construction worker
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
Step 2: Determine your Starting Calories Goal
The next step is to establish your initial calorie goal, depending on your body composition.
---> If you want to stay at maintenance, just chill here at your estimated maintenance
---> For Fat Loss - multiple your maintenance intake by 0.85
—-> For building muscle - multiple your maintenance intake by 1.1
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.
So, you’ll simply use these numbers to determine how many calories below maintenance you should be eating.
Example:
James, a 200lb man, has a maintenance intake of 2,680 calories per day.
His goal is to lose 1 pound 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)
2,680 - 500 = 2,280 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 before your maintenance calorie 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. Unfortunately, fat loss doesn’t happen linearly in this intake :(
Step 3: Determine your Starting Macro Goal
First off, what are macronutrients (macros?)
Macronutrients - A type of food (e.g fat, protein, carbohydrates) required in large amounts in the human diet.
All the food you eat are made up of some combination of the following macronutrients
---> Protein 1 gram of protein contains 4 calories
---> Carbohydrates: 1 gram of carbs contains 4 calories
---> Fats: 1 gram of fats contains 9 calories.
So, when we talking about “tracking your macros” I’m specifically referring to that you’ll be nutrient and aiming to hit specific targets for each.
Setting Protein Intake:
At Mack Performance, protein is the staple in our nutrition plan. Debately, it may be the most important macronutrient. The reason is simple – it is an essential macronutrient, which means you literally cannot survive without consuming it.
Protein is what helps us rebuild muscle tissues and keep our body systems (Muscles, nervous, and immunity) running optimally. We need protein for enzymes in our body, skin, and hair growth and many hormones like adrenaline, testosterone, and growth hormones.
We want to set our protein target at 1 gram per pound of body weight.
---> Example:
James weighs 200 pounds. Therefore, James needs 200 grams of protein per day.
200 grams of protein x 4 calories per gram is 800 calories.
James will be eating 200 grams of protein.
Your body needs protein and when it comes to changing your body composition, your body needs protein and here are the big reasons why:
1) Protein rebuilds muscle tissue which allows us to train hard again and allows us to recover quicker allowing us to build more muscle. The more muscle we build, the more fat our body will burn.
2) Protein has a very high Thermic Effect of Food (TEF), which means it takes more calories to digest. This means if you had 100 grams of protein, then your body will burn 30 calories simply by breaking the protein down into usable amino acids.
In fact, protein has the highest TEF of all the macros.
Protein - 20-30% of calories consumed are burned via TEF
Carbs - 5-10% consumed are burned via TEF
Fat - 0-3% of calories consumed are burned via TEF
3) Protein is extremely hard to store as body fat. Here's the proof. This 2015 study took 48 randomized, resistance-trained men and women and hard them either
Consume a minimum of 1.36g/lb of protein daily
Maintain current dietary habits for eight weeks while undergoing a standardized resistance training program designed to increase lean body mass.
From the Study: “ Compared to the control group, the high protein group consumed significantly more calories (+490 calories) and protein (3.4 vs 2.3 g/kg) From primarily whey protein shakes, leading to a diet that was 39%, 27% fat, and 34% carbohydrates. Both groups significantly increased FFM (muscle mass) and significantly reduced FM (Body fat) compared to baseline, but the reduction in FM (Body fat) was significantly greater in the high protein group compared to the control group (-1.6 vs. -0.3kg). According, body weight gain was also significantly less in the high protein group compared to the control group.”
The high protein group ate ~490 calories more than the lower protein group and lost more fat!
All in all, making sure you are correctly setting and prioritizing protein as it just too important to ignore.
If you’re struggling with getting enough protein, click here to learn how to nail your protein every damn day.
Setting Fat Intake:
The next macronutrient we are going to cover is fats because they are another essential macronutrient. This is why we are discussing this right after protein - you literally cannot live without it.
So why are fats so important?
Fat is crucial for hormonal health, which is the biggest and most recognized reason to consume an adequate amount of fat. This is one of the reasons why this is an essential nutrient - you literally cannot live without it.
Fat is a primer for the nervous system and the axon, the literal building blocks for your nerves. The axon is responsible for transmitting the electrical signals from the brain throughout the body to initiate all functions. The axon is made up of 80% lipids (fats).
Fats are our body's secondary energy source. When we look at low-intensity activities (i.e walking, cooking, etc.) fat is our fuel source. It’s not great for explosive energy, but it’s great for daily energy needs.
For the majority of my online clients, the fat intake will fall somewhere between 0.3-0.4/grams per pound as this best supports their metabolism and hormones.
Calculating your Fat intake:
Set fat intake between 0.3-0.4g per lb of body weight (multiply bodyweight x 1 - 1.2)
Example
James weighs in at 200 lbs.
200 x .3 = 60. James will be eating 60 grams of fat daily.
To determine how many calories this is, multiple by 9 as there are 9 calories in each gram of fat.
60 x 9 = 540. James will be eating 540 calories from fat daily.
Setting Carb Intake:
Of all the macronutrients, carbohydrates are consistently misunderstood and are labeled “bad” or “evil”. At mack Performance, we believe in eating a reasonable amount of “smart carb” choices. We define smart ca1rbs as: slower-digesting, higher fiber, and nutrient-rich.
Carbs should be apart of everyone’s diet as they allow us to thrive. Each macronutrient has benefits and duties within our bodies, which allows us to live life at a much higher level.
The truth is, carbohydrates play an important role within the body, including being your body’s preferred energy source. In addition, here are some specific examples of how carbohydrates play a major role in our health and well-being:
1) Performance - Carbs are the body’s primary fuel source when it comes to higher intensity activities (I.e. strength and HIIT training), so your muscles can optimally perform at their best.
2) Recovery - Although protein is the number one source for this, carbs help replenish muscle glycogen for future performance and actually can help rebuild muscle tissue when protein is not available.
3) Hormonal health - An inadequate amount of carbs will negatively impact hormones, such as leptin, ghrelin, the thyroids, and even adrenals glands all of which assist in metabolism, energy production, and fatigue management.
In terms of exercise, Carbohydrates’ influence on performance is the number one thing that will lead to improving your body composition and increasing strength. Without a doubt, nutrition is the biggest mover for fat loss. However, if you are not training hard, then you’ll truly have a body you’ll be proud of. It’s intense training that will stimulate muscle growth to a meaningful degree.
Calculating your Carb intake:
Now that we have your protein and fats determined, we’ll simply fill your remaining macros with carbs.
Example
James weighs in at 200 lbs.
We know James has a goal intake of 2,380 calories per day.
We’ll subtract the 800 calories from protein
2,380 - 800 = 1,580 calories.
Next, we’ll subtract 540 calories from fats
1,580 - 540 calories = 1,040 calories.
To determine how many calories of carbs to eat, divide by 4.
1,040 calories / 4 = 260 grams of carbs.
Tracking your Macros Accurately with Flexible Dieting
Now that your macros are set, it’s time to put this into action. After a few weeks if your body isn’t changing we know an adjustment is necessary.
However, if your macros are all over the place or you're not entering everything in, it’s impossible to know exactly what adjustments to make to resume progress. If you’re consistently missing food items, incorrectly entering data, or you’re several hundred calories off-target, then we don’t have an accurate baseline to adjust from.
This applies to under-eating as well as over-eating!
This is why we need you to be at or near your macro goals daily. No diet adjustment will make up for a lack of compliance.
Does this mean you need to be perfect? Fuck no. I typically give my online clients macros ranges as I rather have you been consistent rather than perfect. Typically, these macro ranges are +/- 100 calories, 20g protein and carbs, and 10g fats.
If we can have you stay within these ranges, then your set.
On a similar note, we need to ensure that you’re tracking food in your food log accurately as this can dramatically impact your progress. When progress stalls, the first thing we’ll do is ensure your tracking accurately. I want you to be well-fueled and eating as many calories as possible while losing weight.
Tracking accurately usually requires you to measure your food to get a better understanding of portion sizes and how many calories are in your food. This is just short term. While I understand that it can be a pain in the ass, it's better to figure it out now rather than “tracking” and never seeing results, right?
Here are the necessary tools to ensure you’re tracking accurately.
→ A food scale
→ A set of measuring cups
→ a set of teaspoons and tablespoons
Throughout my coaching career, I’ve repeatedly found the most common “mistakes” my clients make are:
1) Not tracking Cooking Oils: Even if you don’t apply it to your food, but on the pan, it still gets absorbed. This can quickly add up to a few hundred calories of untracked food.
2) Guess-imitation instead of measuring: Human beings, in general, are pretty terrible at estimating our food intake accurately. This is why it’s important to learn how to track accurately and/or know portion sizes.
3) Dressing, toppings, and condiments: These are easily overlooked. The biggest culprits are salad dressings and condiments like BBQ sauce. Both are high in calories, easy to over-indulge, and forget to track.
General Guidelines to Ensure Accurate Macro Tracking:
→ Don’t use metrics like small/medium/large: This leaves a lot of room for error. A few examples are 1 medium apple. 1 large banana. ½ bowl of rice.
→ Weight Measurements: Make sure you use grams as this is the most accurate method.
→ Weight your meats thawed and raw as this is more accurate than cooked.
The Best Food Choices for Flexible Dieting
As I’m sure you realized by now, your nutrition needs to both fuel your body optimally and allow you dietary flexibility to enjoy your life outside of body compositional results.
This can absolutely be a tall order, yet completely doable. If you're willing to follow and embrace the philosophies I teach my online clients, you’ll not only achieve your dream physique but keep those results for a lifetime by building a solid nutritional foundation.
Overall, my philosophy on food selection is 80-90% whole foods and 10% If It Fits Your Macros
This can be confusing so let me dive into each component and why this specific balance is essential to your results:
→ 80-90% Whole Foods
Here’s the honest truth, it’s too easy to overeat in today’s society. Every day we are surrounded by highly processed foods that are designed to be hyper-palatable. This means they were specifically engineered to make us crave them more. Pair this with the fact that they are also very calorie-dense and low on nutrients and you can see how difficult it is to make progress.
This is why it’s smart to follow a nutritional program prioritizing whole foods. This will ensure your food is nutrient-dense, meaning it is loaded with plenty of vitamins and minerals for a minimal amount of calories.
In the simplest terms, 80-90% of your food choices should have either:
Grown from the earth
Had a face at one point
Swam on the earth
Specifically for fat loss, these foods will help you stay full longer than their highly processed food counterparts. People make getting and staying lean a lot harder than necessary by eating foods that digest quickly and leaving them hungry again in an hour.
Possibly the most underrated fat loss hacks is simply learning how to build your meals around your lean protein sources. I teach all my online clients to build their meals around their protein as this is the easiest way to making this whole dieting thing easier.
Remember, eating like this 80-90% of the time is great for your physique and your health, yet you don’t have to eat like this 100% of the time
→ 10-20% If It Fits Your Macros
As long as the majority of your food choices are going from whole food, you won’t have a problem with insane cravings or constantly overeating. By doing this, your fat loss will come easier because you’ll be full more often, and crushing training in the gym.
This is why utilizing a 10-20% IIFYM approach won’t hurt your results or health. This means you can use your other calorie and macros for pizza, burgers, drinks, or whatever you want.
Seriously whatever you want. As long as your calories and macros are in check, these “cheat foods” won’t affect your results or health.
The key is understanding the concept of “energy balance” which is the relationship between the amount of calories you eat and the amount of burn.
To lose weight - When you burn more energy (calories) than you consume, you lose weight. This is called a negative energy balance or a calorie deficit.
To gain weight - when you take in more energy (calories than you burn. This is called energy balance or a calorie surplus.
To maintain weight - When you’re taking in the same amount of calories as your burning, you’re maintaining your weight. This is technically energy balance or your maintenance calories.
This isn’t theory either. This is an immutable, indisputable, scientific fact. This is why every single controlled weight loss study conducted has concluded that meaningful weight loss requires energy expenditure to exceed energy intake.
Now, I’m not saying calories are the only matter as it is more complex than that. Rather, this is why my online clients track their macros and not just overall calories.
As long as you’re smart with your food choices 80-90% of the time, you can work in less nutritious foods into your macros 10-20% of the time hurting your results.
This means it's ok to go on a date night with your significant other or enjoy the occasional happy hour and not feel like you wrecked your progress for the week.
Flexible Dieting Lifestyle Tools
Now that we have covered the basic premise of what to eat, let’s break down the necessary tools to create a flexible, sustainable lifestyle.
However, before we dive in, it’s important to remember that you're getting flexible 10-20% of the time, not 50%+ of the time.
If your hitting your macros entirely from pizzas, burgers, and protein shakes, then you won’t feel or perform the way you want to.
Again, these flexible dieting tools you can use to make sustaining your results much easier. With all my online clients, I take pride in my ability to educate you along the way so you can keep your results long after we are done working together.
---> Intermittent Fasting:
Let me be clear here: Intermittent fasting isn’t magical. It’s just another way to reduce calories so you can “spend” them later in the day. However, IF is great on days you know you’ll be going out to eat a high-calorie meal. You can offset the “damage’ by fasting until the afternoon. Black coffee, water, and other calorie-free drinks are totally fine, yet outside of that, avoid calories.
---> Flex Days:
The idea behind flex days is simple - you’re going to make sure you at your daily calorie and protein goals. We need these two factors to be in check to create fat loss. With flex days, these will give you the freedom to eat or drink what you want as long as your total calories are in check.
----> The Pre-Drinking Meal:
A lot of my online clients are worried that they have to give up their happy hours or alcohol altogether to achieve their results.
Drinking itself doesn’t really affect fat loss that much. Even if a large chunk of your calories is alcohol, as long as you in a calorie deficit, you are good. Obviously, alcohol shouldn’t be a staple within your nutrition plan, but the point is it’s not the alcohol itself that kills your fat loss.
It’s eating thousands of calories when your drunk that truly kills your progress.
This problem only gets worst when you start drinking on an empty stomach in an attempt to “save your calories” for the booze.
While this is good in theory, you’ll quickly get drunk and start eating everything in sight as you're famished and have no willpower. This will (almost always) lead to drunk eating.
The solution? The “pre-drinking meal”
As previously discussed, you know that protein is the macro that keeps you full longest, and fibrous carbs are the second most filling.
Therefore, we are going to simply combine these two elements together (25+ grams of protein, and 25 grams of fibrous carbs) while keeping fats low to “save calories.”
This “pre-drinking meal) will keep you full throughout the night. This strategy has helped me better manage and control my drinking while (mostly) eliminating the drunk food. You are much less likely to drunk eat with this strategy.
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.