Ep 5: How to Diet Without Being "On" a Diet
Today is the DIET and NUTRITION episode, one of my favorite topics. Although this IS a podcast focused on lifting and getting strong, what you eat—and more importantly, HOW MUCH you eat—plays a huge role in your ability to lose fat (while preserving muscle) or gain muscle (while limiting fat gain).
You can’t have one without the other—and I’m going to assume you’re here because you want to get stronger AND leaner, and you want to do it productively without spinning your wheels.
I’m very passionate about taking a SUSTAINABLE approach to diet because, like many of you, I’ve personally experienced yo-yo dieting, fad diets, and all sorts of crazy food restrictions and questionable supplements over the years. Only in the last two years or so did I finally make peace with the nutrition gods and realize that proper nutrition is not nearly as complicated or restrictive as I once thought.
Today we’re going on a journey together that will equip you with the tools you need to eat a balanced, enjoyable diet for the rest of your life.
In today’s episode, we cover:
The spectrum of dieting and why traditional diets don’t work over the long-term
A balanced, flexible, and sustainable approach that won’t drive you crazy
Focusing on what’s important and not sweating the rest
An overview of calories and macronutrients, and the phases of weight change
Determining your individual energy needs for your goal and then adjusting for success
The phases of weight change and how they align with your goals as a lifter
And finally, a brief foray regarding some specific foods and supplements
RELATED LINKS
MacroFactor app for food logging and calculating expenditure (use code "WITSANDWEIGHTS" to extend free trial to 14 days)
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Transcript
This podcast was transcribed automatically, so please forgive any errors or typos.
[00:00:00] Philip Pape: Welcome to the Wits & Weights podcast for busy professionals who want to get strong and lean with the strength training and sustainable. I am your host Philip Pape. And in each episode, we'll examine strategies to help you achieve physical self-mastery through a healthy skepticism of the fitness industry and a commitment to lifting heavy and eating right.
[00:00:31] Hey guys, welcome to episode five of Wits & Weights. Today is the diet and nutrition episode. One of my favorite topics, although this is a podcast focused on lifting and getting strong, what you eat and more importantly, how much you eat, plays a huge role in your ability to lose fat while preserving muscle or to gain muscle while limiting fat.
[00:00:59] You can't have one without the other. And I'm going to assume you're here because you want to get stronger and leaner and you want to do it productively without spinning your wheels. I'm very passionate about taking a sustainable approach to diet because like many of you I've personally experienced yo-yo diets, fad diets, all sorts of crazy food restrictions and questionable supplements over the years, only in the last couple of years or so.
[00:01:31] Did I finally make peace with the nutrition gods and realize that proper nutrition is not nearly as complicated or restrictive as I once thought today, we're going on a journey together that will equip you with the tools you need to eat a balanced, enjoyable diet for the rest of your life. In today's episode, we cover the spectrum of dieting and why traditional diets don't work over the long-term a balanced, flexible, and sustainable approach that won't drive you crazy, focusing on what's important and not sweating the rest and overview of calories and macronutrients and the phases of weight change, determining your individual energy needs for your goal, and then adjusting for success.
[00:02:23] How to align the phases of weight change with your goals, especially as a lifter and finally a brief foray regarding some specific foods I like. And a couple of. Let's start by talking about the spectrum of dieting we have on one extreme are the diets that have specific names. You know what? They are, things like keto, paleo carnivore, Atkins zone.
[00:02:55] And one thing these diets have in common is they typically list good or bad foods or clean versus dirty foods. They tend to be somewhat complicated and somewhat restrictive. There are obviously differences from one to the next and each one has their advocates. But the main thing about them is they use.
[00:03:17] Prescribe how you should eat, eat this, donate that perhaps they give you what time you should eat this or that. And there are often what I will call unbalanced from a macronutrient perspective, meaning they might require very high, fat and very low carb or very high carb, very low fat. And the evidence shows that these are.
[00:03:38] Not sustainable diets in the longterm because they often lead to yo-yo dieting. You lose a lot of weight. Initially, the they're super successful because you might lose a lot of waterway, glycogen and actual fat loss because you've changed your eating patterns. For example, on keto, you try to go very low carb, very high fat, and as a rule, it starts to eliminate a ton of processed foods that might've been in your diet.
[00:04:08] Many of the highly palatable processed foods are a combination of carbs and fat. Well, if you're going to cut out carbs drastically, you're going to severely limit your food choices primarily to whole foods, animal-based products and things like that. And then that results in you significantly cutting your calories.
[00:04:29] If these diets work and they work for some people, it's because of calories in. So that's one extreme. And I put that on an extreme, because this podcast is all about sustainability. How can you eat in a way that will satisfy you? It won't drive you crazy and you could do so for years and decades for the rest of your life.
[00:04:53] If you could do that with say Quito or the zone diet good for you, if it meets your goals, go for it. But I think there's an easier way on the other extreme of this dieting spectrum is what's called intuitive eating. And that's just what it sounds it's eating. When you feel like it, based on the signals your body's giving you and not worrying about tracking or what you eat or really.
[00:05:23] And intuitive eating sounds great, but it's very hard to know how many calories you're eating or whether you need to eat more or less if you've never tracked your food. And if you have a difficult time telling the difference between one food and another, in terms of nutritional density, for example, take a tablespoon of peanut butter and put it next to a large bowl of salted popcorn.
[00:05:50] Chances are the popcorn has fewer calories. Furthermore, most of us who have had let's call them less than optimal eating habits over the years have trained our bodies in a way where we can not recognize those hunger signals as efficiently as somebody who maybe has been eating properly for years. And so if to eat intuitively means to continue eating as much pizza doughnuts and Coca-Cola, as you'd like, it's probably not going to help you meet your goals, but we're going to come back to this later because I believe intuitive eating can be a great approach for someone who has gone through a more balanced approach based on tracking, which is the focus of this podcast.
[00:06:35] Which will then teach you to understand what is in a certain type of food in a certain quantity of food, the nutritional density, and you could eyeball this stuff in the future. If you're not the type of person who likes to track. And that brings me to the middle part of the spectrum, the balanced, sustainable approach to eating that we'll talk about today, which is tracking calories and macronutrients, eating what you enjoy, making choices based on your goal, and eventually to learn enough about food portions and nutrient density to shift more toward intuitive eating.
[00:07:15] If preferred this approach is also called flexible dieting. If it fits your macros, I. Whatever you want to call it because we have, obviously I have a fondness for names when it comes to diets, this approach is significantly more sustainable than the highly restrictive named diets. And I'll give you just a few reasons why you might come up with more than these.
[00:07:40] The first reason is more sustainable is you don't have good or bad foods. You don't have clean or dirty foods. You can eat anything you prefer. As long as you meet your goal. The second reason it's more sustainable is there's no incentive to binge because you've avoided or deprived yourself of some particular food.
[00:08:04] We're not doing that. We're not restricting food groups or types or specific foods in any way with this approach. The next reason it's more sustainable is you're not going to be weird on this diet. What do I mean by that? Meaning your spouse cooks you food. You can enjoy it. You don't have to be picky or control exactly.
[00:08:25] What's in the food. You can go to restaurants, you can go to social events, you can go hang out with your friends and you don't have to be weird. You're not the person bringing your own Tupperware or your own shake bottle. You can just go out and pick from the options that are out there. And as long as it fits your plan, you are good.
[00:08:43] Another reason this is sustainable is it's flexible enough. You can continue to change your foods over time, or even on a. Isn't that great. So a few months from now, the seasons change you go from fall to winter to summer, you have different available options at the grocery store, different produce fresh products available.
[00:09:04] You might just have a new craving. You want to eat more fish now instead of beef, go for it. And finally, the reason the flexible dieting approach is sustainable is it is consistent with the laws of physics it's based on energy balance and nothing more. So it works in something that works and has all of these other benefits we just discussed sounds like a pretty sustainable approach to me.
[00:09:29] Have you ever heard of the parades principle? It basically states that in many cases, 80% of the outcome is from 20% of the causes. Some people call this the 80 20 rule. It just means that there are a few things that are very important and many things that are less. So, so why don't we focus our energy on the few things that impact 80% of the results or 80% of the outcome.
[00:09:59] And in our case, when it comes to diet, the most important aspect is calories or energy balance. And we talked about this and the first law of thermodynamics in episode four, if you want to go revisit that, we talked all about metabolism, the energy out side of the equation. And today we're going to focus on the energy in side of the equation.
[00:10:24] At the end of the day, would you gain or lose weight comes down to the energy coming into your body from food period. But then there is another priority just below calories that makes up the 80 20. And that is macronutrients. The stuff in your food that provides the calories. The proportion of these can be important depending on your goals and optimizing your outcomes.
[00:10:54] Everything else, other than calories and macronutrients is in the 20% things like supplements, micronutrients, meal, timing, food, quality. Yes, you heard it right. We are not going to focus on food quality when it comes to diet. Remember what I said before? You can eat whatever you like, as long as it fits within your calories and your macros, let's start then with calories.
[00:11:21] And we are going to go through a lot of detail on this podcast. Step-by-step lots of calculations. I encourage you to take notes or at the very least use the timestamps in the show notes to find your place later on and revisit some of these topics. The first thing we're going to do is calculate your maintenance calories.
[00:11:40] These are the calories that you need every day just to live and maintain your weight. And again, back in the previous episode, we talked about the breakdown, the various components of metabolism. We're not going to recover all that today. We're just going to talk about the numbers and how to set up. In that episode, we talked about estimating your calories, using a calculator.
[00:12:04] You can do that if you'd like, but the best way to estimate your calories is to track them over two weeks with your current diet, don't change anything. Don't change your lifestyle. Do it in a phase where you've been maintaining your weight. Not much is going to change over the next two weeks. Your activity level, isn't going to change much and you're able to track consistently be consistent and see how your weight changes.
[00:12:28] Ideally, the weight stays roughly the same in which case your daily calorie needs are the average daily calories. You can see. As simple as that. Now, if your weight went up slightly, then your daily calorie needs are a little bit less than what you consumed and vice versa, but it gives you a pretty good estimate.
[00:12:48] If I were to use a calculator today, it would probably say that my total daily energy expenditures, maybe around 25, 2600, but in reality, it's closer to 3000. I'm on, I've been bulking. I'm very active and I've been tracking and that is my current Mattel. Now I am going to mention this particular app several times in the podcast, it's called macro factor.
[00:13:13] It's by the guys at stronger by science. And I personally use this app. I think it is by far the best app on the market, not just for food logging, but for calculating your metabolism, adjusting your plan every week, and then presenting it to you in a way that is compliance neutral. It doesn't beat you over the head for missing your target.
[00:13:36] It simply gives you the data gives you the plan, what you need for the week. You either hit it. You don't no big deal. Here's where you are the next week. Do it again. So if you can get an app like that, it's going to make this entire process. We talk about today, much easier. You're still going to have to log your food.
[00:13:54] You're still going to have to weigh yourself, but all the numbers of calculating calories and macronutrients and metabolism are essentially done for you with some of these. So I'll include a link in the show notes for that there are other apps like my fitness pal chronometer or chronometer carbon and many others that do similar things.
[00:14:16] But again, my favorite is macro factor. So you start by determining your caloric maintenance, how many calories do you need every day to maintain your weight? And you're going to start tracking your food and tracking your weight every day. This is critical. This is integral to everything else we talk about.
[00:14:35] So if you're not willing to, or able to do that, it's going to be more difficult, not impossible, but much more difficult. And we're talking about changing our habits to change our lives for the long-term. And I know from personal experience tracking food and weight is cumbersome at first, but it quickly becomes quite easy, especially with these apps.
[00:14:58] Ma maintain your history. They make it easy to search, to use bar codes. It's really not that bad at all. And you'll be glad you did it because you'll have a much higher level of precision in terms of estimating the food that you're eating. Even if you decide to not track in the future. So how do you track your food?
[00:15:17] If you're eating packaged foods that have a barcode, the app that you use should have a barcode scanner, you scan it in assuming the data is accurate. It spits out the numbers. Boom. If you're eating whole foods like broccoli or meat or something that you can weigh, this is where a food scale comes in. I suggest going to Amazon or wherever you buy your inexpensive likely Chinese made electronics and get yourself a cheap food scale that measures in fractions of grams ideally would also measure in ounces and milliliters.
[00:15:50] So you've got all your liquids and solids. And between the food scale barcodes, the databases that are in the app. And then let's say you go to a restaurant, RET many restaurants, especially chain restaurants, have their nutrition facts posted online in the app that you use. Many of them also have branded food.
[00:16:10] So you want to track your food every day. That's everything you consume. Morning, noon, and night with the exception of small things that you consume every day in the same amount. For example, I take fish oil supplements. I take four capsules. It's probably 40 calories worth of fat. I don't track that because it's consistent every single day.
[00:16:33] So the relative change in metabolism and calories would be the same either way, whether I tracked it or not, because it's consistent. Perhaps you have a splash of half and half in your coffee every day. I wouldn't even track that. If it's an issue with convenience versus accuracy, you make the call, but those things don't necessarily need to be tracked, but all of your food and beverages should be tracked.
[00:16:56] And the other part of this is weighing yourself every day. You have to know how your weight is changing to adjust your calories. I recommend weighing yourself daily in the morning. Before you use the bathroom wearing very little clothing around the same time every day. I actually have a smart scale. I bought it a few months ago.
[00:17:15] I can include a link in the show notes. Connects to apple health on my iPhone and an apple health connects to macro factor. So all I have to do is open the app in the morning. Step on the scale. It beams my way, all the way through to the food log or app. I'm a big fan of automating and making things sustainable and making things much easier for yourself.
[00:17:38] Now that you've determined your maintenance calories, and you have a system in place to track your food and your weight, ask yourself, what is your goal? Are you trying to lose weight, gain, weight, or maintain? If your goal is to maintain your weight, it's pretty simple. You're going to eat as many calories as you burn so that your daily calories equals your estimated calories from the first step.
[00:18:06] That's it? It gets slightly more complicated. If you want to lose or gain weight, if you want to lose weight, the goal is to lose fat. I'm sure that that's your goal is to improve your body composition, which also means not losing too much muscle. And so we want to lose at a reasonable rate that is not overly aggressive, such that we would start to lose lean body mass, but just enough to burn fat at a good rate, to have a reasonable food or calorie plan where we're not starving ourselves.
[00:18:42] Now, if you're very overweight, you could push this a little bit further, be more aggressive. There are always special use cases, but for today, we're just going to talk more or less in the averages, and then we can go from there. So if you want to lose weight, the generally accepted range is going to be to set your.
[00:19:04] That is your caloric deficit, so that you lose between a quarter and 1% of your body weight per week. So what I suggest for your calories to establish a deficit of around 20 to 30% from your maintenance, and later on, you can adjust this based on your weight, that how your weight is changing versus your goal.
[00:19:27] But to start, we're going to say 20 to 30% of your maintenance. Let's go through an example. Let's say you're 200 pounds and you want to lose 20 pounds. And let's say your goal is on the higher end of 1% of your body weight per week or two pounds per week. That's going to take you roughly 10 weeks to lose the weight.
[00:19:48] If your maintenance calories are 2,500 and you're going to target 20 to 30%, let's go slightly on the higher end at 30. 30% of 2,500 is 750 calories per day deficit. If we subtract 750 from 2,500, that leaves you with 1,750 calories a day. So 1,750 calories a day would be your initial plan for your diet in hopes of losing two pounds per week.
[00:20:21] Okay. This is just the starting week. Every week. You're going to adjust this that's one example. Let's talk about gaining weight. Now, why would you want to gain weight? You would want to gain weight to build muscle or to improve performance, or if you're a powerlifter, there are a lot of reasons people can gain weight and we'll talk later on about some specific scenarios, but again, let's talk about the reasonable range for weight gain is probably between 0.1 and 0.25% of your body weight per week.
[00:20:51] Notice that's quite a bit less. Then the rate of weight loss. When you're losing weight, you can lose weight and lose fat quite quickly with not too much impact to muscle loss. But if you gain weight too quickly, it is inevitable that most of that weight will be fat. If you're too aggressive about it, you can only gain muscle at a certain rate.
[00:21:13] And it's not as fast as you might think. So what we want to avoid is what they call the dirty bulk. If you've never heard that term before, that just means eating as much and anything you find and see and want some people call it the seafood diet. You see it, you eat it. You're talking 4, 5, 6, 7,000 calories a day.
[00:21:32] Uninhibited. You are definitely going to gain muscle at a good clip that way, but you're going to gain a ton of fat and that fat later on is going to have to be cut down. So why don't we be smart about it? Why don't we gain in a reasonable fashion? 0.1 to 0.2, 5% of your body weight per week. And the initial target here would be half the target if you were losing weight.
[00:21:56] So if you want to gain weight, we're looking at a 10 to 15% surplus to start. Let's do another example. If you're 200 pounds and you want to gain 20 pounds and you want to go on the higher end of the gaining of quarter percent of your body weight, that's half a pound per week. So that's going to take you 40 weeks to get there, which is a nice drawn out period where you'll get to do a lot of lifting and training.
[00:22:23] You'll get to eat a nice, full, healthy satiating diet, but you're not going to get fat. If your maintenance calories are 2,500 and we go on the higher end of the target at 15%, in terms of our surplus, 15% of 2,500 is 375 calories. You add the two together. And you get 28 75, 2,875 calories a day. That would be your calorie target to gain the weight.
[00:22:50] So we've talked about establishing your maintenance calories, and we've talked about coming up with a goal and setting your either deficit to lose weight or your surplus to gain weight for that initial week. And we'll come back to these examples later, after we talk about the next most important priority, which is macro nutrients.
[00:23:13] If you just want to gain and lose weight, indiscriminately calories will get you there. But we want to be a little bit more discriminant about how we gained the weight, why we gained the weight, what goal we trying to achieve. So now we're going to talk about the three big macronutrients that we care about protein, fat, and carbs.
[00:23:36] We're going to. Explain the purpose of each one in our energy systems. And then more importantly, talk about the target amounts and some eating strategies around those that might help you meet those targets. I like to start with protein because that is, I'll say the most important macronutrient when it comes to muscle building and lifters.
[00:24:01] It's the one that has a solid target that you want to hit every time. Or get close to it. And in the fat and the carbs have a lot more flexibility. Protein is critical to your health. It facilitates muscle protein, synthesis, muscle building. It makes you full. It helps you recover. And it's found in a lot of really delicious foods.
[00:24:27] In my opinion, proteins are comprised of amino acids. There are essential amino acids and non essential. There are 20. And I'm not going to get into the science of that today. What I really want to focus on is the importance of protein for kick-starting what's called muscle protein synthesis. But the idea here is to feed your body with enough protein, that you are engaged in more protein synthesis than protein breakdown, so that the net effect is you gain muscle.
[00:25:01] Furthermore, the evidence seems to support the idea that you need to consume protein. Reasonable amounts, you know, certain minimum amounts multiple times throughout the day to maximize or optimize muscle protein synthesis. So we did talk about how meal timing isn't nearly as important as of course, calories and macronutrients, but there are some timing strategies with protein that will optimize how you use that protein that should fit just fine into your normal eating plan without doing anything crazy.
[00:25:36] So we'll get to that in a bit. Another aspect of protein that I think as well established is the importance of leucine, which is one of the amino acids, as well as the essential amino acids. So getting enough of both is easier when you're eating high quality proteins, such as those from animal sources, whey protein, egg meat, fish, chicken, other forms of poultry and so on.
[00:26:01] So if you are a vegetarian, for example, or a vegan, it's going to be harder to include the. Set of amino acids and loosening in your diet without being very deliberate and careful about your food choices. At the end of the day, you need sufficient protein. You need to eat it enough times per day. And the types that give you the protein that you need for muscle building, the next macronutrient is fat despite its bad reputation over the years, which fortunately, I think we've moved beyond that.
[00:26:34] Fat is particularly important for hormone production. It also, for many people has a positive impact on society. It makes you full it's what you hear often with people who eat the keto diet. For example, although I think people can go too far the other direction. And the third macronutrient of course is carbs.
[00:26:54] And back in the day when I tried Atkins and later on paleo primal and keto carbs were my enemy. And a lot of people have this mindset when it comes to some of the more modern diets. When it comes to people who train people who lift folks like you and me, people listening to this podcast, those of you who are getting into training carbs are your friend.
[00:27:18] When it comes to glucose glycogen, they fuel your training. They help recovery because of glycogen stores. It's actually very hard to be low carb and train, to build muscle when you're losing weight. It's definitely possible to get those carbs down as you're losing weight, because you're simply trying to hold on to muscle.
[00:27:38] You're not trying to train as hard, but when you're building muscle and you're in a bulk carbs, are your friend, at least in my opinion. And you'll find from the strategy we set up here for your macronutrient targets, that carbs are a robust aspect of the eating strategy. Before we talk about amounts and eating strategies, we need to understand what is the energy contained in these macronutrients.
[00:28:04] And it's as simple as. Protein has four calories per gram. Fat has nine calories per gram and carbs have four calories per gram. So both protein and carbs have approximately four calories per gram. Whereas fat has more than twice as much in nine calories per gram. So if we're trying to convert between calories and grams, that's how we would do it.
[00:28:33] If we know our protein target every day is 200 grams. Then, you know, since there are four calories per gram, that's 800 calories and you could do the inverse. If you need to convert from calories two grams, and we'll be doing that in some of the examples later on. Now let's talk about the amounts that we want to target for each macronutrient and some eating strategies, some ideas around these, so that you can determine exactly how many grams or calories of each you want to target based on your goals.
[00:29:08] If you use a food logging app, something like macro factor, many of these apps will calculate this for you, or at least allow you to select some sort of goal. And it will suggest reasonable targets, but we're going to do it by hand on this podcast, giving you the tools to do it yourself in whatever way you wish, whether it's on a notebook or in a spreadsheet or using an app.
[00:29:32] So let's start with protein. The evidence suggests that a reasonable target, especially if you're lifting a reasonable target is 0.82. Gram per pound of body, weight of protein. And you can push that all the way up to 1.2, 1.3 grams per pound, which you might consider, for example, during a cut, when you're losing weight in order to preserve muscle mass.
[00:29:57] And it helps us to tidy as well. You can push that up a bit, but the key is that you must be lifting. If you're sedentary, if you're not lifting the targets go way down. And we're not concerned with that population, we are concerned with folks like you and me who want to get stronger. And it's really as simple as that, where it gets a little more tricky is the evidence that shows when and how much protein to optimize.
[00:30:24] Muscle protein synthesis. And from what I've gathered, the consensus is shoot for 25 to 50 grams of protein in a meal. It's going to depend on your weight and age. For example, the older you are, the more protein you want to try to get at each meal or even overall, but this is a range 25 to 50 grams per meal, roughly four to six hours apart.
[00:30:50] Now I'm not going to tell you that if it's three in the afternoon and you've got to have a snack to avoid having protein in your snack, because it's only 15 or 20 grams, if it gets you to your target. Go for it. We're talking about sustainability and flexibility, but if you want to optimize it and you're okay having say four meals during the day three or four meals, each meal, you shoot to get 25 to 50 grams, some of your bigger meals, your lunch or dinner, where you have a little extra pork or steak or whatever your protein is of choice.
[00:31:23] You might get into the 60, 70 gram range and it all evens out and gets you to your target for a 200 pound person shooting for 200 grams of protein you would need on average four meals containing 50 grams per meal. Now, one of those might just be a to scoop protein shake before or after or during your workout.
[00:31:45] And remember what we talked about before the importance of leucine and good high quality sources of protein to get you to that target most effectively would be things like whey casein eggs. And fish. So good rule of thumb that I live by is one gram per pound. It's easy to remember. It's a nice round number that brings us to fat.
[00:32:06] The amount of fat in your diet can range considerably primarily based on your preferences and goals, such as how much room you want to leave for carbs or what kind of foods you enjoy eating. It really is as simple as that. And the range is anywhere from 0.2 on the low end to maybe 0.6 on the upper end grams per pound, or another way to look at it is 20 to 30% of your calories.
[00:32:33] So, if you're going to pick a nice round number to forget all those ranges, you could say 25% of your calories start there and then adjust up or down based on your other goals. Now I've read over the years and I've heard and seen it supported with the. That it's possibly a good idea to limit how many fats you have in your Perry workout, nutrition, peri, meaning during or in the vicinity just before, during or after your workout in that window to limit your fats and prefer instead carbs and protein, and to distribute your fats throughout your other meals.
[00:33:10] During the day. Now we talked about the fact that there are no good or bad foods, no clean or dirty foods. The one exception to all of that, that I would ever make is trans fats, artificial, trans fats. I don't think anybody agrees. They're a good thing to include in any substantive amount in your diet. So you probably want to limit artificial trans fats.
[00:33:30] That's the only thing in this entire discussion, I would say, try to limit. There's still lots of debate about saturated fats. And I think at the end of the day, if you have a pretty balanced diet, pretty good foods, it's going to balance out between saturated, Moto and saturated polyunsaturated. And that's a good point.
[00:33:49] And we're not trying to artificially bias toward one or the other with some radical food choices, just eat what you enjoy, have a good balanced diet. And it's going to work out. That brings us to carbs. Carbs would make up the remainder of your calories. If protein is one gram per pound and fat is roughly 25% of the cow.
[00:34:11] Then based on your calorie allotment for the day, which we talked about earlier, are you in a surplus? Are you in a deficit or are you maintaining relative to your maintenance calories? Whatever those calories are, the remaining calories or carbs. Now, when you eat carbs, pretty much anytime you want, but there are some benefits eating them at specific times.
[00:34:34] Pre-workout especially if it's your first meal of the day. Like it is for me. I have at the very minimum, I'll have a banana about a half hour to an hour before I work out. So that's a good time. Post-workout seems to be an excellent time to eat carbs, to replenish your glycogen stores. If you've ever heard of the anabolic window, it's actually much larger than people claim or used to think it was probably four to six hours after your workout.
[00:35:04] And that's a good time to replenish and eat your carbs. Some studies even suggest. Roughly 60% of your carbs for the day, peri workout in the vicinity of training. So it's something to consider. If you're eating 300 grams of carbs a day, then perhaps 180 of those are smushed closer to your workout, depending on when that is during the day.
[00:35:27] But again, don't radically alter things just to meet these timing suggestions I would eat when it makes sense to eat, eat normal way. Don't be weird. And it generally is going to work out. These are just extra tips to optimize when and how you. Another thing, more intense workouts require more carbs, and this could be a high volume lifting session, or it could be endurance related exercise if you're using high weight on the bar, but you're working in a very low rep range with lots of rest periods.
[00:36:02] It may not rise to the level of the endurance that requires extra carbs. So again, don't go out of your way, but if, if it's a high volume session or endurance, something like that, then it could be a good idea to bias your carbs close to or in the vicinity of that workout. Now, what about keto? We're talking about carbs and if you're on keto or a low carb, very low carb diet, you're trying to avoid carbs.
[00:36:26] You're trying to stay a hundred under a hundred grams. Maybe even less than that. Maybe under 50 for the day. Keto can work for you if you're losing or maintaining weight. But I think it's going to severely hinder muscle building and performance in the gym. If you're trying to gain. So just keep that in mind, it works for some people, it may work for you.
[00:36:48] I'm not saying this is a hard and fast rule, but given that carbs are the source of glycogen and that's an important input to your performance. When you train the logic goes that it's better to have more carbs than. The last thing about carbs is fiber, which is a type of carbohydrate. You want to get enough fiber, and if you're eating pretty well, if you're eating fruits, vegetables, grains, you're going to get it.
[00:37:14] You could of course seek it out. Quest bars have a lot of fiber. For example, there's obviously fiber supplements, but you want to get your fiber. And the general recommendation is something like 14 grams per thousand calories. So if you, if you have a 2,500 calorie diet, you're up in the thirties terms of grams of fiber.
[00:37:34] Now the only other macronutrient we haven't talked about, or the only big one that people are familiar with is alcohol. What about alcohol? I love a glass of wine or a, a nice stout or, you know, a mixed drink every now and then a couple of times a week. In fact, now that I'm on a bulk, I can drink a little bit more than when I was cutting.
[00:37:54] And it's an integral part of many people's social lives. Some people suggest take. The calories and alcohol and treating it as a carbohydrate, which means you would take the calories and you, and multiply it by four. For example, I had, I think it was founder's breakfast stout the other day, which is 270 calories.
[00:38:16] So divide that by four. I could track that as 68 grams of carbs. Now let's start to put all of this together. We've established our maintenance calories. We've talked about macro nutrients and a way to target each one. How much protein, how much fat, how much carbs. Now let's talk about the different phases of weight change and how to adjust your diet to fit each.
[00:38:45] So these are phases of weight change in how they align with their goals. We're starting with weight loss. Typically, this is associated with a goal to lose weight, reduce your body fat and improve your body composition. And the idea here is not just to reduce the number on the scale, but to reduce fat while limiting muscle loss.
[00:39:12] If you are not trained at all and you're overweight. Or even skinny fat as, as it's called, you may decide that you'd like to lose some of that fat before he then bulk up and gain muscle. Now, I would caution you if you are not severely overweight, a more effective approach may be to just eat at maintenance or even in a surplus and start training.
[00:39:36] If you've never trained before this could result in somewhat of a body composition where you actually burn fat while gaining muscle, but let's for the sake of this example, assume you want to lose weight. You're either overweight, you're skinny fat, and you want to lose that fat before he gained weight, or you have been training.
[00:39:56] And now you're just ready for a weight loss phase to lean out before he bulk up. Again, our example will be a 200 pound person who needs to lose 20 pounds with a total daily energy expense. Of 2,500 calories. We previously calculated a starting deficit of 750 calories, which leaves us with 1,750 calories or less per day as our target.
[00:40:26] So to lose weight because our maintenance calories are 2,500. We're going to eat 1,750 calories a day to try to lose weight. And here's how we're going to break up our macronutrients. We're going to start with protein. One gram per pound for a 200 pound person. That's easy, 200 grams of protein. You multiply that by four and you get 800 calories now because we're talking about weight loss.
[00:40:53] Some of the literature supports going even higher for your protein target as you're losing weight to preserve muscle mass. So you might even target 1.2 grams per pound, which would get you up to two 20 grams, which is a lot of protein. I understand if you're not used to eating that, but it's a worthwhile target based on what the evidence supports.
[00:41:13] Then we go to fat again, rule of thumb before I said, just start with 25%. You can adjust up or down to based on your needs, but let's just start with 25% of 7,050 calories is 438 calories. You divide that by nine and remember fat has nine calories per gram, and that gives you, and we're rounding here 50.
[00:41:34] So you got 200 grams of protein, 50 grams of fat. Then we get to carbs. Carbs are simply the remainder of your calories. So you start with 1,750 calories subtract the 800 calories of protein subtract the 438 calories of fat. And you're left with 512 calories divided by four. That gives you around 130 grams.
[00:41:57] Now 130 grams of carbs, depending on how you've been eating for the past few years might seem fairly low for a lot of people who are used to eating three, 400 grams of carbs every day. And if that's you and you want to eat more carbs, just reduce the fat to say 20% instead of 25%. And that'll free up some room for more carbs or vice versa.
[00:42:21] If you want to be in a very low carb diet like keto, and you want the fat to dominate and have very few carbs. But for this example, which is a little more balanced approach in summary, it's 200 grams of protein, 50 grams of fat, 130 grams of carbs. That's your goal. You get in the ballpark of that every day plus or minus 20%, you're going to be pretty good.
[00:42:46] And then later on you can start seeing the results and adjusting accordingly. And we'll talk about that. That was weight loss. Now what about weight gain? Typically you want to gain weight for one reason and one reason alone, and that is to build muscle, but you want to do it while limiting fat gain. So if you're a newbie, you'll probably see some pretty good results, whatever you do.
[00:43:11] And if you are lean but trained, this is where it is even more important to gain weight at a reasonable pace. So you don't gain too much fat because the more experienced you are under the. The slower, the rate of muscle gain, because you've already gained a lot of your muscle. Let's go to the same example, 200 pounds.
[00:43:31] In this case, you want to gain 20 pounds and your maintenance calories are 2,500 calories. So earlier on we talked about the surplus. We calculated a surplus of 375 calories giving you a calorie target of 28 75 now because you're gaining weight. I see that as a floor, meaning you're trying to hit at least that many calories a day.
[00:43:55] It's kind of a nice position to be in, to want to eat a minimum. And you'll get there. If you start lifting, if you lean out and then you're ready to bulk, you'll be in that position. So let's calculate the macronutrients again, protein, same thing. One gram per pound, 200 grams or 800 calories, easy fat.
[00:44:16] We're going to stick with 25%, but now it's 25% of a higher calorie target 28 75. So that's going to result in 719 calories of fat divided by nine gives you 80 grams and then carbs are the remainder. So the carbs are going to be higher as well. Again, cause we're working with more calories and we haven't changed the protein.
[00:44:39] So we take 28, 75 minus 800 calories of protein minus 719 calories of fat leaving us with 1,356 calories of carbs divided by four gives you 340 grams. So in summary, that's 200 grams of protein, 80 grams of fat. So 80, instead of the 50 grams, when you were losing weight, you get to eat 80 grams, all gaining weight.
[00:45:05] So a nice little bump there and then 340 grams of carbs. So that's well more than double. In fact, it's almost triple the amount of carbs you would have been equally while losing weight. And this is what we want to see. If we're training to build muscle. This big bump in carbs is. But you can always swap some fat for carbs and vice versa, depending on your preferences, angles and how you feel.
[00:45:31] All these keeping in mind that fat is nine calories per gram and carbs is four calories per gram. All right, in the last type of weight goal would be maintenance. Your goal is simply to maintain the weight where you are. Now, if you are a newbie, if you're just starting lifting, this could be a good place to start for you where you just try to keep your weight, where it is.
[00:45:55] You start lifting heavy. And what will start to happen is you'll burn fat while gaining muscle in weight really won't change, but your body composition will improve. Another reason we maintain weight is when you're transitioning from a cut to a bulk, for some people they want to break, but they don't want to start gaining heavy right away.
[00:46:16] So they go into a maintenance phase for a few weeks. Or even a month or two before bulking. And finally, if you are trained and you're just trying to maintain your muscle and you're not looking to bulk at this time, maintenance is a good strategy going with our same example, our 200 pound person who wants to maintain and has maintenance calories of 2,500, then you're going to eat 2,500 calories a day.
[00:46:41] And the breakdown is as follows protein 200 grams, same thing, right? One gram per pound. So 200 grams or 800 pounds. Fat 25% of 2,500 is 625 calories divided by nine that's, 70 grams. So it's, in-between the weight loss and the weight gain amount of fat. And then finally carbs is the remainder 2,500 minus 800 calories of protein, minus 625 calories of fat leaving you with 1,075 calories of carbs divided by four that's 270 grams, which is lower than the weight gain, but quite a bit higher, right?
[00:47:24] More than double of the weight loss, which is a nicely balanced, sustainable diet for the longterm. It's you could find a good balance of delicious foods. You can fit in dessert. You can fit in alcohol. Even at that maintenance level in summary, 200 grams of protein, 70 grams of fat and 270 grams of carbs.
[00:47:45] We've just talked about. The calories and the macronutrients, but this really is just for week one. And you might be thinking, oh man, now I have to do this every single week. So hear me out. What are you going to do is weigh yourself every day. And at the end of the first week, I want you to take the seven day average of your weight.
[00:48:09] I don't want you to worry about individual fluctuations. Just take the seven day average. That's the first week compare that seven day average to your starting weight. If the change is in the vicinity of what you're targeting. So let's say you're trying to lose two pounds in a week. If it's in the vicinity of that, I would continue with the exact same calories and macronutrients if however, it's quite a bit off.
[00:48:38] So if you're trying to lose two pounds and you only lost half a pound. Just adjust in the opposite direction conservatively. And I don't want to give you a specific number, a specific target. You can. It really doesn't matter because you're going to converge over time. Let's put it that way. It's not going to be perfect first month or so it'll converge over time.
[00:49:01] So if you intended to lose two pounds and you lost only half a pound, then you were eating too many calories. The data is telling you that either your metabolism is lower than you thought or decreased. Or you ate more calories than you thought you did. Now, I'm making the assumption that you properly tracked all your food, because if you're missing meals in your food logger, that's going to make a big difference on how many calories you think you ate.
[00:49:31] So assuming that you've been tracking it properly and by properly, I mean, within 20%, it really doesn't have to be super precise. Then chances are, it's really your metabolism that is lower than you thought at least for that week. So what do you do? You simply reduce your caloric requirement for the next week and recalculate your macros?
[00:49:54] Just like we did before. So if you're in a weight loss, And your calories were 1,750 and you realize that you're not losing as quickly as you'd like, then reduce it by say a hundred calories, reduce it to 1,650 and recalculate your protein, fat and carbs. Your protein is going to be the same. So it's really your fat and carbs that are going to come down and guess what you do the same thing the following week, the next week you keep taking the moving average.
[00:50:22] You can continue using a seven day average, or if you're a math geek, you can use a, a longer average or another special algorithm. It's really up to you to play around. But you'll keep assessing it this way. If the following week, now that you've cut your calories by a hundred calories a day. If the following week you lost say 1.8 pounds, that's pretty darn close to the two pounds you were shooting for.
[00:50:44] I would keep it the same. Or if you lost 2.2, if it's in the vicinity, keep it the same, make it easy on yourself. You don't have to do all the math again until you see that the change is drifting farther away from what you want. It's that simple. And it goes both directions. Weight gain is the same thing.
[00:51:01] Now I know that was a lot of numbers and each of these sections will be timestamped in the show notes so you can review them again. And again, I'll reiterate that using an app like macro factor makes this much easier, but of course you can also use a spreadsheet or a notebook, and it's just fine, depending on convenience versus results.
[00:51:23] Some important things to keep in mind. The first is that your daily expenditure, your metabolism can fluctuate. All the time and it can do so quite dramatically, based on your weight, your activity level, stress, sleep, your overall lifestyle, your job. So you have to track continuously just to stay on top of how your metabolism is fluctuating.
[00:51:50] The second thing is using an app like macro factor will make this much easier, and I encourage you to use technology. If that's your thing, I'm a big fan of putting things on autopilot. Putting habits in place, tools, technologies, things in place where you don't have to think about things, you just do them or they happen for you.
[00:52:09] I suggest adjusting weekly at first. Meaning at the end of every week, as we talked about earlier, you're going to assess your average weight for the seven. Versus your weight change goal. And if it has drifted from your goal, you're going to adjust your calories for the next week, accordingly at a reasonable level, that doesn't create some big overshoot.
[00:52:35] Eventually you should be able to shift toward an intuitive eating approach if you want, because you'll have the experience to know the calorie content and the macronutrients, the density of the foods you're eating based on having gone through this process, you've developed a skill and a knowledge base that will be with you for the rest of your life.
[00:52:57] I personally continue to track every day because I have very specific goals. It does keep me honest to an extent it's, it's a built-in habit that I've just been doing. And I don't really have to think about it. And I enjoy the science and the numbers behind this whole process. That's just me. I'm a geek.
[00:53:15] What can I. Notice that we have not talked once about specific foods that you can and cannot eat. I've mentioned some examples of foods that will give you higher quality protein, but it's totally up to you. If you want to eat those, there's nothing that you can or cannot eat. However, there are foods that can make the process a little bit easier, depending on which phase you're in.
[00:53:38] And I'd like to share just some of those foods, just to give you some ideas, if you're wondering, Hmm. What, what do I want to pick up at the grocery store or try in some new recipes, starting with weight loss. When you're, when you're losing weight, things become a little bit more restrictive, just because you only have so many calories to play with your fat and carbs have been lowered your protein still up.
[00:54:03] But it, it limits your choices a little bit if you want to avoid being super hungry, for example. So when it comes to protein sources, pretty much any protein source is, is still going to be great, even when you're losing weight. But if you compare to say 80, 20 ground beef to chicken or fish or even pork, there's obviously a difference in content and calories, right?
[00:54:25] The beef is going to have a higher content of fat. So you'd have to eat more of it to get the similar amount of protein. But now you're eating into your fat target. Doesn't mean I haven't done it. I love beef. I love a simple dish of ground beef and rice with some taco seasoning as a, as a nice pre-made lunch for the week.
[00:54:44] But generally the lower fat leaner meats might make it a little easier to get the protein you need while avoiding hitting those targets. And I think, you know what? Those are things like chicken and. I'm I love chicken thighs. So I'm not a big chicken breasts advocate necessarily, but of course chicken breast is going to be leaner, but eat what you enjoy and then make it work.
[00:55:09] So chicken fish even lean cuts of beef steak. And so on. Certain dairy products are excellent sources of protein like cottage cheese. That's a really nicely balanced snack, cottage, cheese, and Greek yogurt. Eggs are great. But again, if you're on a cut, you've got the protein in there along with the fat, if you're eating whole eggs.
[00:55:31] And frankly, I don't like to eat my eggs any other way than hole, so I make it work, but you could just eat egg whites and you'll get a lot of protein. You're not going to get the fat that way. The standard grains like wheat, right? Barley oats. I love oatmeal, oatmeal. It's got protein and it gives me my carbs and it's got fiber kind of has everything in it.
[00:55:51] And it mixes well with things like peanut butter fruit. You can use almond milk, you can use whole milk again, depending on what you're gaining or losing weight. You can adjust some of these ingredients and the amount to hit. Vegetables are always great. Vegetables are effectively free when we're talking about things like green vegetables, broccoli, and green beans, I consider them almost free.
[00:56:13] So when you're trying to lose weight, those are excellent fillers to cram into your diet and to every meal, eat big salads and whatnot because they'll fill you up and they'll keep the calories where you need them. And then as far as carbs go tos, there's always the potato variants, sweet potatoes, white potato.
[00:56:29] In addition to the grains we talked about. So you notice, I'm not telling you anything surprising any super foods, any special foods you have to get in some organic local food source or anything like that. However you notice, I didn't mention say sour patch, kids or Hershey. Chocolate bars, even though I love all those things.
[00:56:53] I have a sweet tooth, chocolate brownies, muffins, all this delicious stuff. If those are parts of your diet, you can still eat them. You just have to track your macros and calories and make it work. But the idea is I was sharing with you where those that will maximize your ability to get your protein, keep the fats and carbs and moderate range and still enjoy it.
[00:57:13] All right now, foods for bulking. Okay. We talked about a dirty bulk, which is the idea of just eating whatever you want. We're not going to do that. There are so many delicious foods in existence on this planet for your protein, carbs, and fat. When it comes to bulking, when your calorie limit is higher, everything is higher and you could really enjoy yourself.
[00:57:34] Let's take proteins. For example, all the meats are on the table. Lean fatty from beef to chicken, to seafood eggs, the dairy sources, as we talked about cottage, cheese, Greek yogurt, but even milk, even whole milk. I love whole milk. They're all on the table. And they're excellent. Sources of protein. Think about the grains, think about potatoes, rice keenwah.
[00:57:59] And then as far as fats go, here's where you've got a little more licensed to use some more butter, olive oil, eggs, eat some nuts, things like that. And I'm not saying any of these things won't work while losing weight. It just comes back to your calories and your macros. All right. The last thing I want to talk about is supplements and it really isn't going to take very long.
[00:58:21] I plan to do a future episode exclusively about the whole variety of supplements out there, things that work things that don't things, where the science is out. But today I want to talk about just two of them, whey protein. And Creotine whey protein really isn't even a supplement. In my opinion, it's just a food that's been processed.
[00:58:42] It comes from milk. We're talking about whey protein, isolate in particular. There's also casein protein, which has slower digesting, but let's just focus on way. I have way every day that I work out and usually on days that I don't. And the only reason I have it is because it's a quickly digestible, convenient, ready source of lots of protein and not much else.
[00:59:06] So the way I consume protein is before and after my workouts, I might have 30 grams before and 50 grams after, along with carbs, that's my preference. And that's it. And then the rest of the day, I get my protein from whole food sources, from meat, from dairy eggs, fish. So whey protein, there's nothing wrong with it.
[00:59:26] Yes, it's processed, but so is just about everything else in our diet. And it's an excellent source of all the complete proteins we talked about, including leucine. It's probably the ideal source of leucine from a convenience perspective and one scoop of a minimally flavored high quality whey protein will give you something like 25 grams of protein.
[00:59:49] Okay. So that's enough said about that. Now let's talk about creatine. Creatine is the one supplement that has been validated to actually be effective in a way that's meaningful in a way that most would suggest that you should take it, especially if you're lifting, but now we're coming to find. Various populations would probably benefit from creatine, the elderly, the sedentary kids.
[01:00:12] And I'm not going to go there and I'm not going to bring up the studies. You can look those up. I'm just focusing on us as lifters. The recommendation is three to five grams of creatine every day. Creatine monohydrate it's dirt cheap. It's easy to just throw in your post-workout shake or a glass of water.
[01:00:30] It doesn't taste like anything goes down easy, and there is plenty of evidence through hundreds of studies that it helps you build muscle and gain strength more quickly. If you're taking creatine than if you're not, it helps with your endurance specifically anaerobic endurance and between sessions that helps with recovery.
[01:00:51] It's perfectly safe. It's totally natural. You get creatine from food. You just don't get as much as you should from an optimal perspective. If you want to take it as a supplement for training, if you're going to take creatine, you might hear about a loading phase where you take 20 grams a day for the first week or so, but there's research that shows you probably don't need to do this.
[01:01:14] Just take three to five grams a day. It'll be saturated in your body soon enough. And then you just keep taking it and you could just take it for the rest of your life. It has no side effects whatsoever. It's good stuff. Enough said, let's recap. Everything we've talked about today. Cause I know this was a long episode.
[01:01:33] But I hope it was extremely useful to setting up and adjusting your diet to meet your goals. We talked about how to estimate your maintenance calories and the best way to do that is to track for two weeks, track your calories that you eat and track your weight. We talked about identifying your goal.
[01:01:53] Are you trying to lose weight because you want to burn fat? Are you trying to gain weight so you can build muscle or maintain your weight and how aggressive do you want to be? We talked about establishing your calories for the deficit or surplus consistent with that. Then we talked about macro nutrients, what they are protein, fat, and carbs, and how to set up your targets, proteins easy.
[01:02:19] One, one gram per pound fat. We talked about 20 to 30% in carbs, the remainder, but fat and carbs can be adjusted based on your preferences and training needs. We talked about logging your food every day, preferably using an app. So it's easier weigh in yourself every day and you can use something like a smart scale to make it easier, and then measuring your weight change each week and adjusting the calories up or down by tweaking the fat and carbs accordingly.
[01:02:50] If you have questions about any of the specifics in this episode, or want to share with me your personal experience and your individual goals, I'd be happy to get back to you by email@phillipatwhitsonwaits.com or you can DM me on Instagram at Whitson weights. I'd be happy to go over those details with you.
[01:03:10] That should cover it regarding the basic plan of attack for fat loss and muscle building. When it comes to calories, macronutrients, and even supplements. Stay tuned for episode six, where we introduce systems and habits to put your fitness on autopilot. If you have questions for me or topics you'd like to hear on future episodes, just connect with me by email, Instagram or Facebook.
[01:03:34] All the links are in the episodes. Show notes.
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