pistachio
Member
Following a suggestion by CCM, I have decided to write up a bit about my thoughts / philosophies on diet and training. This part will be focused on diet and nutrition.
Over the years I have tried many different dieting styles and many different philosophies towards nutrition. What follows are my own personal views on diet and nutrition. This is what I have found has worked the best for me.
It is somewhat scatterbrained, I hope you can follow it and find it useful and or interesting. Note that it is intended to be advice to people looking to maintain a healthy weight and generally be in good health all year round (i.e. this is the sort of stuff I recommend to friends / family).
If you have any questions or want my opinion on something that I haven’t covered here (or clarification on something I have), feel free to ask. I will post up a similar thread on my training philosophies some time soon.
Calorie counting:
Despite all my years of training, calorie counting was nothing that I ever really did until I started cutting last year. I went from about 106kgs to 94kgs without calorie counting, but after that I found that not only did my progress stall, but I actually started looking smaller as well.
That was when I started calorie counting. For the next 8 weeks, I lost a consistent 0.5kgs a week and started to look much better.
Calorie counting is not as onerous as it sounds. I think the name scares people off doing it, making them think that they actually need to count the calories in everything they eat, whereas all you really need to do is get an idea of how many calories you are eating every day (and trying to keep this constant).
I read somewhere (probably here lol) that most people either overestimate or underestimate the number of calories they eat each day by around 50%. From discussions with friends, I believe this is pretty close to spot on. Some girls think they are only eating 800 calories a day, others think they are having 3000. Both are way off the mark. Similarly, I’ve heard some guys say they are on 1500 and others on 5000, when in both cases they are nowhere near.
In this respect, calorie counting can be an invaluable tool in getting a much better idea of how many calories you are actually putting away each day.
The actual number is not so important, what is more important is the CHANGE in that number. If you are trying to put on weight, pick a number and see how you go. If you do not gain sufficient weight, increase the calories. If you gain too much weight (i.e. fat), reduce the number.
Another benefit of calorie counting is that it allows you to ‘substitute’ meals or foods. If you feel like having a cheat meal for the day, work out the calories in it and figure out what you should not eat for the day to ensure your total calories remain more or less the same.
tl/dr: Creating your own diet, from scratch, using websites etc to calculate calories, is an invaluable exercise that everyone should do at some point. It allows you to create a diet that you like and that you’ll be able to stick with. It also gives you a more accurate idea of how much you are actually eating, and once the initial work is done, you don’t have to count anything on a daily basis (except the measuring of food obviously). A diet spreadsheet is very handy for this purpose, and quite easy to construct.
Creating a diet:
Following on from the above point about creating your own diet, a few key points here. There is no magic % split for diets, it is the calories that counts. But about a third of each ties in well with my philosophy of ‘everything in moderation’. Usually I have a higher ratio of fat, usually 40% plus, simply because it requires a lower volume of food to hit my calories for the day. If you are on a lower calorie diet, the reverse is true, and you may wish to only have 25% of your calories in fat.
I think a lot of the considerations about making a diet are quite common sense, but I will list them below:
- High calorie vs low calorie: If you are trying to construct a high calorie diet, say 3500+ calories, you will want to have high calorie density, low volume foods to ensure the overall volume of food is manageable. Nuts are great, muesli is fantastic (oats are extremely calorie dense, chuck in some nuts and fruit and you have a tasty high calorie snack). Milk is also good. Low calorie diets will want low calorie density foods such as fruit, low fat low sugar yoghurt, meat, veggies etc. The exercise of constructing a diet spreadsheet and researching the calorie density of different foods will help you in determining which foods are high density and which are low density.
- Meal size and timing is irrelevant: Tailor your diet to suit you. If you can only eat 2-3 times a day, eat 2-3 times a day. If you prefer smaller meals and can eat more often, eat more often. On my current routine, I go nearly 14 hours without food between about 7:30pm and 9:30am. Sometimes I wake up hungry and will smash a tin of tuna, but otherwise I fast. I think your body adapts very quickly to whatever diet you adopt, and any ill effects you may think you will develop are merely the product of successfully marketing campaigns by supp companies.
- Mix it up: Try to consume as many different types of food each day. Eating a large number of different foods gives you the best chance of getting all your micronutrient requirements for the day. This is why I like foods like homemade muesli with several types of nuts, dried fruits, seeds, legumes etc.
- Avoid all processed foods: In general, the closer it is to being a raw product (i.e. something that can be pulled out of the ground or ripped off an animal) the better. A diet full of meat, fruit, veg, eggs, milk, oats, nuts, seeds etc is a good diet. I have no bread, pasta or rice in my diet, except for the occasional meal where it is unavoidable. I don’t think there is necessarily anything wrong with bread/rice/pasta, simply that better carb options exist that are more micronutrient dense, such as oats or sweet potato.
- Everything in moderation: I think this is obvious, but just keep the diet mixed and with a bit of everything. Don’t just eat red meat, eat all meats. Don’t just eat green veggies, eat all veggies. Don’t stick to one type of nuts, eat all of them. This again ties in with my philosophy of trying to consume as many different types of food as possible.
Keep it simple:
There is so much crap and misinformation out there about diet and nutrition. Like most things, people overcomplicate it. So long as you have a diet low in (or even better, devoid of) processed foods and containing a wide variety of wholesome foods, it will be a solid diet. If you are on low calories, you may need to manage it a little bit more carefully to ensure you are getting adequate micronutrients. If you are on 2500+ calories of ‘clean’ foods, you are almost certainly meeting your micros. You should try calorie counting for a period of time, develop a diet you like, and stick with it. The results are well worth it.
Miscellaneous:
Thought I’d briefly touch on a few other things. I don’t really believe in carb cycling or keto diets or any of that. They may work and they may have merit, but they either seem too extreme or more complicated than necessary. Simply going by calories will be sufficient for the vast majority of people. The argument against mere calorie counting is usually homeostasis, that your body will adapt over time rendering a constant diet less effective over time. This can be worked around by adjusting your diet over time (which you should be doing as you gain muscle or lose fat anyway). If you are slowly bulking, you should slowly increase the calories in your diet. If you are cutting, you should slowly decrease them. I think if you are on a low bodyfat cut (trying to get to say 6-8% bf), there is some merit in consuming higher calories on workout days, but as I have never gotten to that level of bodyfat before, I can’t comment on the efficacy of this methodology.
Cheating and breaks:
There is absolutely nothing wrong with cheat meals, and nothing wrong with having chocolate or ice cream (or whatever your vice is) as part of your daily diet (or in the case of ‘larger’ cheat meals, once or twice a week).
However, I sometimes push this further and have a complete break from diet. I’ll still have a rough ‘base’ (i.e. my mash and protein shakes and tin of tuna are largely a staple of my diet), but will mix up the rest of it completely. I think this is a good idea to keep hormones in check. This may be complete broscience, but personally I have found that my testosterone levels always seem to be better when I just eat differently (or crap) for a little bit, but get back to my regular diet quickly. If I eat differently for TOO long, I invariably start to have micronutrient deficiencies from my less than ideal diet. But for a weekend, it can be great to ‘fill any gaps’ that your regular diet may have.
Questions
Alright, that’s all that I could think of off the top of my head, I’m sure there is more, I’ll edit this later if I can think of anything else noteworthy to mention.
EDIT: Two other sections I forgot to mention.
Bulking and Cutting:
Over the years, I’ve ‘bulked up’ multiple times and subsequently cut down. I’ve come to the conclusion that clean bulking, or trying to bulk while gaining minimal fat, is the best solution. Bulking and gaining unnecessary fat simply leads to more time spent dieting later on. Plus, you inevitably lose muscle when you are cutting, more depending on how long you are cutting for. So the more fat you gain, the longer you have to cut and the more muscle you will hence lose during the cut. Plus, I personally feel like I look like shit when I get plump, and I would much rather look good all year round.
My recommendation would be something like the following – First, get down to about 10% bodyfat. Then bulk from to a maximum of 15% bodyfat. Do this for about 42 weeks in the year. Then spend about 8-10 weeks cutting back to 10% bodyfat. Repeat. 10% will look awesome generally (provided you are carrying enough muscle), and is enough bodyfat to ensure your testosterone levels are not adversely affected.
I believe this 10-15% range is optimal in terms of both gaining muscle and maintaining a decent physique year round.
With regards to diet, it doesn’t need to change much at all between these phases. Bulking I would start at about 200 calories above maintenance and see how you go. Depending on fat gain, you may need more or less than this. As mentioned earlier, this amount will have to increase over time as you get bigger.
When cutting, simply reduce the calories. I don’t think you require any kind of fancy dieting to get to 10%. Just pick some foods you like, make sure you don’t exceed your calories and you are good to go. Again, monitor body fat levels and adjust accordingly.
You’ll notice in both sections, I talk about monitoring body fat levels. I will touch on this briefly in the next section.
Monitoring:
If there is one thing I would recommend, whether you are bulking or cutting, it is to weigh yourself daily and to take pictures and measurements fortnightly (or monthly).
Some people hate the scales, I live by them. Really, scales are only your enemy if you are doing a complete body recomp (i.e. losing fat and gaining muscle at the same time). If not, they are fantastic, and when combined with photos, can give you a very good idea of how you are travelling.
The important part though is NOT to care about the daily number. I like to use a 7 point moving average (i.e. the average of the last 7 days). This is far less volatile, and in fact, can be nearly linear if you have your diet and training on track.
When I lost about 15kgs last year (after a bulk that was FAR too dirty), the chart of my 7 point moving average was almost linear at 0.5kgs per week. My DAILY weight on the other hand was all over the place, sometimes moving 2kgs in as many days.
So to tie in with the section above, monitor your 7 point moving average and if it hasn’t changed in 2 weeks (either up or down, depending what you are trying to achieve), adjust your diet accordingly (either more or less calories). It really is that simple. All you need to do is be consistent. Don’t skip workouts or slack out, keep getting stronger, keep hitting PBs, stick to your diet and you WILL achieve your goals. Regardless of how strong you are, or how big you are, or how much training experience you have, you can always continue to improve. It is simply a matter of how bad you want it.
Over the years I have tried many different dieting styles and many different philosophies towards nutrition. What follows are my own personal views on diet and nutrition. This is what I have found has worked the best for me.
It is somewhat scatterbrained, I hope you can follow it and find it useful and or interesting. Note that it is intended to be advice to people looking to maintain a healthy weight and generally be in good health all year round (i.e. this is the sort of stuff I recommend to friends / family).
If you have any questions or want my opinion on something that I haven’t covered here (or clarification on something I have), feel free to ask. I will post up a similar thread on my training philosophies some time soon.
Calorie counting:
Despite all my years of training, calorie counting was nothing that I ever really did until I started cutting last year. I went from about 106kgs to 94kgs without calorie counting, but after that I found that not only did my progress stall, but I actually started looking smaller as well.
That was when I started calorie counting. For the next 8 weeks, I lost a consistent 0.5kgs a week and started to look much better.
Calorie counting is not as onerous as it sounds. I think the name scares people off doing it, making them think that they actually need to count the calories in everything they eat, whereas all you really need to do is get an idea of how many calories you are eating every day (and trying to keep this constant).
I read somewhere (probably here lol) that most people either overestimate or underestimate the number of calories they eat each day by around 50%. From discussions with friends, I believe this is pretty close to spot on. Some girls think they are only eating 800 calories a day, others think they are having 3000. Both are way off the mark. Similarly, I’ve heard some guys say they are on 1500 and others on 5000, when in both cases they are nowhere near.
In this respect, calorie counting can be an invaluable tool in getting a much better idea of how many calories you are actually putting away each day.
The actual number is not so important, what is more important is the CHANGE in that number. If you are trying to put on weight, pick a number and see how you go. If you do not gain sufficient weight, increase the calories. If you gain too much weight (i.e. fat), reduce the number.
Another benefit of calorie counting is that it allows you to ‘substitute’ meals or foods. If you feel like having a cheat meal for the day, work out the calories in it and figure out what you should not eat for the day to ensure your total calories remain more or less the same.
tl/dr: Creating your own diet, from scratch, using websites etc to calculate calories, is an invaluable exercise that everyone should do at some point. It allows you to create a diet that you like and that you’ll be able to stick with. It also gives you a more accurate idea of how much you are actually eating, and once the initial work is done, you don’t have to count anything on a daily basis (except the measuring of food obviously). A diet spreadsheet is very handy for this purpose, and quite easy to construct.
Creating a diet:
Following on from the above point about creating your own diet, a few key points here. There is no magic % split for diets, it is the calories that counts. But about a third of each ties in well with my philosophy of ‘everything in moderation’. Usually I have a higher ratio of fat, usually 40% plus, simply because it requires a lower volume of food to hit my calories for the day. If you are on a lower calorie diet, the reverse is true, and you may wish to only have 25% of your calories in fat.
I think a lot of the considerations about making a diet are quite common sense, but I will list them below:
- High calorie vs low calorie: If you are trying to construct a high calorie diet, say 3500+ calories, you will want to have high calorie density, low volume foods to ensure the overall volume of food is manageable. Nuts are great, muesli is fantastic (oats are extremely calorie dense, chuck in some nuts and fruit and you have a tasty high calorie snack). Milk is also good. Low calorie diets will want low calorie density foods such as fruit, low fat low sugar yoghurt, meat, veggies etc. The exercise of constructing a diet spreadsheet and researching the calorie density of different foods will help you in determining which foods are high density and which are low density.
- Meal size and timing is irrelevant: Tailor your diet to suit you. If you can only eat 2-3 times a day, eat 2-3 times a day. If you prefer smaller meals and can eat more often, eat more often. On my current routine, I go nearly 14 hours without food between about 7:30pm and 9:30am. Sometimes I wake up hungry and will smash a tin of tuna, but otherwise I fast. I think your body adapts very quickly to whatever diet you adopt, and any ill effects you may think you will develop are merely the product of successfully marketing campaigns by supp companies.
- Mix it up: Try to consume as many different types of food each day. Eating a large number of different foods gives you the best chance of getting all your micronutrient requirements for the day. This is why I like foods like homemade muesli with several types of nuts, dried fruits, seeds, legumes etc.
- Avoid all processed foods: In general, the closer it is to being a raw product (i.e. something that can be pulled out of the ground or ripped off an animal) the better. A diet full of meat, fruit, veg, eggs, milk, oats, nuts, seeds etc is a good diet. I have no bread, pasta or rice in my diet, except for the occasional meal where it is unavoidable. I don’t think there is necessarily anything wrong with bread/rice/pasta, simply that better carb options exist that are more micronutrient dense, such as oats or sweet potato.
- Everything in moderation: I think this is obvious, but just keep the diet mixed and with a bit of everything. Don’t just eat red meat, eat all meats. Don’t just eat green veggies, eat all veggies. Don’t stick to one type of nuts, eat all of them. This again ties in with my philosophy of trying to consume as many different types of food as possible.
Keep it simple:
There is so much crap and misinformation out there about diet and nutrition. Like most things, people overcomplicate it. So long as you have a diet low in (or even better, devoid of) processed foods and containing a wide variety of wholesome foods, it will be a solid diet. If you are on low calories, you may need to manage it a little bit more carefully to ensure you are getting adequate micronutrients. If you are on 2500+ calories of ‘clean’ foods, you are almost certainly meeting your micros. You should try calorie counting for a period of time, develop a diet you like, and stick with it. The results are well worth it.
Miscellaneous:
Thought I’d briefly touch on a few other things. I don’t really believe in carb cycling or keto diets or any of that. They may work and they may have merit, but they either seem too extreme or more complicated than necessary. Simply going by calories will be sufficient for the vast majority of people. The argument against mere calorie counting is usually homeostasis, that your body will adapt over time rendering a constant diet less effective over time. This can be worked around by adjusting your diet over time (which you should be doing as you gain muscle or lose fat anyway). If you are slowly bulking, you should slowly increase the calories in your diet. If you are cutting, you should slowly decrease them. I think if you are on a low bodyfat cut (trying to get to say 6-8% bf), there is some merit in consuming higher calories on workout days, but as I have never gotten to that level of bodyfat before, I can’t comment on the efficacy of this methodology.
Cheating and breaks:
There is absolutely nothing wrong with cheat meals, and nothing wrong with having chocolate or ice cream (or whatever your vice is) as part of your daily diet (or in the case of ‘larger’ cheat meals, once or twice a week).
However, I sometimes push this further and have a complete break from diet. I’ll still have a rough ‘base’ (i.e. my mash and protein shakes and tin of tuna are largely a staple of my diet), but will mix up the rest of it completely. I think this is a good idea to keep hormones in check. This may be complete broscience, but personally I have found that my testosterone levels always seem to be better when I just eat differently (or crap) for a little bit, but get back to my regular diet quickly. If I eat differently for TOO long, I invariably start to have micronutrient deficiencies from my less than ideal diet. But for a weekend, it can be great to ‘fill any gaps’ that your regular diet may have.
Questions
Alright, that’s all that I could think of off the top of my head, I’m sure there is more, I’ll edit this later if I can think of anything else noteworthy to mention.
EDIT: Two other sections I forgot to mention.
Bulking and Cutting:
Over the years, I’ve ‘bulked up’ multiple times and subsequently cut down. I’ve come to the conclusion that clean bulking, or trying to bulk while gaining minimal fat, is the best solution. Bulking and gaining unnecessary fat simply leads to more time spent dieting later on. Plus, you inevitably lose muscle when you are cutting, more depending on how long you are cutting for. So the more fat you gain, the longer you have to cut and the more muscle you will hence lose during the cut. Plus, I personally feel like I look like shit when I get plump, and I would much rather look good all year round.
My recommendation would be something like the following – First, get down to about 10% bodyfat. Then bulk from to a maximum of 15% bodyfat. Do this for about 42 weeks in the year. Then spend about 8-10 weeks cutting back to 10% bodyfat. Repeat. 10% will look awesome generally (provided you are carrying enough muscle), and is enough bodyfat to ensure your testosterone levels are not adversely affected.
I believe this 10-15% range is optimal in terms of both gaining muscle and maintaining a decent physique year round.
With regards to diet, it doesn’t need to change much at all between these phases. Bulking I would start at about 200 calories above maintenance and see how you go. Depending on fat gain, you may need more or less than this. As mentioned earlier, this amount will have to increase over time as you get bigger.
When cutting, simply reduce the calories. I don’t think you require any kind of fancy dieting to get to 10%. Just pick some foods you like, make sure you don’t exceed your calories and you are good to go. Again, monitor body fat levels and adjust accordingly.
You’ll notice in both sections, I talk about monitoring body fat levels. I will touch on this briefly in the next section.
Monitoring:
If there is one thing I would recommend, whether you are bulking or cutting, it is to weigh yourself daily and to take pictures and measurements fortnightly (or monthly).
Some people hate the scales, I live by them. Really, scales are only your enemy if you are doing a complete body recomp (i.e. losing fat and gaining muscle at the same time). If not, they are fantastic, and when combined with photos, can give you a very good idea of how you are travelling.
The important part though is NOT to care about the daily number. I like to use a 7 point moving average (i.e. the average of the last 7 days). This is far less volatile, and in fact, can be nearly linear if you have your diet and training on track.
When I lost about 15kgs last year (after a bulk that was FAR too dirty), the chart of my 7 point moving average was almost linear at 0.5kgs per week. My DAILY weight on the other hand was all over the place, sometimes moving 2kgs in as many days.
So to tie in with the section above, monitor your 7 point moving average and if it hasn’t changed in 2 weeks (either up or down, depending what you are trying to achieve), adjust your diet accordingly (either more or less calories). It really is that simple. All you need to do is be consistent. Don’t skip workouts or slack out, keep getting stronger, keep hitting PBs, stick to your diet and you WILL achieve your goals. Regardless of how strong you are, or how big you are, or how much training experience you have, you can always continue to improve. It is simply a matter of how bad you want it.
Last edited:
