After reading the thread title I was wondering how many posts before someone mentioned
jzpowahz. Not even one lol.
The thing is everyone looks at his progress (which is awesome) and is like "I told you so, stop following a traditional diet". But who else here has made it work? Following other peoples' logs, most follow a pretty loose diet, but no one else is even getting close to his results. What most people don't realise or chose to ignore that he's incredibly active and has a lot of muscle mass, which burns up a lot of the calories and generates a fast metabolism. He's far beyond the average gym goer, but many average gym goers want to eat like him.
In my opinion, a traditional diet is more foolproof. Most foods are pretty clean and if you over eat a bit here and there, no damage done. If you don't have your macros dialed in perfectly with IIFYM or overeat the wrong foods, you'll pay for it.
But as others have said, a lot of it is common sense. If you have something classified as a cheat meal, balance it out with a low calorie meal or increase your activity on that day. Personally I try to follow a traditional diet 90% of the time. Then on weekends or the odd occasion of going out, I'll eat whatever. But I'll take note of the macros and deduct them from other similar meals in my plan. The other way to incorporate cheat meals is to have them before or after a big workout session. So either leg day or a big cardio event. After my regular hiking outings, I'll go out to a cafe for brunch and usually order a massive serving of scrambled eggs on toast with salmon. A bit of a refeed for the body after burning 800 or so calories. So far this has worked for me and is something I really look forward to.
I think another angle is how much are you enjoying your food. I know when I was bulking and had a more relaxed diet, I would eat most cheat food regularly and not appreciate it. It was all just food. Where now restricting my diet and not eating certain foods, when I do get them, I enjoy them a hell of a lot more.
