Planning for Success 4: 5 Steps to Setting Up a ‘Healthy’ and Flexible Diet
- Jonny Potter
- Dec 18, 2015
- 4 min read
If you’ve read my Setting Your Targets article for either Fat Loss or Muscle Gain, you should now be able to easily set your own individual calories/macronutrients and tailor them to your goals.
Calories and energy balance is the most important factor when it comes to dietary success, followed by macronutrition but it isn’t all Poptarts and skittles when it bottles down to having a ‘healthy diet’.
In order to guarantee a successful ‘healthy’ diet make sure you stick to the following 5 steps.
1. Include Fibre in Your Diet
Most complex carbohydrates and vegetables contain fibre. You need this for several reasons:
- It regulates blood sugar and helps reduce the risk of developing type 2 diabetes.
- It helps maintain bowel health.
- It Lowers cholesterol.
- Fibre increases the ‘bulk’ of the food in your stomach and slows down its rate of digestion, leading to a higher sense of satiety.
- When aiming to lose fat in order for fibre to move though your digestive system you need to drink more water, this can lead to a greater feeling of fullness resulting in reduced cravings.
How much do you need?
A typical range should be 10-13g of fiber per 1000 calories. That means if you consume 2000 calories per day, ingesting 20-26g of fibre will be optimal.
My personal fibre favourites are:
green beans
wholegrain tortillas/breads
buckwheat noodles
popcorn
bran flakes/high fibre cereals
2. Consume Enough Vitamins and Minerals (Micronutrients)
Micro-nutrients are vitamins and minerals, and are necessary for a whole host of reasons:
- The formation and density of bones
- Controlling body fluids inside and outside cells
- Enabling digestion
- Helping your body to absorb and utilise nutrients (especially important when trying to build muscle)
- Hormone production
- Aiding metabolism
You get micronutrients in foods such as meat, fish, milk and dairy foods, vegetables, fruits and nuts.
However, when people focus solely on macros, and try to get as much junk into their numbers as they can, they can miss out on micros, then wonder why their fat loss plateaus, and performance plummets.
A deficiency in a single vitamin can have great effects on your athletic performance and even in your health.
Micronutrients should be obtained mainly from food so look to consume plenty of veg (3-6 open palm-fulls per day is adequate for most) and 1-2 servings of fruit per day. To cover bases I’d also suggest taking a daily multi-vitamin.
3. Choose Foods You Want to Eat
The more you enjoy your food the longer you’ll be able to stick to a diet, the greater the adherence and the better the results. There is no such thing as ‘super foods’ or foods that you must eat. The number of times I still see people who hate avocado eat avocado … It drives me wild!!
Get the fundamentals right, eat enough protein, eat enough fibre, consume enough micronutrients, and eat the foods you want to eat - NOT the foods you feel like you have to eat. The following template by Alan Aragon is a fine example of what a pie-charted healthy diet should look like:
4. Be Flexible With Your Target Intake
Unless you're in the final weeks of physique comp prep, being slightly off from your macro targets will not affect your progress whatsoever.
You can easily become obsessed about being bang on with your macro counting to the gram, but being overly anal about the accuracy of your macros can cause disordered eating habits or make a previous eating disorder resurface.
What you need to know...
Being 5-10g away from your carbs/protein target and 3-5g off your fat target is more than acceptable and will balance out over the course of the week
Why?
On food packets and calorie trackers like My Fitness Pal, each food listed isn’t 100% accurate.
Don’t worry - they aren’t lying to you, but here’s an example;
MFP may say that a 100g chicken breast has 30g protein, and 3g of fat, but who is to say that that isn’t a slightly leaner or slightly fattier cut of chicken?
A 50g serving of Muesli may have 14g fat, 19g carbs and 8g of protein but what if your bowl has more fruit and nuts in it than what the serving size says?
Basically … don’t worry about it!
There can be a 10-20% inaccuracy range of the nutritional info given on food packets and calorie counters.
As long as you are fairly close to your targets then don’t worry about being slightly above or below them.
That is how to be flexible and still get results... now quit weighing out your lettuce!
5. Understand What is Important
I still see far too many people worrying over extremely pointless things such as meal frequency, trying to eat 8 times per day, only eating carbs immediately before or after workouts, fasting before cardio, taking protein within 30mins of their workout and many many more.
While these may not harm your progress, they certainly aren’t necessary.
The following pyramid is replicated from top researcher and coach, Eric Helms, and is taken from his popular video series, “The Muscle and Strength Nutritional Pyramid.”
Eric does a superb job of breaking everything down in order of nutritional importance in a very coherent and easily digestible way.
From the bottom you can see that the most important factors in a successful diet are calories, then macros and fibre. It then goes on to the less important parts, with supplements being of very minor significance.
It’s a great watch and the take home point is to get all the basics in place first. The vast majority of people needn’t worry about the minor details.
Summary
As I mentioned at the start this article this is a great follow on piece from how to understand your goals and set you targets for fat loss or muscle gain.
It definitely isn’t all just about calories and macros. They might be the most important factors, but there are other pieces in the puzzle you need to be aware of.
If you enjoyed this stick around for my next article on monitoring progress, which is the next step you need after implementing these 5 steps.
Any questions, click here to ask me, and I’ll get right back to you.
コメント