Flexible Dieting Manual Final

Myonomics The Flexible Dieting Manual 1
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 3
INTRODUCTION 5
ABOUT FLEXIBLE DIETING 6
WHAT IS FLEXIBLE DIETING? 6

WHAT FLEXIBLE DIETING ISN’T? 8
WHY CHOOSE FLEXIBLE DIETING? 9
WHAT ARE MACRONUTRIENTS? 14
HABITS FOR SUCCESS 18
FAT LOSS 18
HUNGER 18
FOOD ENVIRONMENT 21
BOREDOM 22
FEELINGS OF RESTRICTION 23
OUTSIDE INFLUENCE FROM FRIENDS AND FAMILY 24
MUSCLE GAIN 25
HABIT/GOAL SETTING 27
HOW DO WE DO IT THEN? 29
PITFALLS TO AVOID 31
NOT CROSS REFERENCING THEIR INPUTS ON MYFITNESSPAL WITH FOOD LABELS. 31
BLTS?! 31
USING STANDARD WEIGHING UTENSILS. 32
MIXING RAW AND COOKED WEIGHT FOR FOODS. 33
OBSESSING OVER EVERY SINGLE MACRONUTRIENT. 33
NOT MATCHING THE FOODS YOU EAT TO YOUR GOALS. 34
CONSUMING POOR QUALITY PROTEINS. 36
USING FLEXIBLE DIETING AS AN EXCUSE TO EAT CRAP ALL THE TIME. 37
STEPS TO IMPLEMENT FLEXIBLE DIETING 39
BASIC TRACKING SKILLS 39

PRE-PLANNED FLEXIBILITY 40
FLEXIBILITY ON THE FLY 41
AD LIBITUM/INTUITIVE EATING 43
OTHER SITUATIONS 46
DOING THE MATH… 50

WORKING OUT YOUR MAINTENANCE CALORIES/MACRONUTRIENT INTAKE 50

THE HARRIS-BENEDICT EQUATION: 52
THE CUNNINGHAM EQUATION: 53
WORKING OUT YOUR MACRONUTRIENT INTAKE BASED ON YOUR CALORIE INTAKE 61
ADJUSTING OUR INTAKE TO OUR GOALS 68
RATES OF WEIGHT LOSS/GAIN 68

73
CALCULATING YOUR SURPLUS OR DEFICIT 74
CARDIO?! 77
HIGH DAYS, LOW DAYS AND BORROWING CALORIES 82
85
DEALING WITH HUNGER AND SATIETY ISSUES DURING WEIGHT LOSS 86
YOUR STOMACH IS A VOLUME COUNTER 87

THE SUPER FIBER 90
THE POWER OF COFFEE 90
EAT BLAND FOODS 91
CHEW YOUR FOOD 93
ALL PROTEIN SOURCES ARE NOT EQUAL 94
THE IMPORTANCE OF MAINTENANCE AND DIET BREAKS 96
CONCLUSION AND THANKS 103
GLOSSARY OF TERMS 104

Acknowledgements
First of all, I’d like to thank you, the reader, for putting your faith in us
as an educator and information provider, supporting our pursuit for
better understanding in the field of health and fitness. By purchasing
this e-book, you have chosen to support evidence-based practice over
social following, image and ultimately what is perceived as power
within this specific field. As per quote from Jordan Peterson in his
book ’12 Rules for Life’, “Competence – not power, is the main
determinant of status” (when referring to well-functioning societies).
This is not mere notion, but theory based upon a network of fact and
anecdote from years of research. If we are to continue to improve the
quality of information distributed to the masses, then we must
continue to invest in this sort of information, so for that, I thank you
sincerely.
Secondly, I’d like to thank my partner, Holly, for believing in me when I

didn’t so in myself. You likely found this book through her promotions,
as she acts as our best sales representative to date (even more so than
myself). This is because she knows the passion we have on this topic,
for fostering ethical practice, by distributing information based on
evidence vs. bias. She is also the one responsible for the beautiful
graphics and formatting of this book, helping to make it a much more
enjoyable read. Beyond this book, I must thank her for even proposing
this pursuit; to start the company that you see in front of you today,
and for that, I cannot thank her enough.
Thirdly, I’d like to thank these three individuals in particular, who

contributed to both the content and editing of this book.
• Chad Dolan – The Strength Guys

• Andrew Keiller – ArkNutrition
• Alan Flanagan – The Nutritional Advocate
Lastly, I’d like to thank the giants of the industry, that I only stand on
the shoulders of when distributing this text. The knowledge that I have
developed is due in large part to the following individuals, and for this,
I have to thank them, as they have instilled a new-found dedication
and passion to producing content that is informative, practical and
ethical. In no particular order, I’d like to thank them for their non-direct
contribution to this book, this company and in no small part the
person I am today.
• Dr. Mike Israetel – Renaissance Periodisation

• Dr. Eric Helms – 3D Muscle Journey
• Lyle McDonald – Body Recomposition
• Steve Hall – Revive Stronger
• Layne Norton – BioLayne
• Menno Hensellmans – Bayesian Bodybuilding
• Alan Aragon – AARR
• Bret Contreras – ‘The Glute Guy’
• Brad Schoenfeld – Author of ‘M.A.X Muscle Plan’ and ‘Science
and Development of Muscular Hypertrophy’
• James Krieger – Weightology
• Martin McDonald – MacNutrition
• Dr James Hoffman – Renaissance Periodisation
Introduction
The word diet, originated from the Greek, diata, which when
translated to modern day English, means a way of living. In Western
Culture however, the word dieting has become synonymous with not
so positive thoughts; in being something that we loathe. Restriction,
lack of enjoyment and unsustainability being the reference points
most people find when they think of it.
Of course, when it comes to fat loss there will be some restriction, with
more extreme goals, generally requiring more of this restriction. The
pursuit of maximising enjoyment and sustainability is left by the
wayside, in place for the search for fast results, unsustainable practice
and a manhunt for the ever elusive ‘goldie locks zone’ of optimality
(hint: it doesn’t really exist as a stand-alone, it is very contextual).
What has been missing is an approach that is of equal parts effective,

and equal parts flexible, allowing us choices based on our likes, needs
and wants.
In comes Flexible Dieting.
Flexible dieting can help to bridge the gaps that have been missing
for some time in the pursuits of changing our bodies and health, for
good. At its foundation, it understands the core principles that dictate
whether our diet (way of living) will lead to the result we want. It
doesn’t put labels on foods as good or bad, it strips away a lot of the
‘must do’s’ and replaces them with choices. There are still rules we
must adhere to, that you will learn, but within these walls, most things
are on the table to choose, and whilst there are probably benefits and
costs associated with some strategies, almost anything works within
the confines of the over-arching principles.
About Flexible Dieting

What is Flexible Dieting?
Flexible dieting is described in many different ways, by many different

people. I like to think of it as an eating strategy that puts a higher value
on the calories and macronutrients (proteins, carbohydrates, dietary
fats, fiber, etc.) attached to foods vs. the food’s composition/quality.
Above this, it puts a premium on adherence, which is our ability to
stick with something consistently, and it does this over any other
particular variable. This is opposed to conventional dieting in which
foods are labeled good and/or bad. These ‘bad foods’ are oftentimes
thought of as ‘cheat foods’ and the ‘good foods’ as clean foods.
I think that the description of flexible dieting alone helps us recognize

its benefits. You no longer have guilt or failure associated with the
food choices you make, instead, you have the freedom and power to
make choices that align with your wants and needs.
Many individuals may benefit from a flexible dieting approach,

whether their goals are to be more aesthetic, perform better, or simply
be more healthful.
Flexible dieting doesn’t disregard food composition and/or quality

(which is simply being misapplied when clean eating strategies are
dogmatically followed). Instead, it recognizes and adheres to the
energy balance theory of weight loss and/or weight gain
Flexible dieting provides you with the map to navigating this

framework successfully. This guide will help you avoid the pitfalls of
dieting and show you a sustainable path to repeated dieting success.
What Flexible Dieting Isn’t?

The term flexible dieting is commonly misinterpreted. Flexible dieting
isn’t typified by tracking macronutrients. It isn’t typified by a single
method. Flexible dieting is a philosophy, in that it is a practical strategy
that leads to success, relative to the current individual’s situation and
their abilities. If someone can’t realistically track and weigh everything,
they don’t. If someone can’t eat at a frequency that is the most ideal,
they don’t. What they do is take all the variables at hand and apply
them in the best way that their current situation allows.
The text here forward is a more idealised way of applying flexible

dieting, and at times may seem like guidelines. Flexible dieting
provides principles, in terms of the order of importance of variables,
and what is needed to attain our goals. Applying them in a way that is
consistent, enjoyable, realistic is balanced with achieving our goals.
Keeping an open mind can help us determine our own ideal, when it
comes to devising our diet. We may want to be ‘perfect’. We may want
to be ‘extreme’. If we keep an open mind, we can see if there is a gap
between these idealised thoughts, and reality. Flexible dieting allows
us to understand that the results we achieve, vs. our maximum
potential, run along a continuum. We aren’t on or off a diet, the
concept of flux, denotes that averages over time, dictate our state over
time. One meal doesn’t throw us off or on a diet, it’s the average of our
actions over time that dictates where we end up. Flexible dieting
allows trajectory, not success or failure in a moment, to be our mantra.
Why Choose Flexible Dieting?
For some, making this shift in mindset and approach to dieting will be
hard. It will require you to move away from the traditional paradigm of
good and bad or clean and dirty foods with clear borders to
something new altogether. It will require a more inclusive mindset vs.
the exclusive one. It will require some objectivity and a system of
measurement to gain control over portion sizes. Which will in turn
allow us to choose to eat the foods that we enjoy and make us feel
great, while achieving our goals all the while. If you can make it past
the transition and begin to embrace and apply the concepts of
Flexible Dieting, I bet that it will change the way you look at food for
the rest of your life. We are going to discuss some of the specific
reasons why you may want to try a flexible approach to your diet.
All foods are “okay”. This is the first and one of the hardest things to
embrace. When we are strictly discussing weight loss, food quality is
not the most important factor when it comes to fat loss or muscle gain.
Food quality contributes much less to directly changing our body
composition when compared to calorie and macronutrient intake.
What does this mean practically? It means that we can enjoy our
favorite foods, eat out with friends and family, and we don’t need to
pre-pack every meal to achieve our goals. This flexibility can be a
game-changer for those who have failed in the past with massive lists
of food restrictions and thinking of diets as on or off, all or nothing,
and foods as good or bad, clean or dirty.
Take away the psychological battle of restricting everything.

Dieting (eating less than we may “want”) is hard enough alone, never
mind when we add in all the rules and restrictions of ‘clean eating’ This
old dieting mindset is usually what leads to diet failures, bingeing ,
feelings of guilt, failure, and shame. It can also cause extreme actions
to be taken to get back on track. With Flexible Dieting, we take away
most of these restrictions, as food choices are based predominantly on
how they contribute to our calorie and nutrient goals. When we learn
to shift from the mind-set of categorizing foods as good or bad, there
are no feelings of shame or guilt associated with eating or enjoying a
food. With flexible dieting, you can enjoy your favourite foods by
modifying your portions to fit your needs.
If you can make it past the transition and begin to

embrace and apply the concepts of Flexible Dieting, I
bet that it will change the way you look at food for the
rest of your life.
Including the foods, you love in your diet can help keep cravings from
becoming overwhelming. However, if your favourite foods cause you
to lose self-control, then they likely ‘trigger foods.’ If possible, it may
be wise to limit ‘trigger foods’ even when using the flexible dieting
approach. Despite flexible dieting being an inclusive approach,
regularly including your ‘trigger foods’ in your diet is like playing with
fire. What a flexible dieter should try to achieve is that on any given
day, the food choices made still allow them to reach their goals, which
is much more difficult when ‘trigger foods’ are involved.
It really does work. Calories matter and a diet that disregards calorie
balance is unlikely to be successful for weight change in the long term.
Flexible dieting is a tried-and-true method that provides a framework
for prioritizing the energy and macronutrient profile of foods to reach
an individual’s energy and macronutrient goals. This approach can be
objectively measured and adjusted over time to ensure consistent

progress towards your goals. When progress stops during flexible
dieting, you have direct access to the variable driving your success.
When progress stops when ‘clean eating’ what do you do? Eat
cleaner? There is no way to ensure that eating cleaner automatically
means calories are also lower. This is a major pitfall of dieting.
Indirectly trying to manipulate calories may maximize simplicity, but it
does not maximize results.
Below is a diagram displaying variables that affect success in a

nutritional strategy, in a hierarchical format, for body composition,
performance, or health.
It really is flexible. Because flexible dieting is based on achieving a

consistent energy and macronutrient intake over a period, we can be
flexible with many variables, such as food choice and meal size, timing,
and frequency. We may base our choices on preference, including
high and low-calorie days to suit our social life (more on this later),
changing the frequency of our meals (as we now know, eating six small
meals doesn’t ‘stoke the metabolic fire’ any more than two or three
meals, it’s personal preference), and then what foods we actually eat
(we can eat white rice over brown rice guilt-free). We are free to make
choices based on what foods we enjoy, fills us adequately, and what
we have available to us at any time.
It really is flexible. Because flexible dieting is based on

achieving a consistent energy and macronutrient
intake over a period, we can be flexible with many
variables, such as food choice and meal size, timing,
and frequency.
As you can see, when we get our calories and macronutrients in check,
we really do get 80% of the outcome for 20% of the work. This manual
is going to explain how you can implement Flexible Dieting into your
lifestyle in a way that is sustainable and will bring great success in time.
What are Macronutrients?
All the calories in foods are composed of macronutrients. The

macronutrients we are going to concern ourselves with are proteins,
carbohydrates, and dietary fats (dietary fiber will be included when we
are working out our intake, although it isn’t necessarily a
macronutrient). Depending on the individual food, a certain amount of
each macronutrient will be present. Each individual macronutrient has
a calorie or energy value. Proteins have 4 kcals per gram,
carbohydrates have 4 kcals per gram, and dietary fats have 9 kcals per
gram. This basically means that the number of grams of each
macronutrient you see on the back of a food packet can be multiplied
by the above calorie amount per gram, to get the number of calories
in that food that come from that macronutrient.
Proteins are important to rebuild and repair tissues within the human
body (amongst many other things). These tissues include muscles,
bone, ligaments, hair, skin, and more. They also provide raw materials
for enzymes found throughout the body. Enzymes are essential to
biological processes that occur within the body to sustain life.
Carbohydrates mainly provide us with an easily usable form of energy

when they are broken down into glucose. However, they can also be
stored in the blood, liver, and muscle, and can be accessed for energy
during the times we are not eating.
Dietary fats provide energy, support hormonal regulation, and aid the
absorption of specific vitamins (A, D, E, and K).
It’s important to understand that all calories will provide us with

energy. All macronutrients can be converted to a usable form of
chemical energy (ATP, adenosine tri-phosphate) through different
pathways. Some pathways are more efficient than others, and this
efficiency largely determines when they will be used.
Carbohydrates and Dietary Fats are our main sources for ‘fuel’.
Imagine for a moment, a newspaper, and a pile of wood. They both
come from the same basic format, they both can be lit to create fire,
but they both have different times to light, and the length of time they
are lit is longer or shorter. Carbohydrates and Dietary Fats can be
compared in the same way in terms of the context that they are
utilised.
Fat is like the pile of wood, it takes some time longer to be readily
utilised/lit, but once lit/converted, will burn for a much longer time
than newspaper (this is why it is likely suited to more lower intensity,
long duration activities). Carbohydrates are like the newspaper, they
set a light quickly, but are also used quite quickly, so they are more
suitable as our preferred source (nutritionally) for shorter, more
intense bursts of activity (although as mentioned, they are not
exclusive of each other).
The individual macronutrients and overall calorie goal are the

backbone of our flexible dieting approach. A slice of white bread is no
longer good or bad; it is simply an approximate 115kcals, 1g dietary
fat, 20g carbohydrates, and 5g protein. Those values will be fit into the
context of the rest of our daily intake no different than other foods of a
comparable macronutrient make up.
So, is food quality not important at all? It really is, but it is simply not
the holy grail that it has been thought to be for so long.
As a rule of thumb, traditionally ‘healthy’ foods probably have more

actual food volume (bites) per calorie than ’unhealthy’foods (although
this is not always the case). Additionally, traditionally ‘healthy’ foods
also help us create a more micronutrient and fiber-rich diet, reducing

the risks of deficiency or ill health.
So, is food quality not important at all? It really is, but

it is simply not the holy grail that it has been thought
to be for so long.
Variety is not only the spice of life, but it is equally important in a diet.
A wide variety of food sources provide the maximum benefits (in terms
of micronutrition and so on). So getting a spread of different sources,
not just traditionally ‘healthy ’foods, is important for the same reason.
As such, calorie and macronutrient goals shouldn’t be the only focus of
our nutritional approach. We should also look to eat mostly ‘healthy’
foods (lean meats, whole grains, fruits, and vegetables, healthy fats)
whilst limiting ‘junk’ foods (foods that offer no real micro-nutrition) to
the minimum amount needed to enjoy the foods we eat and get us to
our goals without driving us completely insane.
Habits for Success

Objectively, attaining a certain calorie/macronutrient intake will get
you the result you want, but meeting these goals consistently is how
you will achieve the way you want to look.
What I mean, is that adherence is king. The ‘optimal’ diet is useless if

you can’t stick to it for long enough to see results. What I have found
most clearly is, that individuals who can make certain patterns and
actions become habits, get the best results, both short and long-term.
So, along with setting goals for our objective nutritional intake, we are
going to discuss some of the things that can help set you up for
success.
Fat Loss
When it comes to fat loss, the things I’ve found that hurt long-term
results are a combination of the following: hunger, cravings, boredom,
feeling restricted, and outside influence/environment (family, friends,
and social engagements).
Hunger
I’ll only briefly discuss this here, as we have a whole section at the end
on fighting hunger. To differentiate between hunger and cravings, we
will describe hunger as the need for food regardless of taste, texture,
etc. Cravings, on the other hand, are when we seek out a food to
satisfy a desire for a particular flavor and/or texture, like salty, sugary,
creamy, starchy, or fatty.
So, when it comes to managing hunger, there are a few simple tips
you can follow.
Pick foods that are high in volume compared to their calorie content.
These are foods such as veggies, fruits, potatoes, legumes, zero-
calorie liquids, etc. and using something like the satiety index, or
fullness factor can help us determine foods that are most satiating.
Don’t let hunger get out of control. This usually comes from leaving
too much time between meals, so planning when, where, and what
you will eat throughout the day can work to your advantage. Either
preparing food in advance or simply knowing when, where and what
you will eat can help you to plan for periods of time when you may
have previously not eaten for so long that your hunger became
insatiable.
Eat more of your calories when you are hungriest. This is a simple one,
but people rarely implement it. If you are hungriest at night, save a
decent portion of your calories for then. There is no right or wrong
time to eat necessarily when it comes to weight loss. You want to eat
when your need/want for food is highest. When it comes to fat loss for
the general population, this is going to be when hunger is highest, so
taking an apple and a protein shake to eat on your way home from
work or saving a big portion of your carbohydrates and a low-calorie
dessert for your night-time meal can be extremely valuable in
managing hunger.
Note: Hunger should likely be expected at some point on a diet, as

you are restricting your calorie intake to an amount that is lower than
you need/want. However, you can lessen the burden of hunger with
these strategies.
Manage your cravings. As previously described, a craving is a

psychological desire for a particular flavor or texture. So unless this
craving is addressed or satisfied, the feelings will likely not go away for
some time. We want to give in to these cravings, but not in the way
you might think or previously have done. We can use flexible dieting
to help fit in these foods on a more regular basis than conventional
dieting, so that cravings are less likely to get out of control. Also, as
previously mentioned, we don’t want to substitute these foods in so
often they become a problem themselves, so finding a balance can be
key.
To differentiate between hunger and cravings, we will

describe hunger as the need for food regardless of
taste, texture, etc. Cravings, on the other hand, are
when we seek out a food to satisfy a particular desire.
A practical strategy to use could be a high/low day calorie structure.

Allow one or two days a week of which calorie intake is increased to
provide an opportunity to fit more enjoyable foods into our diet.
However, any extra calories eaten on these days will be taken away
from the rest of the week. So, you must make sure that this leaves a
reasonable number of calories for the low days (more on this in later
sections).
Alternatively, you can find foods that are lower-calorie versions of what
you are craving. For example, ice cream companies are coming up
with insane ways of getting low calories while keeping the product
tasty. You could also pick low-calorie popcorn over crisps, make your
own pizza instead of buying one, etc. There are lots of creative ways
that people do this, and a quick google search will bring up a vast
number of low-calorie alternatives for your favorite foods.
There is the one caveat we must keep mentioning, certain foods in any
amount may be trigger-like. A ‘trigger food’ when eaten, triggers
additional increases in cravings for that food. Determining if you react
in this way and to what foods, can be the difference between success
and failure. It is probably best to avoid or limit ‘trigger foods’ at all
costs. While you may be able to enjoy small quantities of most of your
favorite foods, ‘trigger foods’ may have a greater risk than reward if
they are regularly included in your diet, despite it being flexible. Make
sure you know which type of response you have to your favourite
foods and fit your strategy accordingly.
Food Environment
Food environment is the availability of foods around us at any one

time. Available could be a car journey, a phone call etc. Our food
environment drives some fairly strong cues at us to eat. The availability
of food in our immediate environment is something that we can
manipulate to help avoid cravings and temptation to eat.
The adage “Out of sight, out of mind” is sort of right. Our main advice
on food environment is this, if you can do, keep highly palatable foods
out of your house if you struggle to diet. Make sure you don’t make it
easy for you to order food over the phone, throw out/hide takeaway
menus, delete food apps and ask your family and friends to avoid
asking you if you want such foods.
We want to create barriers to food, meaning that we have to put in

more effort to get them. Examples are as follows, if you must have
highly palatable foods in your home, put them somewhere they are
really not easy to get to, don’t have food out on your counters, buy
single ingredient, raw foods that need preparation before eating, buy
foods that have skins like oranges. Basically, do not have convenience
foods readily available to you, especially in places you spend a lot of
the time like work, home, in your car etc.
Avoiding places that tempt you to eat in the absence of hunger is

something that will be beneficial. If you can avoid having to sit in
McDonalds daily, that will definitely help, avoiding the vending
machine at work etc. are some more examples. Basically, try to avoid
places that will cause you to crave their food, especially if you are
hungry.
The above is not something that is always necessary, but for most it will
make a significant difference. The basic concept is to make food
harder to consume and reduce trigger like food cues. This will add to
reducing hunger, cravings and stress around deprivation.
Boredom
When I say boredom, I mean lack of external stimulation from work,

hobbies, social interactions, etc. We can fill this need for stimulation by
eating, and as such may crave food as a resolution to boredom. The
only real solution to this is keeping yourself busy or planning your
meals at times when you are least busy, and as a result most likely to
suffer with boredom related eating. Using these non-busy times to do
things like cardio, listen to podcasts, read, finish leftover work, or start
a new venture are all productive ways to keep yourself from craving
unnecessarily. Personally, I love listening to podcasts and reading to
stimulate my mind.
When it comes to planning meals when you’re least busy, consider

when you are free to eat. Placing meals in these slots can effectively
prevent cravings that arise out of boredom. If it is not possible to get a

meal in at certain times, utilizing non-calorific fluids and caffeine (if
appropriate) can help to mediate hunger and steer you away from
boredom induced eating. This will always be on a case-to-case basis
(much like ‘trigger foods’). Some self-exploration into your habits and
behaviours during times of boredom can be very rewarding and
instrumental in developing your personal strategy.
Feelings of Restriction
Feeling that you are missing out on something can cause stress in all
areas of life, particularly so when it comes to dieting. These feelings
can be sparked from multiple places, like hunger and cravings (which
we have already discussed), as well as missing out at social events, or
on the new trendy restaurant that everybody is posting about on
Instagram. I find that if you struggle with feelings of restriction, you
should minimize exposure to highly palatable foods whilst dieting.
Save these foods for when you are taking a break or on a high day.
Out of sight, out of mind can seem extreme, but is likely very relevant
in this situation.
It’s always hard to address the subject of eating out on a diet,

especially for a smaller individual who struggles with the negative
feelings of restriction. Again, fat loss should always have an end point,
or at least a point of which you take a break, so save meals out and
highly palatable foods for times of diet breaks or high days. This
strategy will help you enjoy them, while reducing some of the stress of
over-eating or being hungry later because of the calorie density of
restaurant prepared meals.
In my experience, individuals who can just eat one biscuit and put the
packet away, don’t struggle with this as much as those who have
trouble regulating their intake of certain foods. Using the techniques

outlined, along with those in the section on hunger and cravings, can
be very effective at keeping these feelings at bay. However, as
mentioned before the dieting process is tough, and embracing it can
strengthen you mentally as well as physically. Think of it to a
productive end.
Outside Influence from Friends and Family
This can be tough to deal with because the reality is that nobody, but
you, care about how lean you are. If your health is not at risk, you are
going to be in this thing by yourself (or with a coach, if you are using
one).
Making close family and friends aware of what you are doing can do
two things. It can keep you more accountable, as well as reducing the
chances of them offering up foods that aren’t conducive to success for
you in dieting, reducing unneeded pressure on your willpower to say
no. If you get this conversation out of the way early on, you can
hopefully avoid the stress of repeatedly discussing the topic.
The reality is that nobody, but you care about how lean
you are.
Another strategy can be finding a friend or family member to

accompany you on this journey. You can keep each other accountable
and split the external influence from others in two, offering support
when having trouble or struggles. It can be very powerful for you to
learn from each other’s mistakes, be there to support each other, and
to keep each other on track. Arranging days to meet to either go
shopping for food, do your measurements and weigh-ins, to train

together or get your cardio in can be a big positive influence. This can
be especially beneficial at the start of the diet when most individuals
struggle to build momentum.
Muscle Gain
As we know, to gain muscle appreciably, we should be in a calorie
surplus, to provide the energy for increased recovery, along with the
raw materials our body needs to create these new tissues. Whilst this
surplus isn’t going to be huge in most cases, some individuals may
struggle to adapt to this new way of eating in a surplus. The thing I see
people struggling with most is transitioning from fat loss to muscle
gain.
The reason is that when we spend any appreciable time in a deficit,

the hormones that regulate hunger and satiety are altered (reversibly)
in a way that means we aren’t as satiated by food as we would have
been prior to the fat loss phase. You would think a calorie surplus is
ideal for this, right? It can be, but only if you do it right.
The first thing I always suggest is doing a maintenance phase (more on

this later) in between fat loss and muscle gain phases. This means we
bring our calories up as high as we can, whilst still maintaining our
body composition, in terms of maintaining our muscle and body fat
levels (if you are getting so lean that it is not sustainable, you would be
better served gaining weight to a maintainable place first and then
staying there before moving up further).
The benefits of this approach are multi-faceted. First, the hormones

that regulate hunger start to balance out and our hunger and satiety
feedback systems restore their function, so we can maintain our
bodyweight much easier. We are no longer in a state where our body

wants us to regain the body fat that we have lost.
Secondly, all the markers of diet fatigue (lethargy, motivation to train,

gym performance, etc.) begin to reverse and return to levels that allow
us to feel energized, motivated, and ready to push training in the
direction of gaining new tissue (if training is adapted along with it).
Thirdly, when our hunger is better regulated, we can include more

calorie-dense foods into the diet without the risk of over-eating due to
still irregular hunger patterns. These types of foods are very valuable
when it comes to a calorie surplus, especially for individuals that have
never spent any consistent time in this state.
Lastly, when we finish a diet, we are in the best position to regain new
tissue (either fat or muscle), so over-eating during this period can lead
to higher rates of fat gain than it might have previously. This means
that maintaining our body weight with a lower level of body fat, will
allow us to keep this new body composition much easier in the future.
This is based on the ‘Set Point Theory’, which posits that at any one
time, our body strives to modulate hunger, satiety, activity (the
components that affect metabolism) in a way to get us within an ‘ideal’
body fat range. The longer we sustain a lower or higher level of body
fat, the easier it likely is to maintain that body fat level in the future.
When we have lowered our settling point through a diet and
maintanence phase, we can move into a surplus more effectively.
A calorie surplus can be tough for some individuals, especially for

those who perpetually diet or have always struggled to gain weight
due to inability to eat adequate amounts of calories. These individuals
usually struggle with constant feelings of fullness. One tool to battle
this is to include more calorie-dense foods (i.e., bagels vs. potatoes or
steak vs. turkey breast). These foods allow us to consume less food
volume, but still meet our calorie needs, which is necessary for
maximizing muscular gains. Including more of these foods allows us to
increase our calories without overwhelming our stomachs. We will
cover matching your food choices to your goals in more depth in our
“Pitfalls to Avoid” chapter.
Habit/Goal setting
With my clients, I often like to set goals in terms of habits, to help
combat what we see them potentially struggling with. Let’s consider
someone who is always hungry at night and consistently overeats even
with the best of intentions. We might set habit goals to eat a protein
and veggie only breakfast, and then a protein, veggies, and light
carbohydrate lunch to reserve most of their intake for the night so they
can fulfill their cravings with their biggest meal. This example
illustrates the strategy of planning meals and food around their
hunger, while creating a repeatable process (habit) for success.
To mitigate hunger in the smaller meals between, we can implement a

habit of introducing low-calorie satiation strategies, such as
consuming 1-2 glasses of fluid with each meal, vegetables at each
meal, eating protein and veggies before their carbohydrates and so
on.
A useful way to quantify these habits, that I learnt from Alan Aragon, is
to rate yourself out of the number of habits you have set (if you have
set 5 habits, you give yourself a score out of 5 each day). When setting
these goals, be realistic about what you can accomplish, small wins
consistently add up to more than large goals failed always.
Back to habit tracking. Every time you achieve a habit for the day, you
award yourself a point. At the end of the week, you average out your
scores and see what you did well and where you struggled. Then, look
at why you struggled and determine what you can implement in the
coming week to stop this from happening again.
The above strategy has been invaluable to my clients and myself, and
it might help you as well. Try this one to see how it works for you. If it
becomes too cumbersome, then you can drop it, but at least give it a
go and see if it is a viable option.
How Do We Do It Then?
So, now that we know the benefits of flexible dieting, we need to

better understand the process. I’m going to start with the basic
premise of how to implement it, and then delve into some strategies
that people can use at different phases/levels of experience. I
recommend using an application like MyFitnessPal to log and monitor
your intake to ensure you are hitting your goals. Alternatively, some
people may prefer to use the notes function on their phone or write it
physically on a piece of paper.
• Determine your goal (weight gain, maintenance, or weight loss).
• Determine how many kcals and macronutrients you must

consume daily to reach this goal (more on this later).
• Eat throughout the day based on hitting these goals. You can
include the foods that you enjoy if they are accounted for and
satisfy hunger (if weight loss is the goal). Avoid or reduce intake
of foods that leave you feeling excessively bloated or give you
any other negative issues.
I recommend giving yourself a range to work within for each goal, i.e.,
for protein, give yourself a 5-10% window on either side for ease. Do
the same for carbohydrates and fats. This allows for less pedantic
calorie and macro counting.
To make sure that you are on target over time check the weekly
average (if available) on your tracking application (MyFitnessPal has
this feature). The weekly average will help make sure you aren’t
consistently over or under your calorie and macronutrient goals. By
making sure you are meeting your weekly averages you provide
yourself a little more leniency when tracking day-to-day, which is

especially useful at the start of the process and/or as a break from rigid
dieting.
You will need to weigh foods and utilise the back of food labels to
understand what values of each intake goal are in the food. Make sure
to account for everything that is consumed, including liquids that have
calories in them (although if you are consistent with diet drinks lower
than 5kcals or so, this is probably not an issue) and oils for cooking.
MyFitnessPal has a useful feature that scans barcodes to bring up the
information. A note of warning: many foods on MFP are input by users,
so make sure to cross-reference them with your package.
Pitfalls to Avoid
There are some common patterns that I see when people first start to
use flexible dieting. These generally iron themselves out intuitively but
getting a heads up and avoiding them altogether can be
advantageous.
Not cross referencing their inputs on MyFitnessPal with

food labels.
This is for those that do choose to track using an app as such. As

mentioned prior, the data input into MyFitnessPal (MFP) is user driven.
This means that the foods and data regarding each food on MFP are
input by people like me and you, and there aren’t really any quality
control measures in place, meaning there’s lots of mistakes. There are
some foods that are blue ticked, and have been confirmed correct, but
not all of them are. So, for the first few times you input food into MFP,
just check to make sure it is correct as per the label.
BLTs?!
BLT stands for bites, licks and tastes. Especially for small individuals
with lower calorie intakes looking for fat loss, you need to quantify
every bit of food that you eat if you are going to track successfully. An
extra teaspoons of nut butter when you are preparing breakfast, one
of those biscuits from the tin at work you just pass by, the bite of your
son’s sandwich that he won’t finish, they all add up.
It may seem pedantic, and for most people it is, but it could be for
some people, the difference between noticeable fat loss, and a rate of
loss that isn’t visible over any realistic time course. As mentioned, for
bigger individuals, this really may not make a difference when you can
diet on 2,500+ kcals a day, but for the sub 50kg stay at home mother,
who doesn’t work, these BLTs could take her from a deficit, up to
maintenance intakes. If you are having the odd little taste of
something, or a bit of this or that, and are still making progress, that’s
perfect. If progress has slowed although you should definitely be in a
deficit of calories, then make sure you are accounting for these little
tastes and see what a difference removing them can make to getting
you back on target with your goal.
Using standard weighing utensils.
This is a common error when consuming very calorie-dense foods like

nut butters and oils. Just because it fits on a teaspoon, doesn’t mean
the serving is a teaspoon. I see people piling utensils high with peanut
butter, unknowingly consuming three times as many calories as they
are expecting because they are not standardizing by their
measurement utensils. As with BLTs above, for some individuals with
lower calorie goals, this mistake alone can completely knockout their
daily deficit, change maintenance into a surplus, and/or even double
their target surplus.
Just because it fits on a teaspoon, doesn’t mean the

serving is a teaspoon.
I’d always recommend weighing stuff like this first, and when you get
better at eyeballing what each serving actually looks like, you can
remove the scale. I also always recommend re-calibrating this
‘eyeballing’ skill semi-regularly, re-weighing every now and again, as it
is useful to make sure precision doesn’t decrease, especially with
grander fat loss goals.
Mixing raw and cooked weight for foods.
This is a simple one, but people often ask which weight to use. I always
recommend going off what is on the back of the nutritional packet, or,
if it is farm bought/butchered food, then I’d go with raw weight. You
should be able to find normative data for it on MyFitnessPal or the like.
Additionally, you can make assumptions that are consistent with some
food science data like, most meats lose approximately 25% of their
weight as water during cooking. So, 4oz of raw meat should be 3oz
cooked meat. The actual water loss varies with cooking methods, but
this assumption is pretty sound. Additionally, cooked grains (oats, rice,
pastas, etc.) often increase volume and weight 3-times when cooked.
2oz raw pasta becomes 6oz cooked. Similarly, to the above, this is an
assumption and will be less accurate than direct measurement. But
these assumptions are still 80% accurate with 20% of the effort and can
be very useful in certain situations, or just generally for long term
adherence.
Obsessing over every single macronutrient.
Bear in mind that this is for the average individual who wants 80-90%
of optimal. Those doing contest prep for a physique sport, modeling,
or paid work will want to be more accurate. However, 95% of people
don’t have to worry about hitting macros to the gram or chasing grains
of rice around the plate. We will generally offer our clients a range for
their nutritional goals, usually staying within 5-10% either side of their
goal intake for proteins and carbs, and within 5% for dietary fats to
allow them some leeway and reduce the stress of hitting things
exactly. I usually find that this approach has people hit their goal pretty
dead-on over the week/s anyway. In some cases, people may show
bias on the upper or lower end of the scale, so keeping track of your
weekly average may be a good system for checks and balances (you
can do this on MyFitnessPal).
Not matching the foods you eat to your goals.
This sounds strange, as we are talking about a completely flexible

approach, but to sustainably diet, we must balance hunger and
fullness with enjoyment of food. People will eat super high volume
‘clean’ foods during periods they want to gain weight, and then try to
get away with eating bagels and kid’s cereal at every meal when
they’re cutting. This is probably going to make it harder to stick to
each of the approaches long-term. I like to think of flexibility as a
continuum, between how palatable a food is and how much it will
satisfy hunger. It is probably ideal for adherence (not in all cases, just
on the average) to consume foods that contain more volume for the
same calories (lots of vegetables, oatmeal, potatoes, etc.) when you
are targeting fat loss. These foods will keep your fuller as you go
deeper into a calorie deficit, preventing serious hunger pangs that can
really make sticking to a diet tough. On the other side of the coin,
when you are trying to consume a higher calorie intake to gain weight,
you probably want to make foods tastier and lower volume per calorie
of food (bagels, denser cereals, healthy oils, pasta etc.) to make it
easier to consume the relatively high number of calories. This is
especially true when you get higher into a surplus to push up your
body weight for muscle gain. On the next page you’ll find a graphic
containing some foods that may have been deceiving you in the past,
as they didn’t match your goals. At one end you’ll find low volume,
calorically dense foods and at the other, high volume, low calorie
foods.
Consuming poor quality proteins.
This is one of the problems with flexible dieting. It accounts mainly for
objective goals of macronutrients and calories. The quality (in terms of
bioavailability and amino acid profile) of the proteins that are
consumed is important for maximizing our muscle protein synthetic
response, which is important for ‘putting down’ new protein in our
muscles. There are two common cases in which this is a problem: in a
vegetarian and/or vegan diet, and in very high-carbohydrate diets.
The quality of protein in a vegan/vegetarian diet can be quite low
because a significant amount (all of them in some cases) of their
proteins can come from trace sources in foods such as gluten and
vegetables. This is especially true for vegan diets since dairy
products/eggs/fish are excluded, all of which have an excellent amino
acid profile and bioavailability and are available in vegetarian diets.
The problem with this is that it can potentially be a rate-limiting factor
in muscle retention/growth (although it may only be a smaller point
relative to calorie intake and total protein intake). For this population, I
recommend making sure your protein sources are mixed and not just
from one food group. I also suggest increasing the total amount of
protein consumed by about 20-40%. Depending on the size of the
person and their preference, this will usually cover the deficit of amino
acids that these types of proteins provide.
Secondly, when it comes to very high-carbohydrate diets (upwards of

5g per kg potentially), we see that a lot of the carbohydrates
consumed have a decent amount of trace proteins in them (gluten is a
protein, with one bagel having up to 15g of protein). This leads to a
similar situation in which the diet can become predominantly
composed of poor protein sources. I would only consider this a
problem when your protein consumption reaches 50%+ from poor
sources compared to high-quality protein sources like lean meats and
dairy. If this becomes the case, what I’d like to do, again, is increase
the total protein intake. We add in 5 grams of protein for every 50

grams of carbohydrates. i.e., someone who consumes 500 grams of
carbohydrates daily would add 50g of protein to their daily total.
Using flexible dieting as an excuse to eat crap all the

time.
This is something that we sometimes see. It’s the individual who takes
flexible dieting as an excuse to consume whey protein and kid’s cereal
all day and nothing else. Flexible dieting simply allows you the
flexibility to eat foods you like within the confines of an otherwise
healthy diet comprised mainly of lean meats/fish, whole grains, fruits,
vegetables, and healthy sources of fats. Most diets that have you
confined to a select number of foods are going to risk deficiency in
certain micro/macronutrients. A diet that has you eat only six select
‘junk’ foods and one that has you eat only six select ‘clean’ foods have
the same potential to leave you deficient in certain nutrients. What is
important in a ‘healthy’ diet is a balanced approach that includes a
variety of food selection over time. This will allow you to sustainably
reach your goals. This, for me, is the ideal nutritional protocol for
mostly everyone – one that restricts as little as necessary to still reach
your goals.
Steps to Implement
Flexible Dieting
So, by now, we understand more about the flexible dieting approach,
how it is beneficial, basics on its structure, and where some of the
potential pitfalls lie. We will now discuss a step-wise approach at
implementing flexible dieting from starter to master tracker, as I’m
sure the process of tracking and weighing all your food will be a
daunting task for some. We have provided recommended timescales
for each phase, but these are just guides. Stay with each phase until
you’re ready to progress further. We always recommend starting with
the first phase to make sure you’ve got the basics covered before
progressing.
*I always recommend trying to create good habits as early as possible,

per our section on this, as this will serve you well in hitting any intake
goals with ease. *
Basic Tracking Skills

Length of Time – 2-4+ weeks
In this phase, you will simply be learning to use your food tracking
application of choice and learning the basic do-s and don’t-s. This is
the simplest part of the process, but still highly essential. We ask that
you simply track all your food (and body weight daily to create a
weekly average, more on this later) with no set goals, and no changes
to how you currently eat, whilst learning how to use the app,
measurement utensils/tools, and food labels. This phase is all about

building consistency and establishing a baseline. By observing what
you are currently doing it will help us understand how you are
responding to your current habits and calorie intake (this will make
more sense later). This approach will give you an idea of which protein
foods, carbohydrate foods, and dietary fat foods you already regularly
include in your diet, and you can base your future meals around
similar sources. This can help mitigate some of the difficulties
associated with transitioning into a diet.
Exit Criteria
You should be able to track all your food accurately daily, along with
being able to weigh and measure food with a level of ease and low
stress, have a basic understanding of what foods represent which
macronutrient; and use your app’s functionality.
Pre-Planned Flexibility
Length of Time – 2-6+ weeks
We will now start to implement some nutritional goals to hit (we will
discuss how to set these later). This will allow us to understand how to
format our meals to match our intake goals and keep us full and
satisfied for long-term adherence (i.e., someone may not feel hungry
until noon but hungry at night, so consuming food around those times
would be ideal from an adherence standpoint). Setting goals only for
calories and protein is ideal to ease into this process. We implement
these goals by planning ahead of time, not just tracking on the fly, to
keep the process from being overwhelming to start. So, we
recommend planning your next week or day’s food in advance, so
you’ll know exactly what to eat and when. Alternatively, we also like to
see people prepare their own meal plan, planning 2-3 separate days
of food on your app of choice (or in written format) and alternating
between the days throughout the week. This phase is categorised by
the ability to hit goals, plan, and further understand the macronutrient
composition of foods.
Exit Criteria
You should be able to hit daily goals within 5-10% of your targets, be
able to prepare a realistic day’s food ahead of time and start to build
habits and consistency for success when flexibility increases further. It
is important to still include variety in the diet during this phase, so you
can become familiar with the macronutrient compositions of a range
of foods and sources (potentially every week you could re-create your
meal plans with slightly different sources or food combinations if you
utilize them in this fashion). Understand further what foods represent
which macronutrients as we are going to implement Carbohydrate
and Dietary Fat goals in the next phase.
Flexibility on the Fly

Length of Time – 2–8+ weeks
This may be where you like to stay in terms of your flexible dieting,
although we have another phase we can push on to.
We will now incorporate goals for carbohydrates and dietary fats into
your tracking, looking to hit them within 10%. This will allow us to
optimize the results we get by biasing our macronutrients to those that
fuel training and create more consistency with our intake. That will
help with tracking changes in body composition more consistently
over time. Day-to-day variation in carbohydrate and fat intake can
cause changes in body water and undigested food content in the GI

tract. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as it isn’t necessarily
contributing to the way you look, but it can introduce unnecessary
variance to weigh-ins and measurements. This can create problems
that do not exist (believing you aren’t making progress when you are
because your weigh-in data is ‘messy’ from the varied intake), but if
you are aware of the confounding factors discussed above you can
exclude these time points from your weekly average when checking
for progress. A more consistent fat and carbohydrate intake can help
to reduce these fluctuations.
We should understand that we can just pick up foods

on the go rather than sticking to a specific set of foods
that are ‘on our diet’.
We will also start to track on the fly now. This doesn’t have to mean we
abandon planning ahead. For example, we could now track our final
meal ahead of time but eat our first meals on the fly. This will take away
some of the time consumed by planning and allow us to fine-tune our
flexibility and tracking skills out of necessity. You can use any amount
of pre-planning you feel necessary, but we like to see some flexibility
in terms of removing the energy taken to pre-planning out.
By now, we should have built up more of a principle-based approach

to thinking of foods as part of a bigger picture instead of good/bad
foods. We should understand that we can just pick up foods on the go
rather than sticking to a specific set of foods that are ‘on our diet’. This
stage will help to really solidify this understanding and that eating
towards your goals can become completely meshed with your lifestyle.
We also recommend that, towards the end of the time-scale, you
include dining out with family and friends. You will learn to estimate
intake and to increase enjoyment, taking away the fear of eating out
that some of us have. Doing this consistently will allow you to

understand how to structure your day to fit in a more enjoyable meal
out at night (i.e., restricting carbohydrate and dietary fat intake during
the day to save them for later). You can practice this by estimating
food weight before you weigh it out or estimating the macros of a
meal before putting it into your tracking app – whatever will help you
learn this skill most effectively. We recommend that during this time,
you look to maintain or increase your body weight, as you will have
more availability of calories to make mistakes and take the mental
stress of weight-loss dieting away, as you become better at this, you
can include this into a fat loss regime.
Exit Criteria
Able to hit all your nutritional goals within 5-10%, able to track full days
of food without pre-planning meals, eating foods that satisfy hunger
and cravings and create a level of sustainability. You should be able to
eat out with friends or family while still being able to work the rest of
the day in a way that allows you to stick to your goals within that 10%
margin. You should be able to include foods you enjoy into your diet
from time to time to remove big restrictions on diet (this will depend
on your goals; more extreme goals are going to take more extreme
restrictions).
Ad Libitum/Intuitive Eating
Length of Time – As long as it will allow you to hit the goals you have
for any time. This may not work for dieting to extreme levels of low
body fat and may be better suited for weight maintenance or
moderate mass gain and/or fat loss.
Ad libitum is Latin for ‘at one’s pleasure.’ Within the context of dieting,
it basically means eating in a way that encompasses all the habits
you’ve built up thus far based on feedback from your hunger and
satiety signals, whilst still adhering to the guidelines that allow you to
achieve your goals. Despite it being the most ‘natural’ approach, this
phase of dieting is the trickiest for most people. Balancing the
physiology and psychology of hunger and satiety can be challenging,
and not many people can implement this approach to achieve a good
rate of sustainable fat loss. This style of dieting has the greatest
potential of over/under-feeding based on a multitude of factors
influencing food choice and consumption. An additional challenge
can present itself in how do you direct yourself towards your goals
when you aren’t measuring anything and hit a plateau?
In this phase, our goal is to use all the experience we have so far, to
make choices in terms of our diet, based on our personal preferences,
principles learnt so far and the habits we have developed. We
eliminate tracking and eat foods that have historically allowed us to
reach our goals, whilst managing the amount we eat based on
hunger/satiety. What this will usually mean is that when we are trying
to lose fat, we eat to be full enough, but expect to deal with some level
of hunger for some extended periods of time vs. the normal hunger
leading into a meal. When maintaining, we eat to match our hunger
throughout the day. When trying to gain mass, we expect to feel full
more regularly than we may necessarily want. You could use a fullness
scale, from 1-10, with 10 being stuffed and 1 ravenous, and have an
aim for each meal and the day overall depending on your goals. This
can be tough for some but, if done effectively it can be a great strategy
to recover from a really taxing period of tracking (for example a
bodybuilding prep where every molecule of food is measured). We
may recommend a score of 7-8/10 for maintanence, 5-7/10 for fat loss,
and 8-10/10 for mass gaining. However, food choices will also play a
role here as we will need to consider if they align with our overall
goals. For example, achieving an 8/10 whilst eating broccoli and
chicken will likely have you eating less calories than achieving it with
pizza, and may be more appropriate for weight maintenance than

mass gain. When in the phase you must remember to include a foods
caloric density into your considerations when making meal choices.
Alternatively, you can shoot for maybe a 7-8/10 in each phase, but
match your food choices to the phase, working along a continuum of
food volume and calorie density. When aiming to lose fat, we want to
increase food volume and decrease calorie density. When we want to
gain mass, we would want to shift in the opposite direction. When
maintaining we can fall somewhere in between. The ability to do this
successfully will be built from a base of time spent tracking and
monitoring nutrition and how your body responds to it.
This stage of dieting will be based on intuition and experience. You

will know approximately how much food you normally eat, how much
of each macronutrient is in diferent food sources, approximately how
much is in each meal, and how hungry you would normally feel. You
will only use your body composition measurements and photos week-
to-week to measure whether you are headed in the right direction or
not. These will be your feedback tools to inform you on whether you
should stick or twist with what you’re doing. There are no real
guidelines to this other than using your knowledge, staying aware of
how you are feeling, knowing what portion sizes look like, and
knowing the types of foods you are eating (i.e., meats, starches, etc.).
This phase isn’t recommended to many clients, as it does take a hell of

a lot of discipline and a level of awareness that most people don’t
possess for some time. However, if done successfully, it can be an
excellent tool for long-term maintenance after achieving a big goal. I
recommend interspersing periods of tracking into this phase to make
sure your skills are still as sharp and give you an indicator on where
you are in terms of accuracy (maybe do this for one week every six or
eight weeks or so). This will give you some security in knowing
whether you are being accurate or need to make some changes.
Exit Criteria
You should be able to work towards your goals without formally
tracking your nutrition, using your weekly body composition measures
to guide the process. You should be able to eat out when you like and
without fear based on achieving your goals. You will use your hunger
and satiety as feedback on whether you are eating appropriately,
along with the types of foods you’re choosing. You should be able to
implement this for long enough at one time to get the benefits of it.
You should trust your abilities that you have built up so far and not feel
the need to track daily.
Other situations
What do we do when things come up in life that we can’t control? Or
we plan for a trip away, like a holiday, family meal, birthday etc. Do we
just go off our diet? It kind of depends.
What does it depend on? Both your goals, and the type of person you
are. Firstly, if you have no deadline to your goal, and you are just
seeking to look and feel better over time, we recommend using these
times as breaks from dieting, and either plan them in ahead of time
(more on diet breaks later), or just go with them, make the smartest
choices you can, and then get back on with your goal when you are
done. This is what we recommend 90% of people do.
The above is so especially when you are on holiday. Even if you have a
contest, photoshoot or any other reason to continue dieting, we
recommend you take a holiday as a diet break and utilise some pre-
panning to make it work. The only difference is that you may have to
diet more aggressively before and after the break, as a result of the
break, as you have a time and date that you must be in condition for.
The more extreme the goal, the more extreme the restriction
unfortunately.
For those that wish to, our favourite method of getting around
situations like mentioned prior (meals out, birthdays etc.), is using an
intermittent fasting pattern of eating. Fasting is a bit of an unusual
beast, it seems that fasting (within a day), has no further effects on
hunger when compared simply eating lowered calories during the
day. We can use intermittent fasting to back load our nutrition towards
the end of the day, or around a meal or event. Below is an example of
a day of doing this (with the option of lower calorie meals if needed).
Intermittent fasting doesn’t have any further benefits over calorie

equated diets, so there are no extra benefits to weight loss, but what it
does is give you a bigger pool of calories to play with when it comes to
later meals. We still recommend making smart choices, mostly leaner
meats and lots of veggies, but setting up your day in this way will allow
you to enjoy a treat, or just mentally relax, without the stress of this
meal mitigating any enjoyment of it.
If you were so inclined, you could do something similar on holiday.

Most people find themselves busier during the day on holidays, out on
trips, seeing sights etc., so they don’t really think too much about food.
This can allow you to save calories during the day by fasting and enjoy
a bigger calorie intake for your later meals. This may mean you can
have a dessert, some alcoholic drinks (although alcohol reduces will
power, so just be aware) or simply any meal you enjoy.
As we mentioned, we always recommend trying to take these events

into account ahead of time, and planning breaks. We understand that
life happens, and we aren’t always in control, these are our preferred
ways of working around them (although we aren’t averse to any calorie
equated approach, as they will likely have the same result).
Doing the math…

Working Out Your Maintenance
Calories/Macronutrient Intake
This section may seem a little redundant to some, with all the online
calculators for macros and calories available, so we decided instead to
break down two different ways of attaining your maintenance intake
and give you the benefits vs. costs of each. Maintenance intake is
defined simply as the amount of food, as calories, that it would take to
maintain your current weight om average. Keep in mind that factors
like food choices and meal timing may cause daily weight fluctuations,
but a weekly average, can likely resolve any variance. It is important to
work out the amount you need to maintain your current state for two
reasons. The first is to have a starting point from which to alter your
nutrition to attain your goal. The second is to have a point of reference
for future use, and to help guide this process next time, or as your
goals change with time. This number will stay pretty consistent over
time and move up and down along with changes in your body
weight/composition. From this maintenance calorie number, we can
figure out how these calories will be split up into their macronutrient
parts. Remember that for body composition, as opposed to just
weight loss, macronutrient intake matters, just not as much as calorie
balance.
As we mentioned before, we will provide two methods for working out

your maintenance intake. One will utilize a standard formula to
approximate your maintenance, and the other will compare two
different weekly weight and calorie intake averages. We will first
discuss the simpler, although somewhat less accurate, process and

follow up with the lengthier and likely more accurate process.
It is important to understand that when using a standardized formula

to work out your total daily energy expenditure (TDEE, how many
calories you burn in a day through movement, bodily function, and
bodyweight maintenance) we will have some degree of error. These
formulas are derived from averages across large populations, which
means that there isn’t much inter-individualism other than your
statistics like body weight and height. What makes these calculations
beneficial is that they are simple and easy to use, with around a 10% or
so degree of error. This degree of error isn’t necessarily a big issue for
most of us, as you will need to track your body composition and
monitor as you go along anyway, and changes should be made based
upon how these tracked variables change over time.
As shown above in the paper extract, we also know that some of the
proposed formulas are likely more accurate than others. We know that
for males who partake in regular exercise, the Harris-Benedict
equation likely has the least degree of error, and for females who
partake in regular exercise, the Cunningham equation is likely most
accurate. When we say partake in regular exercise, we are basically
stating that you probably have more muscle mass/less body fat than
the average individual and exercise more than once per week.
The Harris-Benedict Equation:
• (10 x body weight in kg) + (6.25 x height in cm) – (5 x age in

years) – 161 = Basal metabolic rate (BMR, metabolic rate minus
activity)
• You would now use an activity multiplier to obtain your TDEE as

follows (times your BMR by the appropriate number)
1. Light exercise (1-3 days exercise per week) – 1.3 -.14

2. Moderate exercise (3-5 days exercise per week) – 1.5 – 1.6
3. Heavy exercise (6-7 days exercise per week) – 1.7 – 1.8
4. Very heavy exercise (twice per day, extra heavy workouts) –
1.8 – 1.9
• The number you have should be (approximately) the number of

calories you need to maintain your current body weight at your
current activity level.
The Cunningham Equation:
Lean body mass, LBM, is your body weight if you were to remove all
body fat weight, i.e., 100kg male @ 20% body fat would be 80kg LBM.
• 500 + (22 x LBM) – LBM = BMR
• You would now use an activity multiplier to obtain your TDEE as

follows (times your BMR by the appropriate number) –
1. Light exercise (1-3 days exercise per week) – 1.3 -.14
2. Moderate exercise (3-5 days exercise per week) – 1.5 – 1.6
3. Heavy exercise (6-7 days exercise per week) – 1.7 – 1.8
4. Very heavy exercise (twice per day, extra heavy workouts) –
1.8 – 1.9
• This number should be (approximately) the number of calories

you need to maintain your current body weight at your current
activity level.
Here they are in flowchart format for your reference-
As you can probably tell by looking at the formula, there is no real

case for individuality – especially with the Cunningham equation –
other than a few bodily measurements. There are also no real
guidelines for the activity multiplier. What is classified as exercise? Is
all exercise equal? How long does exercise have to be to be included?
These are all questions that would give us a more accurate view.
Unfortunately, we can’t ask these questions other than through more
research.
We can use this equation to get a good guess of where we should

start and move on from there. It is important to realize that those on
either side of average of body fat levels, above and below, will likely
be over/underestimated more than those that are closer to the
average. For males above 20% body fat and females above 30%, the
equation will likely overestimate how much you need to eat. For males
under 10% and females under 20%, the equation will likely
underestimate how much you need to eat. We don’t have an exact
number for the size of this inaccuracy, but it is useful to know and
consider when working out your starting numbers and monitoring
your body composition going forward.
It is important to recognize that factors outside of

calories such as changes in food amounts/weight, fibre
amount/source, sodium levels, hydration, activity,
stress, and more can cause fluctions in body weight.
The next method to working out your maintenance intake in terms of

calories will potentially be much more accurate because it is based on
how your body responds to a given number of calories. It is important
to recognize that factors outside of calories such as changes in food
amounts/weight, fibre amount/source, sodium levels, hydration,
activity, stress, and more can cause fluctions in body weight. Although
they likely iron themselves out as you attain your baseline using
averages. It is just advised that whilst doing this method, you try not to
significantly change your eating or activity habits except for how many
calories you intake. We will use our weekly average body weight, in
relation to a given calorie level to determine our baseline. Work this
out by taking 3-7 daily morning weigh-ins, under the same conditions
each time (i.e. first thing in the morning, nude, after the bathroom
etc.), adding them together and dividing by the number of
measurements to get the average. We should do this for 2 consecutive
weeks to establish our week 1 and week 2 average body weight. We
are going to take this weekly average and, using the 3500-calorie rule,
work out our current maintenance based on how much the first and
second weekly weigh-ins differ.
The 3500-calorie rule suggests that it takes around 3500 kcals to

lose/gain 1lb of body tissue/fat (this is not exactly the most accurate,
but the best practical approach we have). This means that to lose 1lb
of true body weight (not water/stored carbohydrates, etc.) we must be
in a deficit of 3500 calories on average over the period of time we look
to lose it. Inversely, to gain 1lb, we must be in a 3500-calorie surplus.
Obviously, we wouldn’t shoot for a 1lb loss/gain over one day, so this
deficit/surplus would be spread across multiple days/weeks in the
frame of setting up our nutrition for our goals, more on this later.
To put this into context, somebody looking to lose 1lb of body weight
per week, would need to be in a 3500-calorie deficit over 7 days (3500
÷ 7 = 500 calorie deficit per day). So practically, what we want to do is
track our intake (using your app of choice) and our average weekly
body weight for two weeks. We will use these pieces of information,
alongside the 3500-calorie rule, to work out our estimated
maintenance intake. We will also need to work out our average calorie
intake over the 2 weeks by adding each daily amount together and
dividing by the number of days (if doing over two weeks, this would
be14 days). Let’s say in this instance, the average comes to 3000
calories per day, now we have this number we can move forward to
work out where our maintenance is.
We should also now have 2 weekly body weight averages. We are

going to look at how our weekly average body weight has changed
over the two weeks. Let’s say the first week’s average came to 80kg,
then the second week’s average came to 80.5kg. That is a 0.5kg gain
between the two weeks. We now take that 0.5kg and x by 2.2 (to
convert to pounds, as the 3500-calorie rule was formulated with
pounds in mind). This comes to a 1.1lb gain over 7 days. We now work
out how many calories would have been needed to gain this weight,
so we multiply 1.1 x 3500 (remember the 3500-calorie rule is the
amount to gain 1lb). We now have 3,850 calories – the number of
calories total it took to gain this weight over those 7 days
approximately.
We now need to equate that number into a daily calorie surplus, so we

divide by 7 to get this number. We now have 550 calories. 550 calories
is the average number of calories per day that this individual had to
approximately eat over their maintenance to gain 1.1lb per week,
based on their current body state and activity.
It’s now simple to work out our maintenance. We simply take the 550
calories per day away from the 3000-calorie average that the
individual consumed, which equals 2,450 calories. That is this
individual’s maintenance intake based on their current activity. We
must understand that this is subject to change along with changes in
activity, food composition, and feeding in proximity to weigh-ins etc.
We will put this into a visible calculation for simplicity’s sake.
• Week 2 average body weight – week 1 average body weight =

body weight change (x by 2.2 if working in kilograms; if in
pounds, stay with the original number)
• Body weight change x 3500 = calorie number needed to create

weight change per week
• Calorie number needed to create weight change per week ÷ 7 =

average daily calorie number needed to create weight change
over the week
• Average calorie intake over the 2 weeks + or – average daily

calorie number needed to create weight change over the week
(will depend on whether you saw gain or loss, if you lost weight
use the +, if you gained use the -) = daily maintenance calorie
intake at current bodyweight and activity level.
As you can see, the process of getting to this number will be longer,
but potentially more accurate. The longer the time, the more accurate
your maintenance number will be (e.g., doing this over three or four
weeks instead of two weeks). It is important that you be consistent and
aware that a drastic change to your diet can cause your body weight to
fluctuate in absence of any fat gain/loss or changes in muscle. These
changes in body weight will mostly be due to glycogen (stored
glucose), fluid changes, and food in the GI tract. Drastically increasing
the number of carbohydrates or amount of sodium consumed can
make quite a big change from one day to the next too, when it comes
to total body weight. This can skew your results and give the illusion of
fake fat gain/loss. This may also happen if you drastically change the
food volume you are eating day to day, i.e., one day you eat 500+
kcals of green veggies, and the next day you have the same amount of
calories in peanut butter. Not only in the differences in Macronutrients,
there will be a big difference in terms of the weight of food remaining
in your digestive tract. You can omit these cases from your weekly data
analysis to avoid interrupting your data trends.
Drastically changing the amount of activity you do in one week versus

the next will make a difference as well. As we now know, energy
balance dictates weight change. Energy balance is the difference in
energy from the food we eat compared to the amount of energy we
need for biological functions and physical activity of all kinds. If we
change either of these variables enough, for long enough, we change
our weight. More activity (if the change is notable and consistent) will
equal weight loss or more weight loss than we previously had seen.
Most calories burnt that aren’t from our body’s

physiology are not from exercise, they are from
physical activity that is a consequence of daily living.
The consensus here is to try and keep things as consistent as possible

whilst trying to determine your maintenance intake. This will give you
the best picture possible, and we recommend eating your normal
intake for two weeks (or however long you want to determine over) to
establish a baseline. You can even combine this process with the
learning portion of flexible dieting as the two go together quite well. If
you use a step counter, it may be useful to take a two-week average of
your steps as well to determine your baseline activity that was a factor
in your maintenance intake. Most of the calories our body burns, that
aren’t from our body’s physiological processes, are from the physical
activities of daily living, in particular, walking. As such, if you
intentionally modify your steps, you will also modify the amount of
energy you burn, all else kept the same. Conversely, if you take fewer
steps, you will burn less energy, again if all else is kept stable.
As mentioned prior, neither of these processes of determining

maintenance are infallable, and both have their own separate issues
that can result in inaccuracies. However, both are practical and serve
as an excellent way to estimate where you should start your intake and
adjust from. It will be personal preference which of the two methods
you will use and it’s important to realize that where you start is of little
importance when compared with how you adjust the variables over
time. The latter is the real skill and the factor that will bring you long-
term results.
Working Out Your Macronutrient Intake Based

on Your Calorie Intake
As we mentioned, all calories are made up of constituent

macronutrients, so we are going to consider protein, carbohydrates,
dietary fats and dietary fibre. When it comes to determining our
macronutrient intake, we most commonly like to set our protein first,
dietary fats second, and then the rest of our calories will be filled
through carbohydrates, whilst also setting fibre minimums for health
purposes.
Some of the rationale behind this is that some types of amino acids
(constituent parts of protein) and dietary fats cannot be formed de
novo within our bodies, so consumed through the foods we eat. These
are called essential amino acids (EAA) and essential fatty acids (EFA).
Protein will be our most important macronutrient if we want to build
muscle or maintain lean body mass whilst dieting. This is because
some of these amino acids, are crucial for signalling anabolism
(growth of tissues) within our bodies. Additionally, dietary protein will
contribute to a pool of amino acids that act as muscle sparing reserves
when we don’t have enough calories in our diet, i.e. when dieting for
fat loss.
Muscle protein balance is the term given to the relationship between

how much protein we synthesise into our muscles, and muscle protein
breakdown, which is the amount we breakdown during times of
absence of protein going in. In simplistic terms, when we aim to build
muscle, we are looking to on average over time, synthesise more
protein than the amount being broken down. We do this through an
excess of calories, both minimising breakdown and elevating
synthesis. We also do this through hard, productive training that
greatly increases the amount of synthesis occurring. We can also do
this through appropriately dosed protein servings, at the right

frequencies.
When we are looking to lose fat, we lose some of these big players.
We don’t have an excess over calories any more, we actually have less
than we need. We also can’t do quite as much training as we have less
recovery reserve due to nutrition lacking. This means during fat loss,
other than in exceptional cases (i.e. rank beginners or individuals
coming back from injury or long layoffs), it is not likely that we will gain
much, if any, muscle mass. We usually end up balancing out on
average.
Don’t think of just balancing out as a bad thing, it is a good thing. It

means that whilst getting significantly leaner, we are preserving our
hard-earned muscle tissue. Protein is also important as it is less
energy-efficient per kcal vs. Carbohydrates and Dietary Fats (it
requires more energy to digest, thus we can likely eat a little more vs.
other macronutrients). Along with this, it has the title of being the
most satiating of the macronutrients. This point is very important when
it comes to fat loss phases, keeping hunger under control may dictate
long-term success on a diet.
Whilst Dietary Fats are not needed in large quantities, they do have
some essential purposes. As mentioned prior, they aid in hormonal
regulation, they are the basis of a lot of our neurotransmitters, along
with other things. So, we do need a minimum to meet the needs for
essential amounts, although beyond this, they don’t contribute much
to most individuals interested in resistance training.
So, are carbohydrates not important? They are very important, but
there is no minimum amount we must consume or any essential
carbohydrates that must be consumed. The stored form of
carbohydrate is glycogen, a substrate that can be readily and quickly
converted into the bodies chemical form of energy, ATP. Other

macronutrients can be converted into glycogen and be stored in the
same way, via a process called gluconeogenesis. So if some calories
are being consumed, then Carbohydrates aren’t essential in the same
way that the other two macronutrients are.
Despite this, carbohydrates are the most effective way to fuel our
nervous system and maintain blood glucose levels to help reduce
feelings of physical and mental fatigue. Stored muscle glycogen will
be the most effective and efficient means of fuelling resistance training
during hard sets of 6-20+ repetitions as we try to build/maintain
muscle.
So, indirectly, eating as many carbohydrates as your calories allow may

help you train harder and recover better. By doing so, we can create a
muscle building stimulus of a higher magnitude on average, create
higher levels of muscle protein synthesis as mentioned before, and
potentially increase the likelihood that we will maintain while in a
calorie deficit.
So, now we know a bit about priorities for body composition when it
comes to macronutrients. Now, we must learn how we are going to
work out how much of each of them we likely should eat.
We will start by looking at the minimums we should hit for dietary fats
and carbohydrates. We’ll ignore protein for now because it will never
be so low that it becomes an issue if calories in the diet are adequate.
For dietary fats, we recommend not going below 0.5g/kg of body
weight, as this seems to be where individuals start to see deleterious
effects. For carbohydrates, we recommend not going below 1g/kg of
body weight. These recommendations are given on average over a
weekly period, so it’s possible that you will have carbohydrate and/or
dietary fat intakes below this for a short period, but they should stay
above these recommendations on average. Most individuals looking

to just lose some body fat and look better will likely not need to get
too near these levels anyway.
When dieting to the extremes of leanness, like in physique sports,

individuals will often push the boundaries of what is ‘healthy.’ Realise
that there is a risk associated with this, and they are doing this for a
short period of time out of neccesity for their sport. The smart
individual would look to get out of this state as soon as they possibly
can. I’m not saying no one should ever go below these ranges, it’s just
a recommendation for 95% of the population, and isn’t necessary for
the general public to get to most people’s desired levels of leanness.
On to working out our daily macronutrient intake, starting with protein:
• Protein intake – 1.8 – 2.2 g/kg of body weight
• Dietary fat intake – 15 - 30% of total kcals or 0.5 – 1g/kg of body

weight (based on preference)
• Carbohydrates – Fill in the rest of your kcals with these (use the
knowledge that protein and carbohydrates have 4kcal/g and
dietary fats have 9kcal/g).
As you can see, protein intake is quite a small range, averaging around
2g/kg of body weight. There is some evidence to suggest that those
looking to diet to extreme levels of leanness may want to get closer to
3g/kg, although this is not conclusive. Those in a caloric surplus, or
eating more calories relative to their maintenance level, may be able
to use the lower end of the scale since resources are not scarce during
a calorie surplus. For those eating in a calorie deficit, you may want to
go with the higher end, as this may have a protein sparing effect and if
anything will reduce hunger and increase satiety from the diet. As you
can see, we have some wiggle room from there when it comes to
choosing a carbohydrate and dietary fat intake based on our
preferences.
These preferences generally come mostly in foods you enjoy eating

most, but it can be based on subjective feelings (how foods make us
feel) or performance (how well we perform when consuming them).
Adherence will be the biggest factor to consider for most people
when it comes to succeeding in fat loss, so enjoyment should be a
strong consideration when it comes to choosing where you want to
spread your calories.
Whilst adherence is very important, there are some positives and

negatives associated with picking more of one than the other.
Generally, for individuals interested in building muscle mass or
maintaining lean body mass whilst losing body fat, there will probably
be an advantage to biasing your nutrition towards more carbohydrates
and less dietary fats. This is more of an indirect effect, rather than
being causal of fat loss or muscle gain. The indirect benefits will
primarily come from improved workout performance, as most routines
that are aimed at building muscle mass and losing body fat will be
fuelled by glucose and its stored form, Glycogen (in terms of using
them to create ATP as mentioned). Muscle protein synthesis will only
be elevated for extended periods of time when there is not a low
energy state in the muscle tissue. Carbohydrate can also help improve
the signalling for muscle growth, as there is likely an increased
potential within muscles that are glycogen full vs. depleted.
On the next page you’ll find a flowchart break down of how to work
out your macros, and the most convenient order to do it in for easy
referencing.
Adjusting Our Intake to

Our Goals
Rates of Weight Loss/Gain
Now that we know what our maintenance intake is, we need to adjust it
based on our goals (unless your goal is to maintain, then voila, you
have your intake already).
Some words of warning, being in an extreme caloric deficit for long

amounts of time can be deleterious to your long-term health. Similarly,
an unsuitably large calorie surplus that leads to excessive body fat
gain (although I don’t forsee this being something we need to harp on
with our target population) can also be hazardous to long-term health.
Generally, for most people not looking to diet down to the levels of
leanness required for physique sports or the like (these have their own
risks attached) we don’t recommend consuming a calorie amount
below 20 x your body weight in kilograms for an extended period. You
may intersperse periods of being below and above this, but as a rule
of thumb, try not to sink much below this for an extended period.
So, we will start this discussion by laying out our desired rates of
weight gain/weight loss we are looking to acheive. Using the 3500-
calorie rule we discussed prior, we can work out an estimate of our
starting intake.
For weight loss/fat loss, we recommend that you aim for 0.5-1% of
total body weight loss per week. This is a rate that is slow enough to
maintain training performance and muscle mass, but still see results in
a timely manner. The range, rather than a specific figure, mostly serves
as a way to account for the leanness of the individual. What we mean

is, that leaner individuals are more likely to lose a higher percentage of
lean body mass (LBM) per total weight loss vs. individuals with a higher
relative level of body fat. For this reason, we advise that leaner
individuals diet more slowly, in a shallower caloric deficit, and
sometimes slower than the range suggested, to help in the pursuit of
LBM retention. On the flip side, higher body fat individuals can
generally diet somewhat faster – sometimes faster than the range
suggested – as they will be less likely to lose LBM and more likely to
lose more body fat per total weight loss. Realise that the rate of weight
loss will lie on a continuum, a visual example is shown below.
We won’t be suggesting a rate of loss based on a specific body fat

level (I won’t start on how arbitrary and inaccurate body fat testing is)
as every person will be different, and it is very unlikely that you will be
able to attain an accurate body fat reading from any source. Just know
that most lean individuals will lose body fat slower than those with
more body fat, so their rate of total weight loss should likely be a little
slower. Make sure you also consider adherence, no matter where the
individual falls on this continuum. The approach you choose needs to
allow you to adhere over a long enough period to achieve your goal.
Rate of weight gain (with the intention of increasing LBM/muscle

tissue) should probably lie at between 1-3% of total body weight gain
per month. As you can see, the rate of weight gain will be much slower
because the processes involved in building new muscle tissue are
inherently slower. We also see that there is potentially a momentum
aspect involved in building muscle. It doesn’t happen straight away,
and a consistent anabolic stimulus, rather than a severe and acute one,
may improve overall response, although this is anecdotal.
Muscle tissue does not increase linearly alongside the rate of weight
gain. It runs along an asymptote, increasing up to a point that it levels
off. More than likely, a 1-3% increase in body weight per month will
top that out for most natural (non-drug using) individuals, while
minimizing fat gain. So, the reason for the range in this consideration,
vs. a single figure, is going to be determined by training age. When I
say training age, I mean how long you have been effectively training
and eating. A visual example of this is shown below.
An individual newer to training and nutrition will likely gain at a higher
rate because they have much more of their genetic potential left to
fulfill when it comes to muscle gain. The opposite occurs in the more
seasoned individual, who has very little gains left to make from their
hypothetical ceiling. Faster rates/excessive weight gain in the absence
of increased muscle gain will only be detrimental in the long run.
A last word on muscle gain – these recommendations are based on

leaner individuals, as the process at which muscle gain is likely
optimized is in the region of 8-15% body fat for males and 15-25% for
females. Again, it’s difficult to be exact, but being somewhere within
this range subjectively is likely ideal. The reason comes down to how
nutrients are partitioned within the body, with our p-ratio likely being
more ideal. The ideal situation when it comes to p-ratio, is when the
food we consume is rationed more towards recovering and/or
increasing LBM vs. being stored as fat. We are not saying that you
cannot gain muscle outside of these ranges, but it will just not likely be
as effective in terms of muscle gain per total weight gain, so when
considering your initial approach, and rate of gain, this should be in
the back of your mind.
Calculating your Surplus or Deficit
Now that we know the rate of loss/gain we want to hit, we can set our
calorie deficit/surplus based on our 3500-calorie rule. I will give an
example of a 100kg male with a higher body fat level whose
hypothetical maintenance calorie are 3500 kcals. He wants to lose
body fat.
• 100kg x 0.01 (1%) = 1kg/2.2lb desired weight loss per week

• 2.2lb x 3,500 kcals = 7,700 kcals = weekly deficit needed attain
this loss
• 7,700 kcals ÷ 7 days = 1,100 kcals = average daily calorie deficit
needed to attain this loss
• 3,500 kcals – 1,100 kcals = 2,400 kcals = daily calorie intake
needed to attain desired rate of loss.
We will now perform this equation for the same individual, imagining
that he was within our desired body fat range and new to training to
build muscle, with the same maintenance of 3500 kcals as described.
• 100kg x 0.02 (2%) = 2kg/4.4lb = desired weight gain per month

• 2kg x 12 months = 24kg ÷ 52 weeks = 0.45kg/1lb = weekly
weight gain target
• 1lb x 3,500 kcals = 3500 kcals = total weekly surplus needed to
attain desired rate of weight gain
• 3,500 kcals ÷ 7 days = 500 kcals = average daily surplus needed
to attain desired rate of weight gain
• 3,500 kcals + 500 kcals = 4,000 kcals = daily calorie intake
needed to attain desired rate of gain.
Now, you have a rough caloric intake as a starting point. Understand

you will need to amend along the way from here, as weight gain/loss
slows to a halt over time. Your body will adapt eventually and bring
you to a state of homeostasis (internal balance) in terms of body
weight, through lowering needs for energy to remain functioning. This
can be simply due to weighing less, but also through adaptations in
our metabolism, that can be alleviated using diet breaks/maintenance
phases periodically (more on this later). Be aware that when you
implement a decent deficit/surplus immediately, you will probably see
a similarly decent sized fluctuation in weight in the direction you have
taken calories, the fluctuation isn’t a bad thing, it is just something to
understand will happen, so you can take it into account.
These fluctuations will come mostly from the volume of food in your
stomach and stored glucose, along with the water that is drawn into
the surrounding areas because of glycogen storage. As you store
glycogen, water is drawn within the muscle along with it, at around a
3:1 ratio of water: glycogen. So, the first 1-2 weeks of any new diet are
going to look a little strange on the scales, and maybe in the
measurements too. More than likely it is for the reasons we just
mentioned, so don’t freak out and feel the need to start changing up
your diet immediately. You must give it time to see how your
weight/measurements change over a period of weeks before deciding
to make changes up or down. My recommendation to track progress
for body composition is to use a weekly average weight (take 2-7
weigh-ins per week, at the same time each time, and create a weekly
average based on them). You may also want to take body girth
measurements and physique photographs to assess progress. Take
the measurements every 1-2 weeks and photographs every 2-4 weeks
on average. You can do this more or less often. These are just
suggestions. Understand that some measures will take longer to show
consistent results, so don’t be disheartened if some things move and
others don’t, progress is progress.
The flowchart on the previous page gives you and easy referencing
point for working out your calorie intake. We’ve started right at the
beginning and simplified each step to make life as easy as possible.
Cardio?!
I will repeat this again and again, energy balance dictates weight
change. What cardio contributes to energy balance is increasing the
‘energy out’ side of the equation. For body composition purposes,
there is no further benefit to it. If you are doing a sufficient amount and
intensity of resistance training, you will likely put adequate stress on
your cardiovascular system to promote health and recovery for your
needs.
Is cardio necessary? No. But is it useful? It can be.
Let’s just define cardio a little. Cardio is any activity that is done
purposefully to challenging the aerobic system, and its constituent
parts, in either the pursuit of increased cardiovascular function, or
increased energy burn. As individuals who just want to look better, as
mentioned above, a decent amount of relatively hard, relatively heavy
resistance training, will more than fulfil these needs, outside of sports
purposes. In terms of energy burn, we are looking to burn as much
energy as possible, whilst producing as little fatigue as possible, whilst
still being done in a time scale that is both achievable and realistic.
Cardio is useful when the requirement of eating less calories to

continue progress must drop below sustainable levels. For some
individuals (smaller, more sedentary individuals, commonly ladies),
dropping calories this low will mean they probably won’t be able to
eat with their family, eat anything they don’t prepare, or eat foods that
they enjoy. In this case, increasing activity would likely be beneficial in
reducing this psychological stress by allowing greater caloric intake,

and greater overall flexibility within their diet.
Cardio isn’t good or bad, it is just a trade-off between

which side of the energy balance equation you want to
manipulate.
Cardio can (depending on the amount and type) promote recovery

from the simple process of promoting blood flow through the working
tissues, supplying nutrients, along with drainage of waste products via
the lymphatic system. We also see an improvement in insulin
sensitivity as muscles are stimulated and glycogen is utilized as fuel for
exercise (depending on the type of cardio again). This increased
insulin sensitivity will likely promote glucose storage, to allow for its
later use.
When is cardio not necessary? When that cost-to-benefit ratio we

discussed doesn’t align in favour of cardio. In short, time spent doing
cardio is time that could be spent recovering from training, with
recovery being a higher concern when dieting for fat loss as we have
already reduced our calorie intake. Due to the constrained energy
theory, we also may see individuals begin to unconsciously reduce
their daily activity outside of exercise (NEAT or non-exercise activity
thermogenesis) to save energy for ‘when it counts’. They do this by
sitting more, being more docile, less expressive with their bodies etc.
Cardio isn’t good or bad, it is just a trade-off between which side of

the energy balance equation you want to manipulate. You must weigh
your options up before deciding whether to implement cardio (and to
what level) for yourself or clients.
The ideal situation when it comes to cardio for body composition

purposes, is to burn as many calories as possible whilst accumulating
as little fatigue as possible. Remember that there will always be fatigue
generated with any activity. For this reason, we almost always
recommend low-intensity steady state cardio (LISS) for body
composition purposes, as the intensity is so low that it shouldn’t
conflict with our weight training adaptations. It shouldn’t be so
physiologically and psychologically stressful that it impedes recovery
to a noticeable degree, with this noticeable degree being declining
training performance (although if you do any form of cardio enough,
its effects will start to cause more and more stress on your system).
We like to do one of two things with clients (although sometimes we

do include other form of expenditure). We give them a daily step goal
with no formal cardio, as this accounts for activity away from what
would have been their formal cardio. We can manipulate it up or down
based on how the individual’s body changes over time.
The second option is generally implemented to keep steps from

becoming unsustainably high. We would add in some cardio, in the
form of LISS – either a bike, stair stepper, treadmill, or if the individual
has an activity tracker, they can do any low-intensity activity they like.
We will usually give a calorie goal for this, as depending on your
speed, incline, body position, etc. for the same amount of time, you
could be burning a variable number of calories if we just set an
arbitrary amount of time to do it for. To add to this, we know that
volitional activity sees a reduction as diets go on, due to our bodies
want to reserve this energy for other functions (constrained energy
theory), so a calorie goal likely will keep things more consistent.
On that note, the calories you see on the treadmill or bike are one, not
really that accurate, and two, they are not the additional calories you
are burning on top of rest. When you are at rest, you burn calories to
maintain vital bodily functions, even though you’re not moving. The
calories on the machine you are using basically reflect the resting
metabolic rate in addition to the current activity. So, if you want to
implement this into your 3500-kcal rule, we usually take around 1/3 off
of the amount on the treadmill to account for this, i.e., your treadmill
says you burned 300 kcals in a session, we would equate that to an
approximately an extra 200 kcals burned by treadmill exercise alone.
A last note on cardio – when should it be done? There are two

answers, and while the first is more important, the second is what is
probably ‘optimal’ in some sense. First and foremost, it must be done
at a time that is ideal for you and doesn’t cause excessive increases in
stress from changing around your schedule or getting up at the crack
of dawn to do it fasted (lol) reducing your time sleeping. For some
people, this may be pre/post workout, for others, it may be convenient
at night. It will vary, but this should be the first consideration.
The second consideration is in the proximity to training, especially leg

training. We try to recommend cardio be done away from training
altogether if all else is unaffected. Depending on the duration and
intensity, cardio can cause acute fatigue that negatively impacts
training if done pre-workout, so we try to avoid this first and foremost.
If done post-workout, cardio will delay the start of the recovery
processes, including repletion of glucose, nervous system repair,
healing of physical tissue damage, and so on. The earlier that these
happen, the earlier you can return to productive training and either
gain or maintain your current level of muscle mass. So, there may be
some detriment to doing cardio at these times, although I have seen
some information detailing that waste product removal is enhanced
with very low-intensity exercise post workout for between 15-20
minutes. That means that this may be up for debate, and I would
advise potentially trying this out to see how you deal with it. But again,
you need to consider ease of implementing cardio into your routine.
High Days, Low Days and Borrowing Calories
Some of you may have heard of the concepts of calorie cycling, or

tools such as strategic refeeds used when fat loss is the goal. Calorie
cycling and refeeds, or high and low days are the same thing, in
essence. Strategic refeeds are days in which you have higher intakes of
calories. You will then compensate for this higher intake by reducing
intake on other days of the week to balance out, with the weekly
caloric intake being the same as a consistent intake would have been.
There are several hypothesized reasons someone may want to do this
(most without much real evidence supporting them). The main reason
we may choose to implement high days are for adherence.
Cycling will allow you to enjoy a meal out with family, or a social event
with friends, or just to break up the monotony of dieting as a whole. It
can also in some cases be used to support tough training days (usually
lower body days) during the week while also granting some dietary
freedom. These strategies will mainly be implemented out of personal
preference and are just another way of manipulating variables
throughout the week to allow better diet adherence.
There are a few instances in which we may not suggest high

days/refeeds. With smaller, leaner individuals, who have a low-calorie
intake, it is may not be of benefit to them to reduce calorie intake on
several days to increase intake on one. This strategy will likely just
make it impossible to stick to the low days, as calorie intake has to be
taken so low to make the higher day significantly higher. Furthermore,
performance in the gym can take a hit on or around low days. This
approach will be something that you will have to experiment with on
the performance side. The other individuals I wouldn’t recommend
this approach to would be people who train very frequently, or even
multiple daily training sessions. In this case, glycogen repletion is a
more important matter, as they are going to be having to repeat hard

bouts of effort more often, which can be hampered by lower days of
intake.
It is important to note that when we say we don’t recommend it, it is

usually relative to what would likely be ideal for the training and
recovery perspective. If the individual has greater adherence when
these days are implemented, this should supersede the need for the
‘ideal scenario.’, However, those looking to get the most out of their
physique for paid work or competition may want to consider what is
optimal vs. practical.
In terms of how much you should take from one day to give to
another, I’d recommend around 20% of your daily intake. This is
enough that it feels substantial but is not so much that it is
unsustainable on your low days. Again, I’m giving you this as a blanket
statement, but with the credence to be flexible as necessary. You
aren’t going to notice any difference if you go to 19 or 21%, just be
wary of getting too far away from these ranges. Performance may
suffer noticeably on low days if you go well above 20%, or the
difference between the days that you find the low days tougher for no
reason if you are too far below 20%.
We are often asked, “What if I make a mistake in my calculations and

I’m over or under?” or “What if I give in to a craving and eat a
chocolate bar or two?” For most individuals, put it in the past and
move on and return to the plan.
For some of you, you will feel better by balancing it out a little though.
In this instance, we can introduce a flexible ‘borrowing’ system, as to
which you can, 1-2 times a week, have a flexible 10-20% window at
either side of your calories (above or below) to eat a little more or
forego some food if you like to. Please note: we recommend this
flexible borrowing approach more for individuals who have spent

some period in the past dieting, as they will likely have a better
understanding of when they are and aren’t hungry and why.
Newer dieters may not have attained this skill and may likely overeat
out of boredom vs. actual hunger or the need for recovery. What they
do is simply make it up throughout the week. For example, if
somebody eating 2000 kcals wants to ‘borrow’ 20% of their intake to
eat that cheesecake for dessert, they could have the 400 extra kcals
that day, then take that away from the rest of the week, or four days of
the week. Again, I would recommend trying not to steer too far away
from these recommendations as you will run into some of the same
issues we mentioned with the high and low days.
Dealing with Hunger and

Satiety Issues During
Weight Loss
Eating in a way that allows us to lose weight (and body fat) is a
pretty simple process (but not necessarily easy). Our input needs
to be less than our output (grossly oversimplified, I know) and we
need to train progressively with weights. After some time, we will
lose body fat. But as we all know, it doesn’t usually wind up this
way…the problem lies in cravings/hunger.
What makes dieting seem like an impossible task for some of us,
is the combination of being in an underfed and heavily trained
state (for a consistent period. While most of us don’t struggle to
train hard for 4-8 hours a week, being hungry is something that
we cannot handle, and having to choose the salad over that Big
Mac is just too much to overcome.
Dieting is part physiology, but also a huge part

psychology. Set yourself up to be successful and
you will be astounded at what you can achieve!
We have all been there. We’ve set our macronutrient intake
perfectly, ticked off meal timing and frequency, got our next six
weeks of training mapped out. A couple of days pass, and we feel
fine, but then we start to feel the hunger pangs at 7 pm, and
guess what? We’ve eaten all our intake for the day. We then must
fight the mental battle of making it to the morning without eating
the whole block of cheese, and this is when most of us get scared
and flee. Alternatively, we go out for a family gathering, someone
tells us to “just have a day off”, so we just have a little slice of the
lasagne, and the burgers, and the apple pie.
Dieting is part physiology, but also a huge part psychology. Set

yourself up to be successful and you will be astounded at what
you can achieve! What I’m about to provide in this article will be
strategies backed up by evidence that will help you beat those
cravings and nail the diet psychology once and for all.
I want to confirm that I am not a medical doctor and in no way can

this be classed as health advice. The following strategies should
only be undertaken after a consultation with your MD beforehand.
We cannot take any responsibility for the results.
Your Stomach Is a Volume Counter

One of the ways that hunger is regulated is through
mechanoreceptors that exist in the walls of our stomachs. These
detect how stretched or lax our stomach walls are. What they do
not do is measure calorie intake – they measure volume. This is a
key factor to understand in fighting the feelings of hunger. We
must strategically consume foods that have a high volume yet
low-calorie content. The foods with a high water and fibre content
will allow us to do this. Last I heard, water had no energy content,
so by consuming foods that have a high-water content, we allow
the chewed food AND its water content to take up space and
stretch our stomachs. The best foods that fit this bill you ask?
Enter, the humble vegetable.
Vegetables are incredibly effective at curbing hunger. Most of

them have very low calorie content, have a high-water content,
and aren’t so palatable that you want to eat them to infinity. They
are also generally high in fiber. Fiber slows the rate of gastric
emptying, which means that the food we consume stays in our
stomach longer. Since fibre itself takes up space and keeps food
in the stomach longer, it helps us feel satiated for longer periods
of time. We can take advantage of the satisfying effects of
vegetables by either adding them to all our meals or, as I like to
do, by consuming a large salad before eating my main
meal. Getting the salad in early starts the cascade of messages
from our stomach’s stretch receptors to our brain, letting us know
that there is sufficient food in there, helping us becoming fuller
quicker, and helping combat potential overeating from feeling
like we have consumed an inadequate volume of food.
Liquids are equally as effective as vegetables at helping us feel

fuller, if they are calorie-free. Drinking adequate (or higher than
normal) amounts of liquid through the day is an effective way to
reduce the potential for unwanted feelings of hunger between
meals. Whilst I won’t recommend an objective intake, you can
probably consume half to a full pint of liquid when you are
starting to feel hungry but are far away from a meal. Another
strategy that works similarly to the pre-meal salad is consuming
half to a full pint of a calorie-free liquid before you eat your meal.
This, again, allows those fullness signals to be sent as early as
possible. It is important to note that if you are consuming higher
than normal quantities of fluids, you should probably use salt on
your foods a little more liberally to stave off the risk of
hyponatremia. This happens when electrolyte balance is severely
off in the body through either over-consumption of fluid or lack of
sodium in the diet. This isn’t likely, so this is just a precaution.
This recommendation now becomes even more effective if you

introduce carbonated calorie-free drinks. These are like the gold
standard for hunger control. Not only do they have the effect of
being voluminous and calorie-free, but we’re now adding carbon
dioxide to the mix! Adding a gas means that, along with the
liquid, the Co2 molecules will enter our stomach. When they do
this, they shoot around everywhere, activating even more stretch
receptors and giving the brain the impression of even more
volume in the stomach. My recommendations are to use diet
drinks, seltzers, and flavoured waters as often as needed. Just be
aware that some diet drinks, like Diet Coke, contain caffeine and
probably shouldn’t be consumed too close to bedtime.
This is a key factor to understand in fighting the

feelings of hunger. We must strategically consume
foods that have a high volume yet low-calorie
content.
Another way that you can add more volume to liquids is with the
use of a blender. Whilst I don’t recommend blending food as it
becomes easier and quicker to digest leaving us less full, we
can use a blender to increase the volume of our whey/casein
protein shakes. This high-speed mixing adds a lot air to the liquid
and creates a ‘foam’ provide more volume than a shaken liquid. If
you add ice too, this will make a thicker and more voluminous
mixture without adding a single calorie.
Remember, our stomach recognizes ‘full’ from volume, not

calories. This means that opting for high volume: calorie ratio
foods is an excellent way to keep us fuller and help to combat
some of the cravings we may endure.
The Super Fiber

We have established that fiber is an excellent way to increase the
time it takes our food to digest, keeping us fuller for longer. What
we haven’t mentioned is that there is a type of fiber that is even
more effective at doing this, and it has also been linked to other
benefits that fight hunger. These are called beta glucans. What is
unique with beta glucans is that when they enter the small
intestine, they turn into a viscous gel-like material that continues
to slow digestion, further prolonging the feeling of fullness. This
also has a positive effect on our blood glucose levels, making us
feel energised for a longer period.
Beta glucans stimulate the release of an important hunger-

supressing hormone, cholecystokinin, that helps us feel fuller for
longer. What’s best is that there is a dose response relationship
between the two. So, the more beta glucans you consume, the
more cholecystokinin is released, and the more satiated you
feel! This is an excellent tool to include when you really crave the
most. If you know you have stretches of time when you won’t be
able to eat or when you are going to be very busy, crack out food
sources rich in this fiber. The food sources richest in beta glucans
are oats and barley. Porridge oats are an excellent choice as you
can also add more liquid to the mixture to get more and more
volume. Other sources include certain cereals, oat cakes, pearl
barley, and more (some information can be found through this
link - https://goo.gl/YY93h8.)
The Power of Coffee

Coffee is my one true love. There’s nothing like a rich, aromatic
Americano to start the day, there is simply NOTHING like it.
And when it comes to supressing appetite and providing a mental
boost, there’s nothing like it either. Coffee (more specifically,

caffeine) is known for giving us that instant hit of energy that we
need to hammer through our emails first thing in the morning.
The story with coffee doesn’t stop there. Coffee also has a
positive effect on curbing hunger when it arises, and it’s not
caffeine alone that does this. What caffeine does is help us fight
fatigue by blocking adenosine receptors in the brain. It gives us a
second wind of energy and helps improve cognitive function (the
ability to take in, process and store new ideas), along with having
positive effects on our ability to train hard and burn more
fat. Coffee also offers compounds within it that positively affect
some of the key hormones that regulate stress and appetite, like
leptin, ghrelin, and peptide yy. In doing this, coffee works as a
strong appetite suppressant that can be used to help us to stick to
our diets.
As the appetite suppressing benefits come from coffee, and not

caffeine, a tactical decaf at night or between meals can help stave
off cravings before they arise. Earlier in the day, you may want to
grab something stronger to take advantage of the benefits of
caffeine before tough training sessions and long work days while
dieting down.
Eat Bland Foods

I know, I sound like every other uber-motivated fitness zealot
coach. I promise that I have rational behind this. We have reached
the point now that we know that tasty foods are not the devil, and
when it comes to fat loss, calories in vs. out is the key. What I am
trying to relay now is the effectiveness of avoiding highly
palatable foods to help prevent over-eating or uncontrolled
snacking.
We can define highly palatable foods as the following: foods well-

seasoned with spices and herbs, foods with the right amount of
salt (not too much, not too little), sweet foods that are high in
sugar, foods that have a pleasant texture and mouth feel (often
foods that are high in fat), and very savoury foods (really a
combination of mostly fat and salt content in addition to
mouthfeel and texture, some additives like MSG can enhance this
sensation).
When we consume these highly palatable foods, our taste buds

are stimulated in a way that signals pleasure to the brain. It comes
from the release of dopamine, a rewarding or feel-good hormone.
They create that satisfying, happy feeling you get after you sink
the first bite of ice cream. This feeling we get when eating these
foods is what commonly causes people to become
disinhibited (this is the lack of restraint that follows that tends to
defy logical thinking) and uncontrollably crave more or overfeed
(trigger foods). Repeated exposure to these foods increases the
desire for them over time. This feeling only comes from foods
with highly palatable characteristics, so strategically avoiding
these super tasty foods during the times we want to lose fat is
something that should be considered.
When we consume these highly palatable foods,

our taste buds are stimulated in a way that signals
pleasure to the brain. Repeated exposure to these
foods increases the desire for them over time.
If you think about it, it makes clear sense. How much plain chicken
breast and broccoli could you eat before feeling like you don't
want any more? Probably not that much, even when dieting. How
many tortilla chips or how much peanut butter could you eat
whilst dieting before you get sick of it? An infinite amount?

Potentially. This is where the concept of IIFYM (if it fits your
macros) falls down. In addition to not being a necessarily healthy
option, there is little thought to fiber or micronutrient intake. The
concept fails to take food palatability into account. It tries to
combat the restriction of some conventional diets to allow a more
'balanced' approach, but what it does is create a major roadblock
to long-term adherence. Whilst technically you can get into great
shape eating a Mars bar every day, how long would it take you to
crack and want to eat the whole pantry? Probably not long.
So, putting aside the tasty treats during our fat loss phases can
help by preventing further cravings or not putting ourselves in the
position to uncontrollably overfeed. Whilst some might see this as
daunting, it is important to note that the more you are exposed to
a 'bland'/conventionally healthy food, the more palatable it
becomes. Phases of fat loss are always temporary and not
everlasting. The initial withdrawal is the hardest, and once we get
past it, we are now in a place where we don’t get these cravings
for these foods. The foods that are highly palatable are commonly
higher in calories, meaning we reduce the volume of food we are
eating for the same caloric value (we now know this makes our job
harder).
Chew Your Food

Slowing down the rate at which you eat can be an effective
strategy in helping improve your feeling of fullness from a meal.
This is especially important when in a fat loss phase because it
helps stop us from eating beyond what we need. Eating slowly
has a twofold benefit. Eating more slowly allows the signals sent
by the stretch receptors in our stomach to reach our brains, either
during or close to the end of our meal. This allows a feeling of
fullness that matches up closely with how much we have eaten.

Along with this, a meal that has a longer mental duration allows us
to feel like we have eaten more, as we have been eating for
longer. Research certainly supports this hypothesis in healthy
individuals, so implementing this tool can certainly aid you in your
fat loss phases.
The strategies to implement this straight away include: taking

smaller bites and/or cutting food into small pieces, chewing every
bite of food thoroughly (10-15 chews per bite), putting your
utensils down between each bite, and taking a sip or two of water
every couple of bites. These strategies are very easy to
incorporate but have real, positive effects on hunger.
All Protein Sources Are Not Equal

When the above statement is mentioned, it will commonly refer to
the ‘quality’ of a protein source, but some protein sources allow
us to be more satiated than others. We will discuss the positive
benefits in this vein for consuming whey protein.
There is evidence to support the claim that whey has a positive

effect on appetite suppression and satiation. It contains a
molecule (glycomacropeptide) that increases secretion of the
same hormone that beta glucans effect (cholocystokinin). When
this hormone is secreted the result is an enhanced feeling of
fullness from the food we are eating, along with a reduction in the
cravings that may cause overfeeding. As whey protein is a low-
calorie, high-quality protein source (it typically has the highest
leucine content of any source which is important for growth
signaling) that is conveniently stored and consumed, this makes it
an excellent choice for dieters. A great whey (sorry, couldn’t help
it) to implement this is by starting your day with a whey shake for
an early bolus of protein after a night’s fast. This will give us that
sustained feeling of fullness until breakfast with very little calorie

value. Prolonging feeding in the morning allows us to eat more
calories later in the day and before bed, typically when we need
to curb cravings most. It will potentially allow us to consume more
carbohydrates around our workouts, if we train after work or later
at night, while not feeling hungry all day.
The Importance of
Maintenance and Diet
Breaks
Periodically eating in a way that maintains our body weight is one of
the most valuable tools we can employ for long-term success in weight
loss, the problem for some is that it can be a psychological battle.
When you have made substantial progress, you may become afraid to
eat more than you did when dieting for fear of uncontrolled weight
gain.
This is not the ideal mind-set to enter maintenance/diet breaks with, is

somewhat misguided, yet is very common to see. The goal is not to
gain/lose weight with maintenance. The key is in the name, we are
looking to maintain our current state. The goal of a maintenance phase
is to reduce any mental and physical fatigue that builds up during
extended periods of dieting or gaining weight. That means that we are
looking to do a few things.
1. Eat and enjoy food again. We’ll also start to reduce how hungry
or full we feel and how much we are focusing on food on a
consistent basis
2. Bring more flexibility into our lives (if dieting), allowing for more
meals out, social time, a larger variety of foods in our diet, and to
potentially break from the monotony of a set regimen.
3. Allow us to learn how to live our lives once we get to our goal
weight (if one is looking to just lose a set amount of weight and
maintain without any further goals).
Eating at maintenance will allow us to solidify progress we have made

thus far. In the example of fat loss, when we finish a diet we are
physiologically and psychologically in a primed position to gain
weight. Both in terms of muscle and bodyfat re-gain. There is a theory
that our body fat levels work in set points (settling point theory). This
comes from some simple observations, that no matter your state,
over/underweight, most individuals manage to maintain this state
unconsciously, because our body sets up our psychology and
physiology to maintain it (homeostasis).
So, when we lose a substantial amount of body fat, the body ‘detects’
this as a stressor/danger and wants to get back to where it came from
(in layman’s). So, it will in this example, make us hungrier, less likely to
be active, and preferentially store body fat. We can lower our set point
from where it was originally over time. We do this by maintaining our
new bodycomposition (body fat level) for a long enough period that
the body becomes ‘comfortable’ in this state. We usually recommend
spending half of the time spent doing a long diet, in maintenance.
Meaning that once you have done a longer cut, lasting 3-4 months,
you should spend 6-8 weeks maintaining on average. There will be
circumstances that this may not be necessary, like mini-cuts, but we
won’t be discussing that in this book.
The same happens when we look to gain muscle. If we transition

straight into cutting body fat, after a period in which we have tried to
push muscle mass levels up, the body may preferentially utilize this
newly gained muscle for fuel to replace the deficit in calories that has
been created from the diet. Again, this is not always the case, as in
mini-cuts, but we again recommend spending around half the time
spent in a surplus (depending on the severity of the surplus) at

maintenance. If you are gaining slower, you could do a shorter
maintenance than this, and if you gained quickly, then you probably
should extend this a little, but on average half the time spent gaining
could be spent maintaining.
Maintenance after a fat loss diet can be very effective in allowing us to

split up the periods of time we are dieting and continue to lose body
fat until we are adequately lean for our own purposes, rather than
trying to get to this level all in one go. When we reach our desired
level of leanness, being able to eat at maintenance will obviously also
allow us to maintain this new body composition.
This is, of course, if the level of leanness you have attained is

sustainable. Usually only in the case of physique athletes dieting to
appear on stage do body fat levels become unsustainable to continue
maintaining. In this case it is recommended that bodyfat be increased
intentionally to a sustainable level before a maintanence phase is
started. The process of dieting/fat loss should only ever be a
temporary measure. We should never strive to perpetually diet, as it is
not sustainable, will likely negatively affect our quality of life, and will
not allow us to improve our physique in the long-term. We will also see
our fat loss pursuits become less and less effective as time
accumulates, eventually grinding to a halt. This may really start to
affect our health and quality of life further, along with how well we can
train, which is the opposite of the reason we may be dieting in the first
place.
We have already previously discussed how you would go about

working out your maintenance and how your tracking methods may
look over progressing weeks. Now, we will talk about a few things that
are important to understand when maintaining.
1. You will gain some body weight due to glucose storage (if
carbohydrates are being increased of course), the subsequent
water that is stored with it, and the actual amount of food in your
GI tract. Note that this is not body fat gain, it is just weight gain
on a scale. This new body weight gain could potentially allow
you to regain some losses in lean body mass that may have
occurred, along with fuelling new gains through improved
training performance. These losses in lean body mass are 1. Not
all actually muscle tissue, lean body mass includes stored water
and glucose and 2. Even if you were to lose muscle tissue, the
effects are often overstated with it being marginal amounts and
only in extreme cases of getting to the lowest of body fat levels,
is our muscle mass sacrificed. As long as you utilise a sound
training and nutritional protocol, the risks of losing muscle are
rare, and a return to maintenance post-diet will likely bring them
right back within little time.
2. You want to try and reduce cardiovascular work to a substantially

lower level, so you can start to reduce the monotony of the task,
along with reducing the adaptations that can be made to our
movement and physiology. Your body will become more
efficient at cardio the longer you do it. It does this so that there
will be a reduction in the amount of energy you burn per minute
of cardio. This is great for endurance athletes, but bad for
dieting. Breaking from cardio for a period will act similarly to a
diet break, but for cardio. This will allow us to return to cardio in
the future and have it burn the most number of calories per
minute avoiding the diminishing returns from increased
efficiency.
3. Be careful not to completely abandon all of the voluminous

foods you may have been eating whilst dieting, as bringing in
highly-palatable non-diet friendly foods may spike your hunger
to an unsustainable level if done straight away. Slowly implement

these palatable foods, maybe filling the calories between your
dieting level calories and maintenance calories with some tasty
foods that you enjoy, whilst being mindful of the effects of this on
your hunger levels. We just don’t recommend going crazy, as
hunger will still be a risk factor for losing control of your eating.
4. If you have been pushing training hard alongside your diet

(which I would suggest, as effective training will be one of the
best tools, if not the best tool, to retain lean body mass), then
maintenance could be a time to bring your training down to its
maintenance level too. You may be primed nutritionally to gain
weight/muscle after a long diet because lower body fat levels
and restriction of carbohydrates for an extended period will
increase how sensitive we are to nutrition, but training wise, this
is likely not going to be the case. We probably won’t be in an
ideal situation to push training to a level that would elicit
sustainable muscle gains over long periods of time after a hard
bout of training and dieting. You may be able to get away with a
single cycle/block of pushing training volumes unsustainably
high and going into a slight surplus to take advantage of the
body being so sensitive to nutrients, but I’m not too sure if this
would really be the best approach. I’d only recommend it for
those who have reached their ideal level of leanness. If one is
looking to diet further after maintenance, I would not
recommend going into this surplus, as it will just negate the
progress they have made. Maintenance is recommended for
these individuals.
If you check out our section on habits, we discuss transitioning

between phases of nutrition in terms of fat loss to muscle gain,
etc. Go over that section again for some more on this.
Conclusion and Thanks

We do hope that this text was informative, and it helps to foster a new
mindset, bolster an old one (if positive) and gives you the tools you
need to set up your diet for your own success. Tracking
macronutrients won’t be feasible for everyone, a meal plan won’t work
for some and any other methods in this text may not be right for you.
What I think is a must for long term success, is flexibility in your
approach. The primary variable at play that drives success in body
composition change is adherence. It doesn’t matter which method you
choose, as long as you stick by some basic principles (energy balance
etc.) then the diet that you can do most consistently and for the
longest period of time is going to create the best results, and likely the
best maintenance of those results.
As we haven’t referenced individual sources for each claim made, we

wanted to create a further reading list to allow you continue to further
your education and help solidify some of the information within this
text, as well as give you other perspectives on the same topic.
• The Muscle & Strength Pyramid (Nutrition edition) – Dr. Eric

Helms, Andy Morgan and Andrea Valdes
• The Renaissance Diet – Renaissance Perioidisation
• A guide to flexible dieting – Lyle McDonald
• Position Standpoints – Journal of the International Society of
Sports Nutrition
• The Hungry Brain – Dr. Stephan Guynet
Glossary of Terms
- Adenosine – In the brain, adenosine is an inhibitory
neurotransmitter, meaning it can act as a central nervous system
depressant. In normal conditions, it promotes sleep and suppresses
arousal. When Adenosine molecules accumulate they cause
fatigue, a process also referred to as sleep pressure.
- Adenosine receptors – Where adenosine binds to start its reactions

within the body. Caffeine acts as an antagonist to adenosine
receptors, in that it blocks adenosine entering the receptor and
inhibits its actions.
- Adherence – The process of commitment to a goal or task.
- Amino Acid profile – The amount of each of the amino acids, the 9
essential amino acids that cannot be synthesised outside of
consuming from nutrition, that are included within each source of
protein, a complete protein would contain all 9 essential amino
acids in varying amounts.
- Anabolic/Anabolism – The process/state of building up new tissues.
- Basal metabolic rate – The amount of energy (calories) needed to

maintain your current state if you were to perform no activity at all.
- Bioavailability – The ability for our body to digest and synthesize

something.
- Blood glucose – The amount of glucose currently circulation in a

human’s blood.
- Body composition – The percentages of fat, bone, water and

muscle mass in human bodies, we are only concerned primarily
with the ratio of fat mass to muscle mass.
- Calorie cycling – Cycling the number of calories you eat, with

higher intakes at some points, and lower at others, balancing to the
same total energy balance by the end, usually in the form of days of
higher/lower intake interspersed to create the same overall calorie
balance.
- Calorie density – The number of calories a food has relative to its

weight or volume, with calorie dense foods having a higher calorie
amount per weight, and high volume foods having a lot of volume
or weight of foods relative to lower calories.
- Clean and Dirty foods – A way of subjectively terming foods as

good or bad, with clean foods being held in high regard in terms of
dietary success and dirty foods being negative towards our dieting
pursuits, this is disregarding the nutritional breakdown of the foods.
- Constrained energy theory – This is the way that the body adapts to
stop the linear increase of energy burned with activity, so that a
calorie deficit stops losing you weight eventually, and increased
activity stops in the same way.
- Diet fatigue – The subsequent build-up of fatigue specific to dieting

for a period of time (usually in relation to being in a calorie deficit
for a period of time), commonly typified by high levels of focus on
the foods around us, high agitation, reductions in libido, general
fatigue and unwillingness to be active, lack of motivation to train or
continue dieting, poor relationships with food and any combination
of the above.
- Disinhibited – A lack of restrain, manifested in disregard for social

norms, impulsivity and poor risk assessment.
- Energy Balance – The relationship between the amount of energy

you are burning vs. in taking, burning comes from many sources
including, but not only, activity. Intake comes from the nutrition we
consume through food.
- Enzymes – Enzymes are biological catalysts, that act to accelerate

chemical reactions by reducing the energy needed to start a
‘process’.
- Food composition – The objective nutritional components of a food

aside of their calorie and macronutrients i.e. minerals, vitamins etc.
- Gastric emptying – The amount of time it takes for food to empty

from the stomach and enter the small intestines.
- GI Tract – The gastrointestinal tract, this organ system takes in food,

and digests it to extract and absorb the energy and nutrients within
to send them to various parts of the body, whilst expelling the
remaining waste as faeces.
- Gluconeogenesis – A metabolic pathway that results in the

generation of glucose from non-carbohydrate substrates, including
amino acids, glycerol and lactate.
- Glucose – A simple sugar molecule, commonly found in

carbohydrates.
- Glycogen – The main storage form of glucose within the human

body.
- Homeostasis – The tendency towards a stable equilibrium, within a

range, of an organism and its internal environment.
- Inter-individualism – The differences found between individuals
- Lean body mass – The weight of your body minus all of the fat mass
it has, so this includes your organs, skin, bones, body water and
muscle.
- Leucine – One of the 3 branched chain of amino acids, thought to

be a primary signaller of the mammalian target of rapamycin
(MTOR) pathway that signals for various anabolic processes to start.
- LISS – Low intensity steady state, this refers to the mode of

cardiovascular activity, typified by low intensities and long
durations, beneficial for its low levels of accumulated fatigue but
burning less calories for the same time period.
- Mechanoreceptors/Stretch receptors – A sensory receptor found

within the body that responds to mechanical pressure or distortion
(stretch of tissues).
- Mini Cuts – A period of cutting body fat that is shorter in length, but
more aggressive, thought to be of benefit due to the lower
accumulation of dietary fatigue, because of the short durations
spent dieting.
- NEAT (Non-exercise activity thermogenesis) – All the energy

expended that is not as a result of sleeping, eating or sport like
exercise.
- Nutrient partitioning – How nutrients are used within the body, as

represented by p-ratio.
- P-Ratio – Is the amount of protein that is gained or lost during over

feeding, a low p-ratio when dieting would mean you used very little
protein as energy and a lot of fat.
- Palatable – A food or drink that is pleasant to taste, and commonly

easily over consumed.
- Physique Sport – Sports in which the visual look of the body is the
variable that will determine success or failure, or losing or winning,
examples like bodybuilding, bikini, figure etc.
- Protein sparing effect – The process in which the body derives

energy from sources other than protein, including body fat,
carbohydrates and dietary fats.
- Protein synthesis/breakdown – As it relates to skeletal muscle,

protein synthesis is the process in which RNA (ribonucleic acid)
moves into a cell cytoplasm and causes a proliferation of amino
acids into the cell to create new proteins. Protein breakdown is the
use of protein, within skeletal muscles, as energy.
- Refeeds – A day in which calories are brought up to at least

maintenance, the amount to maintain your current state, primarily
by carbohydrates.
- Rigid dieting – Dieting in a way that has many constraints to it, in

terms of when, what, how and where we eat or foods, with little
scope to adjustment to such approach.
- Satiety Index and Fullness Factor – A rating scale of foods based on

how satisfied, in terms of hunger, they make us feel, with some
foods being more filling relative to their calorie amount, and other
foods the opposite.
- Satiation/satiety – As it relates to nutrition, being full to the point of

satisfaction or capacity, with higher levels of satiety being linked
with dietary adherence.
- Settling point theory – A theory that the body uses various

metabolic feedback loops to maintain our bodyweight and body fat
within a certain range, this is determined potentially by genes, as
well as historic actions in terms of previous body fat and weight
levels.
- Trigger foods – A specific food/s that sets off a course of overeating

where control is lost, commonly calorie dense and highly palatable.
- Whey Protein – A dairy based protein, when dairy is broken down

into its protein parts, you are left with Casein and Whey, Whey is a
faster digesting protein source that has a high bioavailability and
excellent amino acid profile.

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Myonomics The Flexible Dieting Manual 1

ABOUT FLEXIBLE DIETING 6

WHAT IS FLEXIBLE DIETING? 6

HABITS FOR SUCCESS 18

STEPS TO IMPLEMENT FLEXIBLE DIETING 39

BASIC TRACKING SKILLS 39

DOING THE MATH… 50

WORKING OUT YOUR MAINTENANCE CALORIES/MACRONUTRIENT INTAKE 50

ADJUSTING OUR INTAKE TO OUR GOALS 68

RATES OF WEIGHT LOSS/GAIN 68

DEALING WITH HUNGER AND SATIETY ISSUES DURING WEIGHT LOSS 86

YOUR STOMACH IS A VOLUME COUNTER 87

THE IMPORTANCE OF MAINTENANCE AND DIET BREAKS 96

CONCLUSION AND THANKS 103

GLOSSARY OF TERMS 104

Secondly, I’d like to thank my partner, Holly, for believing in me when I

Thirdly, I’d like to thank these three individuals in particular, who

• Chad Dolan – The Strength Guys

• Alan Flanagan – The Nutritional Advocate

• Dr. Mike Israetel – Renaissance Periodisation

What has been missing is an approach that is of equal parts effective,

In comes Flexible Dieting.

About Flexible Dieting

Flexible dieting is described in many different ways, by many different

I think that the description of flexible dieting alone helps us recognize

Many individuals may benefit from a flexible dieting approach,

Flexible dieting doesn’t disregard food composition and/or quality

Flexible dieting provides you with the map to navigating this

What Flexible Dieting Isn’t?

The text here forward is a more idealised way of applying flexible

Why Choose Flexible Dieting?

Take away the psychological battle of restricting everything.

If you can make it past the transition and begin to

objectively measured and adjusted over time to ensure consistent

Below is a diagram displaying variables that affect success in a

It really is flexible. Because flexible dieting is based on achieving a

It really is flexible. Because flexible dieting is based on

What are Macronutrients?

All the calories in foods are composed of macronutrients. The

Carbohydrates mainly provide us with an easily usable form of energy

It’s important to understand that all calories will provide us with

The individual macronutrients and overall calorie goal are the

As a rule of thumb, traditionally ‘healthy’ foods probably have more

also help us create a more micronutrient and fiber-rich diet, reducing

So, is food quality not important at all? It really is, but

Habits for Success

What I mean, is that adherence is king. The ‘optimal’ diet is useless if

Note: Hunger should likely be expected at some point on a diet, as

Manage your cravings. As previously described, a craving is a

To differentiate between hunger and cravings, we will

A practical strategy to use could be a high/low day calorie structure.

Food environment is the availability of foods around us at any one

We want to create barriers to food, meaning that we have to put in

Avoiding places that tempt you to eat in the absence of hunger is

When I say boredom, I mean lack of external stimulation from work,

When it comes to planning meals when you’re least busy, consider

prevent cravings that arise out of boredom. If it is not possible to get a

It’s always hard to address the subject of eating out on a diet,