All Things Diet and Meal Planning

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Hello. Hello. Welcome to another episode of the podcast. In this episode, I want to talk a bit about dieting. This one, it is, this isn’t necessarily coming from the Q and A that I’m running or the moderator, Google moderator, anything like that. But of course, I get a lot of questions related to diet.[00:03:00] 

And there’s just a lot of bad information out there. So specifically I want to talk about a couple popular diets like paleo and gluten free is pretty popular right now. Low carb in general is pretty popular and some of the pros and cons and then also talk a bit about flexible dieting, which is what I recommend everybody.

do unless you have a good reason, like a real food allergy or some sort of problem, some reason why you can’t, but then again, flexible light doesn’t mean you can’t do flexible dieting. It just means your diet’s not going to be as flexible as other people’s. And and then how to set up your meal plans properly.

So yeah. If you already know how to diet properly, if you already know about energy balance and macronutrient balance, and you know that it’s not the foods that you eat that matter so much, it’s how much we know that, then you’re still going to enjoy the meal planning part of it because there are right and wrong ways to set up your meal plans.

Even if you know that you can eat whatever foods you want in terms of how you go about it. you can make it easier or harder to reach your goals. So first let’s talk a bit about [00:04:00] diets. Let’s just take paleo first because it’s very popular. Probably, rides on the coattails of CrossFit.

So you have a lot of interest in it. People, a lot of people doing it and a lot of books being sold about it and it’s just out there. And the ironic thing about the paleo diet is that it’s not, inherently a bad diet. It’s not necessarily an unhealthy diet. I think the saturated fat intake is a bit high and I know that there’s, you have two conflicting schools of thought right now about saturated fat.

One is saying that the old research that, the research that was done decades ago that was used to justify the current recommendations of no more than 10 percent of your daily calories coming from saturated fat, because of heart health and so forth. There are people, there are not just people, but there are scientists, experts that, basically point out the flaws in that research and show more recent research or reference more recent research. In some cases are the people doing the more recent research showing that it might not be as big of a problem as we once [00:05:00] thought. But there is a a another school thought of, people that are equally qualified to be talking about it.

Other researchers, other scientists that are saying hold on, before we just say that, Yes. Basically acknowledging that there were flaws in, the research that these original recommendations were based on, but saying that just because that research has some flaws, doesn’t necessarily mean that we can just eat all the saturated fat that we want.

And it’s going to cause no problems. In, in looking at everything myself and just based on the information that I have and the knowledge that I have, I tend to side more with the group saying yes, saturated fat may not be as big of an issue as you once thought, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that we should be getting 30 percent of our data calories from saturated fat because that still might cause issues mainly related to heart health.

I think it’s better to play it safe in that regard. Like personally, I don’t get more than 10 or 15 percent of my daily calories from saturated fat. And I also make sure to get some unsaturated fat in my diet as well. And yeah, I think that’s the [00:06:00] safe play and it’s the smart play. And is it really necessary to eat huge amounts of saturated fat every day?

I don’t think so. Unless you just, love bacon and love butter and love other meats and love coconut oil and stuff like that. Every time, on the other hand, if you are going to have a couple pieces of bacon or you’re gonna put some butter on this, or you’re gonna use some some coconut oil when you cook, whatever, you can know that you can have a decent amount of it.

Like for instance, if you’re eating. 2, 500 calories a day. The standard recommendation right now would be that no more than 250 of those calories should come saturated fat, 250 calories of saturated fat. That’s a fair amount. That’s a couple of, two and a half tablespoons. So you know, that means you could do your, if you do the coffee, the bulletproof coffee thing, which I should write an article on cause it’s stupid and silly.

Anyways, you can, I think, would you want more than two to three tablespoons of saturated fat a day? Maybe. So back to paleo. And that’s maybe my one critique with the, what’s being [00:07:00] prescribed in terms of foods. But what is silly about paleo is what is being proscribed, what is being, forbidden and like they’re just the science is, that’s where it just veers off and falls off a cliff.

And in that, what is the paleo diet, the standard no grains I think it depends how, like how hardcore you want to be with it. There’s the, I think, what is it? Mark systems thing, primal, which is a flex, more flexible type of paleo where you can eat like sweet potatoes and and then he’s come around and basically said yeah, if you want to have some grains here and there, it’s not really a problem because when you start looking at the research which I’m actually a Lincoln article down below on paleo.

Or if you’re listening to this, you can just go to muscle for life. com and search for paleo. If you really want to dive into it and cause I don’t want to. Spend 20 minutes talking, breaking down from a scientific, angle paleo diet. I just want to talk about it broadly, but basically the bottom line is the restrictions of no grains of if you’re going real hardcore, I think [00:08:00] it’s no sweet potatoes, right?

Definitely no white potato. Yeah. I think legumes are also off the list. And so basically a lot of the foods that you’re told you can’t eat, there’s no good reason why you shouldn’t be eating them because they are nutritious foods. Now if your body just doesn’t do well with them, then that’s another thing.

And you would know that though, like a very simple way to determine what foods you should and shouldn’t eat are in one camp, you have just junk shit food that obviously you shouldn’t be eating much of like just worthless calories, candy, pop tarts packaged baked goods, that you. Packaged donuts and fucking chips and shit.

That’s obvious. If you’re getting a lot of your daily calories from foods like that, you are going to have health problems one day and that’s not surprising. But so that, those are the foods that you really should just be generally avoiding foods with trans fat, breakfast crap, breakfast cereals, and just stuff like that.

Microwavable dinners, whatever, you get the idea. And then you have A bunch of foods, though, that you can be, you can choose from that are nutritious of course, fruits and [00:09:00] vegetables and whole grains and high quality proteins, including red meat. And legumes and potatoes, sweet potatoes, yams, just a long list that of foods that are provide a lot of nutritional value and are also good for, fitting your macronutrient needs.

And you should be able to eat from pick from that. List, so long as you know what you’re doing with your intake it with your numbers. But if certain foods cause gastro GI issues, if you, when every time you eat something, you just don’t feel good or your stomach gets bloated or you get gassy or whatever, stop eating it.

Like it’s really that simple. And that’s really the only way, when we talk about food intolerance testing, like all cat testing the problem with that is you’re going to get a lot of false positives. And this has been shown in research and my mom is super into it. Goes and sees some doctor guy that takes all of her time, has her do interesting things that don’t really work.

And she’ll get this long list of foods, all these things that she’s not [00:10:00] supposed to eat. And there’s just no way that your body is intolerant to like 42 different foods, bullshit, especially a lot of the foods like that. She would eat those foods and feel nothing. There’d be no issues.

Certain foods on the list actually would cause issues like cert, like if she eats too much wheat, then her stomach does get bloated and she gets gassy and stuff. So she, she knew that before she ever got tested or before gluten free or wheat free or any of that ever became popular. She just knew that, certain types of wheat products or if she ate too much wheat, it would upset her stomach.

And then there’s other foods on the, on her, don’t eat list that, that are valid, but there are a lot of foods that, She’s I’ve eaten that food for years and never had any issues, but then she just follows it just because, but anyway, so the point is the only real way to determine food intolerances is to eliminate foods and then challenge with if you were having a lot of GI issues, if you were having like IBS type symptoms and stuff, You’d want to be cutting out a lot of different types of foods and pairing down [00:11:00] to very you could say like gut neutral type foods that are not associated with any sort of gastrointestinal distress.

And then you would, and you get that as a baseline where your symptoms are down you’re feeling good. And then you’d add a food in, see and see, how does it make you feel? And if you’re fine, add another food in, add another food up that, that food makes you feel bad. Kick it out.

And that, it takes time and it takes obviously documenting what’s going on. But if there are people that need to do that, just because, their bodies just they can’t handle anything. So anyways, my point is that there, it’s a very personalized approach. So when you have diets that just broadly restrict food of any kind, really even complete shit food candy and all that stuff.

If you like to eat that stuff and you want to have it, occasionally have it, it’s not like having, if 80 percent of your I wouldn’t I wouldn’t say, I wouldn’t use the 80 20 for just crap. But [00:12:00] if you look at it this way, let’s say, during the week every day the majority of your calories come from nutritious foods you’re exercising you’re maybe even supplementing with some things that improve your health.

And so you’re doing all that stuff right and then one day a week you want to have let’s say a thousand calories of something that’s shit. Is that really going to harm you? Probably not. I mean you’d have to really try hard. It’d have to be like a thousand calories of pure trans fat. to really mess you up.

That it’s just, so when diets broadly restrict foods that where it doesn’t quite make sense, like why should you not have, why should you not be able to eat a white potato? It’s one of the most nutritious, if not the most nutrient dense food actually out there. It’s very it’s very satiating.

It’s very filling. It’s good when you’re dieting for that reason. Although it is calorie dense, but There’s just no good reason to not be able to eat a potato or white rice. There’s no good reason. Like sure. Brown rice has a bit more nutrition and I prefer the taste of brown rice generally, but if you want to have some white rice, why should you not be able to eat white rice?

And there [00:13:00] are different arguments. They all will, the anti nutrients and stuff. Yeah. That’s not, that’s just taking one little thing and playing it up. Like it’s this big menacing problem when it’s not. And when there’s research that shows that it’s not, it’s just not a problem.

Especially if you cook like beans and stuff, you cook them correctly. And your body can digest and absorb them just fine. So it’s like they’re, it’s like they’re in the scientific evolution of things. You have theories. It’s based on isolated types of research and then those theories get tested later in a, in a real life with a live person type setting.

And sometimes they don’t play out where theoretically maybe these anti nutrients should be a problem. But then when they actually go and test it with people, they find out that the bodies have ways to work around these problems or, with how. Food is cooked. It gets rid of the problem.

And that theory, but then what some people will do is they’ll still, they’ll just ignore that the actual clinical trial type research. And they’ll just go to the theoretical research or the [00:14:00] epidemiological research and just focus in on that and use that to sell you on something.

So with paleo there if you really like eating that way, sure, do it, but don’t think that, you’re going to be harming your health by eating some whole grains or eating some potato or eating some legumes or eating really any of the foods that paleo says you, the paleo doctrine says that you can’t eat because it, that, that’s where that diet just goes off the deep end.

Another thing about it is in terms of weight gain or weight loss, a lot of people, the reason why they are, adopting a certain diet is to change the body, their body composition. There’s health of course, and certain people they’re jumping into diets for health reasons.

But a lot of people are looking for diet advice or diets to follow because they wanna build muscle or loose fat. And that’s where diets like the paleo diet and gluten free and low carb in general and stuff is they just, they can’t reliably live up to their [00:15:00] promises. And the reason why is when you boil it all down, as you probably know, if you’re, follow my work at all, or are just well informed if you’re going to lose weight, it’s going to be because you’re eating less energy than you’re burning.

If you’re going to gain weight, it’s because that you’re eating more energy than you’re burning. And that’s really the bottom line is you have energy balance. Of course, it does matter in terms of macronutrients and where do those calories come from? Are you eating, a low protein diet, a high protein diet, where your carbs at, where your fats at, those things do matter.

But first and foremost is energy balance. Now when you have a diet that restricts a lot of calorie dense foods that people like to eat, like low carb dieting, for instance You, there’s a good chance that a person is going to place themselves in a calorie deficit. They don’t know what’s going on. They don’t realize that it’s a calorie deficit that causes the weight loss.

They think it’s the fact that they cut out, that, that bowl of pasta they were eating at lunch every day or something like that. They think that, oh so the carbs are keeping me fat. No, the calories were keeping them fat and by cutting out the [00:16:00] calories. Wow. They’re losing weight. Big surprise.

So this is just a a mistake of causation, what’s actually causing the weight loss. It’s not the elimination of the specific food. It’s the reduction of the calories. And that’s why a lot of mainstream diets they stay away from numbers. They don’t want, cause I know that people don’t really like to plan or track numbers, calories, macronutrients.

They don’t want to think like that. They just want to have a, I can eat these foods and I can’t eat those foods. These are the meals I can have for losing weight. These are the meals I can have for gain muscle and they want to, they want it, real, real simple like that. And that’s fine. But the problem, there’s just a lot of ways that can go wrong because for instance, if you let’s say you start doing a paleo diet and you cut out some of the more calorie dense types of carbs that you’ve been eating and you don’t replace them with very calorie dense fats, which people do, and we’ll talk about in a second.

And you place yourself in a calorie deficit, good. You’re going to lose weight, you’re going to lose fat. And if you are doing some weightlifting, you’re in, you’re eating enough protein. There’s a good chance that you’re not going to lose muscle and that’s [00:17:00] good. But that calorie deficit may be too large.

Who knows? You don’t know how big it is. Cause you know, if you don’t know how much energy you’re burning, you don’t know how much energy you’re eating. You might be in a 1000 calorie deficit, every day. And that’s not good for the body that causes a bit more of the metabolic adaptation. If you’ve heard of that, where your metabolism slows down, your body just adjusts to, to reduce its energy expenditure.

The less food you feed it, which just makes sense. Even just. From a biological standpoint, it it’s trying to balance out input with output. But there are hormonal changes that can occur that are non optimum and a large calorie deficit, especially if you’re exercising a lot, especially if you’re doing a lot of cardio is one of the things that causes It can be pretty dramatic in terms of muscle loss.

So you really want to be in a moderate, moderately aggressive calorie deficit of about 20 to 25%. Meaning if you want to lose fat, you should be eating about 75 to 80 percent of the calories you’re burning every day. If you can stay in that [00:18:00] range and you can eat enough protein and not do too much exercise and make sure you’re doing some resistance training especially some heavy resistance training.

Then you’re going to be golden. You’re going to lose fat. You’re going to preserve muscle. It’s very easy. It’s not it’s, it can even just be enjoyable. Dieting does not have to be grueling at all. But so that’s on the, that’s on the, okay, too big of a deficit, but what if following the rules of the diet?

Paleo, whatever places you in a very small deficit. So then weight loss is very slow because you’re only in a five or 10 percent deficit. And the downside there is it can just be frustrating. So you’re only losing a half pound a week in the beginning, let’s say you’re quite overweight and you should be able to comfortably lose one to two pounds of fat a week and you’re losing a quarter to a half pound a week.

Okay. That means you just have to endure it longer. And there’s also the longer you’re dieting the more things can go wrong, the more likely you are to get frustrated and give up or life gets in the way. And so like when I’m dieting for to lose fat, my goal is to basically [00:19:00] Lose the fat as quickly as possible.

I want to use like I said a moderately aggressive calorie deficit I want to use any supplements I can that are natural safe and that work to speed up fat loss I want to do as much exercise as I can that without causing problems Because the more exercise you do the more calories you’re gonna burn which helps you lose fat faster And so my goal is to lose that fat as quickly as possible so I can come out of the calorie deficit and enjoy my training again and, just not have to be in a deficit because after you’re, after being in a deficit for and it actually varies from person to person.

I start to feel it about. six weeks in is when I start to feel it. When my energy levels are a bit lower, my workouts are, I’ll lose a couple of reps and they’re just tougher and everything feels heavy. And it’s nice to get that over with basically. So that’s when you don’t, without really knowing your numbers, you see there’s just a lot up in the air.

And especially, who knows, you may be eating enough protein. You may not be eating enough protein. You may be eating a ton of saturated fat. This is more on the paleo. Side of things [00:20:00] you may, you’re not going to be eating too little fat if you’re on that diet. But I think it’s much smarter to know your numbers and go by numbers so you can just know for sure you’re guaranteed results in that way, essentially, as opposed to following a long list of rules of what you can eat at this time, don’t eat at that time, blah, blah, blah.

And then just hoping that Basically that you’re in a calorie deficit in the end. All that shit is just to put you in a calorie deficit and try to make it as painless as possible. And a problem that also, you know, especially low carbon paleo and just people I know personally and people I’ve heard from they run into where they think that they don’t, because they don’t have a concept of energy balance and how it really works.

So they cut out some calories from the carbs and stuff they’re eating. Then they add very calorie dense, fatty type, whether, I don’t care if they’re healthy fats, avocado and blah, blah, and butter is, obviously to to a point going back to that saturated fat point, all of oil, et cetera, et cetera, nuts and stuff.

Yes. Yes. Those are all great foods and you should be [00:21:00] able to eat them, but if you’re not, if you don’t understand the numbers of it all, then what happens is people will cut out the carbs and, which reduces their calorie intake. And then they add in way too many fats and that brings her calorie intake back up to where it was before.

Or in many cases. They start eating more calories than they were before they went on a diet and they gain weight. I, I’ve heard of, I’ve heard from quite a few women in particular that went to the paleo diet to try to lose weight and ended up gaining weight and didn’t understand why.

And when I dug into their diet a little bit, so they were eating all kinds of like paleo approved, mainly desserties, dessert type stuff, or like maybe not dessert, like breads and muffins and that’s kind of dessert and pasta and stuff that, you Normally, like they don’t, because they didn’t have a concept of calories, they thought it’s a, it’s on my diet so I can eat it.

And one of the problems with very fatty foods that just have a lot of fat in them is you’re going to get a lot of calories and not necessarily a lot of [00:22:00] satiety. You’re not necessarily going to get very full from a very fatty meal, whereas a high carb meal is more likely to fill you up. One of the reasons for this is simply volume.

If you eat a big bowl of pasta, for instance, that there’s a lot going into your stomach, but if you’re eating a paleo muffin that has a lot of butter in it, the calories, again, let’s say two muffins, right? To make the calories a little bit more comparable. But the point is, two smaller muffins, it just is not going to fill you up nearly as much as a larger amount of pasta or pasta is pretty calorie dense.

So maybe it’s not the best example, but you could take rice or you could take quinoa or things like that, that are fairly carb dense, fairly calorie dense, but they fill you up or going back to the potato, take potato, match that calorie for calorie to something like a fatty type of paleo approved food.

And the potato is going to keep you fuller quite a bit longer. So that’s the bigger picture on just diets in general, whether it be paleo, whether it be low carb or gluten free is obviously super popular right now. And [00:23:00] there’s I’ll link an article down below. I don’t want to go into another like 15 minute diatribe on gluten free, but.

There’s no reason, basically no reason, very unlikely, it’s very unlikely that you have a reason to follow a gluten free diet. Basically it’s for people with celiac disease is the long story short. And again, and I talked about this in the article, so you can go read it if personally like to really play it safe.

It’s probably best to not eat a ton of gluten every day that there’s some research and there’s some good arguments that can be made for that. But should you fear gluten and should you avoid gluten containing foods altogether? No, there’s no good reason to do that. Again, unless you have celiac disease then you have to, or you’re going to end up dying one day.

Essentially. Celiac can be that bad if you don’t, if you don’t, diagnose it and you keep on beating the shit out of your small intestines until they can’t absorb nutrients anymore, essentially. And you can get some serious diseases. There’s a lot of comorbidity when you’re looking at at celiac, meaning that celiac, if it’s untreated and [00:24:00] if there’s enough time that is, that has gone on and enough damage that has been done to the small intestines other diseases can now enter the picture of serious diseases fatal diseases.

Cool. Again, going people though, a lot of people turn to gluten free, not because they’re afraid of what might happen to their small intestines, but because they’re trying to lose weight and gluten free for losing weight. Again, ironically, a lot of gluten free foods have more calories in their gluten containing counterparts and are less nutritious.

And these are more like prepackaged type gluten free foods. My diet incidentally is fairly gluten free just because I, the foods I eat is no, these days, I guess that’s not true because I have a lot of oatmeal. That’s what I really like. I’m doing these baked oatmeal dishes. I’m such a robot.

I’ll just eat I’ll find something I like that sits well with my body and tastes good and I’ll just eat it for months on end and it tastes delicious to me every time. So it’s it’s a gift. I’m glad it makes it simple. I don’t have to think about what I’m going to be eating. So I just eat the same foods every day.

I’m not even, I’m not even cutting. And I could be eating more, a larger variety of [00:25:00] foods, but honestly I don’t even want to think about it. Like I don’t want to think about the clothes I wear every day. I don’t want to think about the food that I’m going to be eating cause I have too many other things to think about, too many other decisions to make.

So I just go on robo mode, but I enjoy it. Before though, before I was doing the like I’m getting a lot of carbs from oatmeal right now. Cause I’m doing all these like baked oatmeal dishes at nice at night. They’re super good. Where if you want to try it, try, I do about a cup and a half or a cup to three quarters of a cup of oatmeal.

I cut up various types of fruit like bananas or peaches. Plums are really good. Strawberries bake really well. Even green grapes. I really, I love green grapes. So yeah. They’re, they don’t bake the best, but they taste good. Whatever fruits you like raspberries and stuff. And so I’ll do about like maybe 50 75 carbs of fruit.

And then, so you have a cup to and a half, a cup and a half to a cup and three quarters of oatmeal. I like to mix in instant oatmeal and in the heavier oatmeal just for mouth feel. Some applesauce to give it a a. And in terms of applesauce, how much is it? Probably about a quarter. Quarter to.[00:26:00] 

To about a half a cup of applesauce, which gives it a, it just improves mouthfeel. It doesn’t change the taste so much that I can tell, but it gives it a chewier, better mouthfeel. And I put about, I like cinnamon, so I put a fair amount of, I put about a teaspoon, two teaspoons. I, at this point, I’m just but it’s probably about two teaspoons of cinnamon, some nutmeg, some cacao powder.

I think it’s how you pronounce it or is it cocoa powder, which is cacao and cocoa. I don’t know. It’s the chocolatey powder that has no, it’s, there’s nothing in it. It’s just powder. It’s but I like dark chocolate. So it’s that bitter type of chocolate flavor and some vanilla extract, some almond extract, some maple extract.

And I’ve tried also some banana extract. You have to go, you have to go easy on that stuff though. I found out the hard way you put too much of that and it tastes weird. And what else? I’m forgetting something. Oh, some Stevia. About a teaspoon for sweetness and usually about a tablespoon to two tablespoons of maple syrup.

So for sweetness. So it’s a lot of carbs and my body [00:27:00] does well with carbs. I don’t know. I’ll eat it all and I’ll just be like, all right, cool. And just go on with working basically. So my diet right now actually has a, has I’m not using gluten free oats, but that was such a random tangent, but my point was like before I was doing the email the oatmeal and again, I’m not even actually sure how much gluten is in oatmeal compared to something like bread, but, or pasta.

But on a day to day basis, I, my gluten the amount of gluten that I would eat is just not very high. Just because the foods that I’m eating are not, doesn’t require it. Like it doesn’t require bread or doesn’t require pasta. I’ll do pasta. I usually do pasta once a week on the weekend. I’ll make some sort of pasta and make a massive bowl of like 10 to 15, not 12 ounces of pasta and just go hard and enjoy it.

Save, a good chunk of my daily calories and carbs for that meal. But I’ll notice sometimes when I do that, that’s a lot of pasta, so it’s not surprising that sometimes my stomach gets a little bit like, I’ll just feel a little bit. It feels a little bit off. I don’t know. That’s probably just because I’m eating so much pasta.

That’s ridiculous. But. [00:28:00] My point is if you are eating the right foods if the majority of your calories are coming from the right foods, your diet is probably going to be relatively low in gluten. Because you’re not just going to getting all your carbs from gluten containing foods, but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to eat some bread if you like bread or eat some I’m not even what are the common, obviously there’s pasta, the oatmeal has some gluten.

I guess there are trace amounts of gluten, a lot of different things. And you shouldn’t have to, you just don’t have to worry about it. Unless you notice it upsets your stomach. If my stomach got upset from eating all that pasta, I wouldn’t do it. It doesn’t get upset. I just can feel sometimes it’d be a little bit constipated the next day or sometimes it’s just, I don’t, I wouldn’t do that every day.

I wouldn’t eat a ton of pasta every day cause that would eventually upset my stomach. I think it’s when I, if I did it, like sometimes I would do it two days in a row and then I’ll feel a little bit off. So I only do it, once a week and it doesn’t bother me. So that’s all the dieting stuff.

Let’s now transition over to flexible dieting, which is what I’m a big proponent of. I’ll link an article down below if [00:29:00] you wanna learn a bit more about flexible dieting. And for those listening, you can just go on you can go on. I wrote about it just recently actually on, on my blog over at Legion, which is legion athletics.com.

L-E-G-I-O-N athletics.com. If you go to blog we don’t have a search function yet, which is stupid. But we had to fire our web dev team because they’re terrible and we’re bringing a new company on. And so it’s on the list. We’re going to have a search function on the blog, but I think it’s on like page two right now.

If you go and find there’s a, there’s an article on flexible dining. And what was, there was an article I mentioned just Oh, on gluten free. Yeah. There’s also the gluten free article over at Legion on the blog as well. You’ll find that I think it’s on page two, who knows about the time you get to hear this, the search function may be fixed, but flexible dining is basically, you’re just you have certain macronutrient needs.

So protein, carbohydrates, fat, and the foods that you eat to get there. are of your choosing. So get the majority of your calories from nutritious foods. Don’t use it as an excuse to just eat junk all day or you will have problems. It will catch up with you. [00:30:00] So that means, food that you’re preparing yourself, several, a few servings of fruit and vegetables day, whole grains, blah, blah, blah.

It’s all you’ve heard this before and if not, you can just check out the article. So let’s talk about meal planning though. I’m a big. Proponent of meal planning. If you, while there are meal planning is great for, especially great for fat loss because it guarantees results. If you’re going, if you’re trying to lose fat, I highly recommend you just make yourself a meal plan and stick to it.

Eat the same foods every day until you get sick of something and then swap that food out for something else. Eat that every day. It is the easiest way to guarantee results. If that sounds like hell to you okay, then I don’t know. I guess you can try to wing it, which is what I was talking about before where.

Okay. You’re just going to try to cut out certain foods and you don’t know where your intake is and you don’t know if you’re in a big deficit or a little deficit and you’re just going to let the mirror and let the scale and if you’re taking any sort of measurements to guide you and tell you if you’re doing it right or wrong, if that sounds okay to you do that.

But that sounds stupid to me. I would rather just. [00:31:00] Do something that I know is going to work and get it over with and move on with my life. So that’s where meal planning comes in and what meal planning is, of course, is you plan out your meals. So you go, okay, at this time I’m going to be eating these foods.

Go over to calorieking. com, work out the numbers. First you start with your numbers. So what you’re, if you want to lose fat you’re determining how much energy you’re burning every day. You’re eating, let’s say you’re going to eat 75 percent of that. So there’s your calorie number. You’re going to break that down into protein, carbs, and fat.

So protein, if you’re dieting to lose fat, I recommend a bit higher intake, about one gram per pound is fine. Or if you’re leaner, if you’re a guy at about 10, 11, 12%, you want to get really lean, I’d bump that up to 1. 2 grams per pound. If you’re a girl at 20 ish percent, you want to get really lean, bump it up to 1.

2 and your fats don’t need to be higher than 0. 2 or 0. 25 grams per pound. And the rest of your calories can come from carbohydrate. So there are your numbers. You take those numbers and you now you go, okay. So for me, for instance, if I were to cut right [00:32:00] now, I would start at probably about I’m about 190 pounds.

So I probably started like 210 protein, maybe 50 fat just to keep it real simple. And and then I would just go, I would go make a meal plan out of that. And so I’d take those numbers and go, okay, so the first thing you have to look at is your meal frequency, how frequently do you like to eat and that kind of determines like that’s determined by how large do you like your meals to be?

I like to eat every few hours because that’s just what I enjoy. Like I work out early in the morning. I like to come here, have a shake. I feel like my post workout meal is just a shake. It’s also my breakfast. And then I like to eat about, 12 o’clock have a salad with some chicken.

That’s what I’ve been eating these days and it’s good and some vegetables in there and stuff. And then I like to have some protein again in the afternoon, about 3 p. m. And then I like to eat dinner about six or six 30. My dinner’s a bit bigger. And then I liked, I’m doing this oatmeal thing at like maybe nine 30 or 10 or so.

That’s just the way that I like to eat. A lot of other people, they, that works for me. Also, I just, I don’t really get hungry. So [00:33:00] I don’t have to deal with that for whatever reason. Like I can feel that I need food or that my energy is a bit lower, but I don’t get hunger issues. I just don’t.

So I, I just eat on whatever, whatever fits my work schedule best. And that’s basically, I don’t want to be spending time prepping food, cooking food in the day, going out to dinner. Lunches and stuff. I just want to work. So I’ll spend a little bit more time eating at night, even though I’m working at night, but Hey, got to take some time to eat.

So that’s for me. But if you like to do a bigger breakfast, you might structure it totally differently. You might come and eat a big breakfast and then eat a smaller lunch and then go from lunch to dinner where maybe you have a big dinner again, maybe have a smaller dinner and then you don’t like eating after dinner.

Totally fine. How, where you time your meals means nothing. The only, like exception, I’d say, or the only caveat is that it’s probably a good idea. You look at the bulk of the research available to have some protein before and after you train, or if you’re training fasted, have some protein after you train and some carbs as well, if you’re trying to maximize muscle.

If you’re trying to build [00:34:00] muscle and strength, you want to have some carbs after you train as well. And in general, you want to, you want your carb intake to be as high as you can go essentially without eating too little fats that, impairs your health. And, or basically, so you have to have your protein set at about say a gram per pound.

If your fat set it, maybe if you were Trying to gain muscle and strength, you go a little bit higher, maybe 0.3 grams per pound, and then the rest of your calories from carbohydrates. That’s the best setup for gaining muscle and strength because it’s gonna give you your best workouts, you’re gonna be strong in the gym.

Also higher insulin levels throughout the day is means that there’s less protein breakdown that’s occurring. And I’ve spoken about these things in different, different podcasts, written about it quite a bit of research on this. Anyway, the point is. So you have your pre and post workout meals or no pre workout meal and a post workout meal.

Otherwise, it’s really up to you. Your body can absorb large amounts of protein in every meal. To be safe if you are a guy, 150 pounds or higher or heavier. You can eat upwards of 70, 80, [00:35:00] 90, a hundred grams of protein in a meal and your body will be able to use it if you’re so as you get heavier, it’s just, and who wants to eat more than that in one meal?

Like for me, I like eating about 50 grams of protein in a meal. That’s enough for me. 30 to 50. It keeps you full. I enjoy, different types of protein that I eat. I like it comes from like Greek yogurt or meats of different kinds, chicken, pork, sometimes red meat. Sometimes turkey bacon, blah, blah, blah, whatever.

Also like my dinner, there’s beans, there’s vegetables, some protein there. So you you can lay it out really. However you want is the point. Now, there are a couple of things that you should keep in mind though. If you are cutting, if you’re dieting for fat loss, you’re going to want to stick to foods that are going to keep you full because most people, the problem, biggest problems they run into with that, with trying to lose fat or hunger and cravings.

And those just derail you because if if every day that you overeat, you just set yourself back a little bit where are you going to lose a little bit less fat that day? Or maybe you ate way too much and you gained [00:36:00] some fat that day. And the best diet is that you can stick to, right?

That, that cliched statement has some truth in it though. So that means that you should definitely be sticking to foods that you like don’t restrict all the foods that you enjoy eating when you’re dieting trust in the numbers, basically. And if that means like when I’m dieting, how I really like chocolate, that’s like my dessert.

Basically. I guess the oatmeal kind of as a dessert, but not really because there’s, it’s nutritious. It’s a lot of, there’s a lot of nutrients in there. There’s, several servings of fruit. There’s the oatmeal there’s Oh, I forgot on the going back on the recipe. Where all those, like the extracts and all the, all that stuff, I put it in about a cup and a half of skim milk is the base and then all the cinnamon and all the spices and extracts and stuff mixed into that.

And then pour the whole mixture. And also I do one egg as well. Pour the whole mixture. into the oatmeal mix all up and then bake it. I bake it at 400 for about like 20 minutes. I think it is done. That’s so that, it’s not really dessert. It’s very nutritious. But my dessert, I just like chocolate a lot.

But even if I were cutting, I still would save some [00:37:00] calories for chocolate. Probably, I saved maybe 150, 200 calories a day. for chocolate and don’t feel bad. Don’t feel that, there is just numbers. So if you’re, if you don’t like chocolate, but you like some ice cream and you want to have, I don’t know, a quarter of a pint of ice cream after every dinner, because that’s what you enjoy the most, do it, fit it into your numbers.

As long as you’re getting the majority of calories from nutritious foods, it’s totally fine. And back to meal planning, those little things are important, including something that even if it’s just psychological. That’s great. There’s, for a lot of people, dieting is just as much of a psychological burden as a physical burden.

So do what you can to mitigate that. Also in your meal timing, coming back to when do you like to eat? When do you generally get hungry? Are you at your hungriest in the afternoons? Then you might want to work some, you might want to think with that. So you might want to eat a bigger lunch.

You may want to save more of those calories for lunch. So then you can, avoid the mid afternoon snacking. Okay. Is nighttime like, let’s say, for whatever reason you tend to overeat at night. Okay. So maybe you should do something like what I’m doing where you’re saving a lot of your calories for dinner.

[00:38:00] And maybe, I, you could, I could eat them all at dinner, but that’s a lot of food like that. It gets, makes me a little bit tired just from the, I forget the name of the hormone. There’s a hormone in your body releases when you eat a lot of food, the more food you eat, the more it gets released and it induces sleepiness.

And that’ll hit me sometimes and I have to work at night. So I don’t like. I’m usually writing at night, so I need to be mentally like, I don’t want to feel sluggish at all. But maybe you want to just eat a big dinner. You want to eat, I don’t care, 1500 calories for your dinner. Save it. Fine. Or maybe you want to do really what I’m doing where you’re, my dinner is probably about 50 carb, 10 fat.

maybe 15 fat and about 50, 40 to 50 protein. That’s my dinner. And then I’ll have, the oatmeal, which is a lot of carbs. It depends on what I’m putting in there, but it’s probably about 200 ish, maybe a little bit more carbs. And another 10 fat and a bit of protein I have it with Greek yogurt as well.

That’s what I eat it with. And it’s like super delicious. So the Greek yard, I’m getting, maybe [00:39:00] another 50 protein in the whole thing. So that’s just knowing your body though, and that’s just knowing your personal preferences. Now when you’re dieting fallacy, like I was saying, you want to stick to foods that are going to fill you up.

So this is where what you eat, there are no foods that are good or bad for weight loss. Per se. There are no foods that directly, you know, cause you to gain weight or get in the way of losing weight, but there are foods that are more conducive to it. Both gaining weight and losing weight, obviously foods that are conducive to losing weight are foods that are going to fill you up.

High fiber type foods with volume. That’s really the key that you want to go for. When you want to be full, you want to go for volume. That’s what matters most. Meaning the amount of food that you’re putting in your stomach, the actual physical like weight of it. And it’s. The space that takes up that is more important than the calories.

And that’s why calorie dense foods going back to stuff like paleo, like the very fatty type of foods, they suck because they eat. So they eat up so much of your, so many of your calories, but they don’t provide The amount of [00:40:00] fullness, which then means that there’s a big difference between being full for three hours and being full for two hours and having to battle through hunger for an hour, several times a day that is going to either just wear on you mentally, but you’re going to stay strong and not give in and not eat, or it’s just going to cause you to overeat and then you’re going to be dragging the whole thing out or maybe never even reaching your goal.

So you want to be sticking to foods that are lower in calories and higher in satiety coming back to this is fibrous type of stuff. First, before we talk about fibers, let’s talk about protein. That’s protein is very filling as you’ve probably experienced. There’s also, of course, research on it. So that’s why one, a high protein diet is crucial for losing fat and preserving muscle.

For many different reasons, but this is one of the reasons that it’s going to keep you full. If you’re eating protein every few hours you’re, it’s unlikely I wouldn’t say it’s unlikely. It’s just less likely that you’re going to, that you’re going to have hunger issues. Again, you don’t have to eat every few hours.

I do like it, but if you don’t, or it doesn’t work for you, then who cares? Eat on the schedule that [00:41:00] you need to eat on. Do eat protein with each meal because it’s going to help. And in terms of, and in terms of what to eat, of course, you want to stick with leaner cuts of meat like chicken, low fat red meats, low fat ground.

I like ground Turkey. There’s even like Turkey bacon, for instance, is good. There’s a, I’ve been getting this other bacon too. I think it’s called like Sunday bacon. Where it’s like basically the same macros of turkey bacon. It’s just tastes better. I think it’s one gram of fat per, per slice. And low fat dairy.

And so just fats make things taste better. Yes, they do. But they’re very calorie dense and you just can’t afford it. When you’re dieting for fat loss, if you’re also going to keep your carb carbohydrate intake relatively high, which you want to do if you’re, if you are a weightlifter, you want to do that.

Trust me, it is way better. Other foods are whole grain foods like wheat, brown rice barley. Those are filling and yes they’re fairly carb dense, but they’re a good it’s a, in a good source of nutrition and they are going to keep you fuller than the more [00:42:00] refined types of grains.

And of course you have vegetables and my vegetables that what I like the most is I really like green beans. Green beans are quite filling and you can prepare them in a lot of different ways. They’re lower in calories. I like peas a lot, but higher in calories but they’re good. I like cruciferous vegetables a lot.

I like pretty much all vegetables, so you can go with what you like. I like to eat a variety of vegetables because of course they have different micronutritional values. So I like to, I need a fair amount of cruciferous vegetables just like my body does. I took this DNA test a bit ago and that was one of the things is that I just, my body has an elevated need for cruciferous vegetables.

So I try to eat pretty regularly, like Broccoli or cauliflower are my choices there. But but vegetables in general, that’s one of the reasons why they’re considered good for like good diet foods is because they’re low in calories and they’re going to fill you up. You can eat a lot of them. You can stuff your stomach full of vegetables and for 50 carbs, you can be really full of 50 cards of vegetables is you are not going to be hungry for a bit.

Plus some protein. That’s a good, at least three or four hours before you’re going to even feel like you [00:43:00] could eat again. Legumes. I like beans. I just stick, I stick to all kinds of varieties of beans again, a bit more calorie dense, but nutrition they’re nutritious and pretty filling.

Tubers. I like I was talking about earlier. So white potato is great. Very filling. Sweet potatoes are good. Of course. I like yams as well. I like sweet potatoes more. So those are the types of foods that you want to be sticking to in each meal when you are cutting, when you’re dining for fat loss has to have some protein and something else that’s going to be filling.

So it’s going to be a whole grain, it’s going to be a vegetable there, there are fruits, what are the more fibrous fruits? I know apples are filling. I don’t know. I’m such like, I only, I don’t eat a wide variety of fruits usually, although these days I’ve been baking with them.

But. It’s been a while since I’ve just had like a protein shake with a piece of fruit and apples. What came to mind, like I’d always eat apples when I was cutting and I would have fruit for snacks. I’d stick to apples cause I think they’re really good. And they’re filling for the calories.

And they’re they’re a bit lower calorie and something like a banana for the amount of volume that you get out of it. [00:44:00] But more fibrous fruits are good as well. So each meal, that’s what you want. You want some protein and you want something else that’s going to be filling. And that’s the best way to, to stay as full as possible for as long as possible.

Now, on the other hand, Let’s say you’re trying to gain weight and so you need to be eating, quite a bit more calories. You need to be in a calorie surplus. And some guys, they run into the problem where they have to eat so much food. It actually is uncomfortable to them. Like I know I’ve spoken to a lot of guys that are 150, 60, 170 pound guys that have to eat anywhere from four to 5, 000 calories a day.

Just to gain maybe a half a pound a week and that might sound cool, but that’s really annoying. I know I’ve spoken about that before. That gets really old really fast. And one of the problems that they run into is they don’t have the appetite to they think they don’t have the appetite, but more it’s the foods that they’re eating.

Like they’re eating. They’re building their meal plans is as if they were cutting. They’re trying to fill a lot of their calories with vegetables, with fruit, with whole grains, not drinking any calories, no fruit juice. That’s another thing when you’re cutting, do not drink [00:45:00] calories. It’s a really bad idea.

It’s that you’re eating up calories and with no satiety, you can drink a cup of orange juice. It’s like a hundred calories and you’re. It’s not going to do anything to make you feel full. So they’ll have low fat dairy products. These guys that are trying to gain weight or girls. So that’s, that strategy is great for when you’re losing weight, when you’re gaining weight, when you want to gain weight and you’re having trouble hitting your calorie requirements, that’s where you flip to the whole fat.

You flip to the fattier meats, maybe it’s chicken thighs or fattier, fattier types of red meat and whole fat dairy. And And you don’t have to go with refined grains. There’s no necessary reason to do it. I would probably still stick with whole grains, but I would stick with more. I do like whole grain pasta or there are certain types of whole grain breads that are quite calorie dense.

I would be doing also with that. So if I’m going to be doing a snack, let’s say I’m gonna do a sandwich. It’s going to be like some calorie dense bread. It’s going to be In terms of protein. I don’t do sandwiches, but I don’t know, I guess the same thing would be like deli meat or right, whatever you’re gonna do for [00:46:00] protein.

But I’d probably use like whole fat mayo or butter the bread. Like you need to add calories without adding a bunch of volume. That’s the key. And to do that, you have to really think about the foods that you’re eating and choose higher calorie options. Yes, you should be eating a few servings of fruits and vegetables every day, but you don’t need to be eating too much.

10, you and many guys, they find that even when they do it, so they’re like really building out each meal to stuff calories in there that they have to drink calories on top of that, just to, to get to, where they can gain weight. And for that, You can get a weight gainer type of product.

I’m not a real fan of what’s out there because they just contain a lot of shit ingredients. And I’m going to end up making my own probably with Legion and just do a better one. But for now what I recommend is that guys like drink fruit juice or do smoothies that, where you blend up a bunch of fruit and you can put also, you can put something like if you like coconut oil, you can put some of that.

And they’re like, it’s easy to add calories. It’s delicious. It’s much easier to drink calories when it comes to fruits than it is to eat it when you are [00:47:00] constantly feeling full and sick of eating. So those are really the main points to keep in mind. In terms of like you probably have, if you caught that, I’m eating this oatmeal dish, a lot of carbs, 200, 250 carbs late at night.

So later, whatever, 10 o’clock, nine 30. And just to reiterate, that doesn’t matter. It’s numbers. You can eat all the carbs you want. I used to think there was like Going back to even the thing I was talking about earlier, where there was like a theory that maybe that was bad, maybe it was bad to spike your insulin levels because it could interfere with growth hormone production and you get your biggest spike of growth hormone production when you’re sleeping and and do you would eating a bunch of carbohydrates before that.

Mess that up. There’s a theory on that, which is why I used to recommend people like basically, I’d say we don’t really know, but it’s probably a better idea to not. But now there’s just more research that’s come out that is used to sell different types of diets. Ironically, that just shows that it doesn’t matter.

Your body figures it out, works around it. So you can eat as much carbohydrates might eat as much as you want as late as you [00:48:00] want. So long as when you. Your head hits the pillow at night, you’re within your numbers and within your numbers means if you’re cutting, I would say be within 50 calories of your target.

And if you’re bulking I would say be within a hundred calories of your target. Ideally I try to stay within 50 regardless, but it’s more important when you’re cutting, I think to be, really on target with your intake so you can get it over with as quickly as possible, essentially, and not give yourself that leeway.

So that’s the most important thing. You can eat a lot of protein in each meal. You can eat a little protein and break it up throughout the day. It doesn’t really matter. There is a bit of research on protein timing that shows that eating protein every few hours may be a bit more anabolic over time.

We’re not quite sure yet. Again, that’s one of those things that to play it safe. I like to eat protein every few hours. but I’m not, I don’t think that’s going to make a huge difference. So I think that covers everything. Of course I’ve written a lot about this and you can check out the articles that I’m linking down below and find out more if you’d like, but hope that helps and happy dieting.[00:49:00] 

Hey, it’s Mike again. Hope you liked the podcast. If you did go ahead and subscribe. I put out new episodes every week or two where I talk about all kinds of things related to health and fitness and general wellness. And Also, head over to my website at www. muscleforlife. com, where you’ll find not only past episodes of the podcast, but you’ll also find a bunch of different articles that I’ve written.

I release a new one almost every day, actually, I release four to six new articles a week. And you can also find my books and everything else that I’m involved in over at muscleforlife. com. All right. Thanks again. Bye.