What is flexible dieting?
It’s a flexible dieting approach that allows you to consume a macro-nutrient balance that is tailored towards your specific goals while allowing you to eat the foods you enjoy. Everyone has different circumstances; they enjoy different foods, have different allergies, and have access to different resources. What flexible dieting allows you to do is pick the foods you enjoy and eat them as often as you like by fitting them into your macro-nutrient totals for the day. This is not to say you can eat a bucket of ice cream daily, but you can easily fit a small bowl of ice cream into your diet every night while still losing weight.
I’ve seen too many people on diets where they’re restricted to a small selection of foods, or even worse – meal plans where you are told what foods to eat for each meal. Chicken breast, broccoli, sweet potatoes, asparagus, tilapia.. sound familiar? Eating what someone tells you to eat via a cookie-cutter meal plan is counter-intuitive to achieving good health and the physique you want, and is more often than not impossible to maintain for long periods of time. These meal plans and diets are not sustainable, no matter how much will power you have. If you can’t see yourself sticking to a diet for the next month.. 6 months.. 2 years, etc., then your diet NEEDS to change. Otherwise, you are setting yourself up for binge eating, rebounding in weight, and ultimately – failure.
People are able to lose weight every year following crazy diets – the hard part is keeping the weight off in the long term, and this is where crash diets fail. You may lose 30 pounds in a month following some crash diet that cuts out 90% of your food choices, has you at under 1500 calories, and has you eating foods you don’t like. You may even lose an additional 15 pounds in the next month, but as soon as you go back to eating how you want to eat, the weight will fly back on, and often times you end up weighing more than when you started off. Research has shown that the slower you lose weight, the more likely you are to keep it off. You need to realize that wherever your physique is, it did not get there overnight. Conversely, it is not going to change overnight – it’s a long process, and it is precisely this reason that you need something both sustainable, and effective.
Remember, the best diet is the one you can follow.
You are better off losing 5 pounds/month over a one year period (that’s 60 pounds!) with small calorie deficits, than you are losing 40 pounds in two months, only to yo-yo right back to where you started as soon as you stop your diet to indulge in food you enjoy.
Your health should revolve around you and your lifestyle, not the other way around.
How can you apply flexible dieting to yourself?
If you are just starting out, there a few things you’re going to need. The first thing I recommend you do is to calculate your total daily energy expenditure (TDEE). There is a good calculator for this at IIFYM.com (http://iifym.com/tdee-calculator/). TDEE is exactly what it sounds like, the total amount of calories you burn in a 24 hour period.
You’ll then have to figure out your macro-nutrient breakdown. For each pound of body-weight you should be consuming roughly 1g of protein, and .45g of fat, and using carbs to fill everything else. Again, everyone is unique and has different needs/requirements so you if you’re doing this on your own it will take a little bit of guess and check to get where you need to be.
You can get on with your diet with that information, but there are a few things I recommend to make the process easier. While many people get by just fine without one, you will have a much easier time getting accurate food portions if you invest in a digital scale. I use this $20 one off Amazon; it’s both accurate and durable – I’ve had mine for over a year with no issues. Most people can get by just fine without one, as the most important thing is tracking your calories – even if you don’t feel like counting them. What I mean by that is eyeballing your food, being mindful of what you eat, making sure you don’t over consume or under consume, etc. There’s the argument that it’s a hassle and a waste of time, but it probably adds no more than 5 minutes to my day.
Another tool (and in some ways an alternative to a scale) you can use to make things easier is a way to track the macro-nutrients you’ve consumed. I don’t personally use these apps, but many of my clients have found convenience in downloading the My Fitness Pal or My Macros+ app to their smartphone. These apps allow you to either manually plug in your numbers or find the foods you’ve eaten and plug those in.
Remember that just because someone may be counting their calories to a tee, or training six days a week, etc., it does not mean that is what you should do.
Find what methods work for you, and apply them to your own flexible diet.