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The 4 Most Important Things You Need to Know About Flexible Dieting 70,972 people have read this article. Letting yourself enjoy your favorite foods in moderation, like my Boston Cream Pie Cupcakes, will help you reach your long-term fat loss goals. You’re willing to suffer. You want to be lean yesterday, and you’re willing to do whatever it takes to get there.

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Flexible Dieting Philosophy. Eating in a healthy manner

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The 4 Most Important Things You Need to Know About Flexible Dieting

70,972 people have read this article.

Letting yourself enjoy your favorite foods in moderation, like my Boston Cream Pie Cupcakes, will help you reach your long-term fat loss goals.

You’re willing to suffer.

You want to be lean yesterday, and you’re willing to do whatever it takes to get there.

You cut calories, eliminate as many foods as you can, and deal with being miserable because you know it will pay off.

It will, in the short-term.

It won’t, in the long-term.

When you can’t maintain your diet any longer, and you don’t know how to stay lean without it, you’ll lose all of your hard earned progress.

The truth is that you’ll lose more fat, faster, with less trouble, and keep it off in the long-run, by giving yourself a break.

In this article, you’ll learn the general principles behind a concept called “flexible dieting.” As you’ll see, this is a system that helps you direct your dieting efforts in a way that gives you the results you want, without driving you insane.

This article is mostly about fat loss, but the same principles are just as important for muscle gain, weight maintenance, and general health.

A Simple Introduction to Flexible Dieting

Be less strict about your diet.

That’s the essence of flexible dieting.

Instead of forcing yourself to follow a set of rigid, unsustainable rules to lose fat or stay healthy, you take a more relaxed and long-term perspective on your diet.

The term “flexible dieting” has gotten popular for a reason — it works. What’s confusing, however, is that there isn’t an objective definition of flexible dieting. It means different things depending on who you ask. You’re about to learn the fundamental concepts behind flexible dieting, why it works, and how to start using it.

Lyle McDonald was probably the first person to popularize the concept of flexible dieting. In fact, he wrote the book on the topic in 2005 called A Guide to Flexible Dieting.

McDonald lays out what he believes are the two main reasons dieters fail:

1. Being too absolute and expecting perfection.2. Focusing only on the short-term.

Flexible dieting is basically the opposite — not being as absolute and focusing on the long-term as well as the short-term.

Let’s take a closer look at what flexible dieting is and isn’t.

The 4 Essential Elements of Flexible Dieting

Flexible dieting has several different interpretations, but we’re going to define it with the following four criteria:

1. Modifying your diet based on your preferences, goals, and tolerances.

2. Letting yourself enjoy your favorite foods in moderation without feeling guilty or deprived.

3. Staying calm and sticking to your diet if you do overeat, or have something that’s not “on” your diet.

4. Focusing just as much on maintaining fat loss as on achieving it.

Let’s take a closer look at each of these principles and why they work.

1/. Modify your diet based on your preferences, goals, and tolerances.

You should eat foods that you enjoy.

You should enjoy both “healthy” and “unhealthy” foods.

There are no specific foods you need to eat to be healthy or lose fat. Food isn’t “bad,” “good,” “healthy,” “unhealthy,” “super,” or anything else. It’s just food. You should eat a well rounded overall healthy diet, but you should enjoy all of the foods you eat within that diet.

Your diet should also support your goals. If you’re trying to lose fat, you need to eat fewer calories. If you’re trying to gain weight,

you need to eat more calories. If you’re training hard, you might want to eat more carbohydrate or protein.

It’s fine to place restrictions on yourself to make it easier to reach your goals. If you enjoy higher fat foods and it’s easier for you to control your calorie intake by eating a low-carb diet, then do it. If eating “paleo” — avoiding grains, legumes, dairy (and other stuff, depending on who you ask) helps you eat less, then go for it. Just remember why you’re eating that way. Your diet isn’t magical; it’s just easier for you to follow.

You should also consider any medical reasons for avoiding certain foods. If you’re less insulin sensitive, you may need to eat fewer carbs. If you have celiac disease, you can’t eat gluten.

Base your diet on personal preference first. Modify your diet to suit your goals second. Then take into account any potential restrictions you might need to place on yourself.

Most popular diets do the exact opposite of this approach. They tell you to avoid certain foods or foods groups based on pseudoscience and anecdote, regardless of your goals.

Flexible dieting is the opposite. You get to decide what you do and don’t eat to reach your goals.

2/. Let yourself enjoy your favorite foods without feeling guilty or deprived.

Unless you have a specific medical condition like celiac disease, there is no reason you need to avoid any food forever. There’s also no reason you need to eat the exact same diet every single day for the rest of your life.

You should let yourself enjoy your favorite foods throughout your diet. When you do, you shouldn’t have to feel guilty.

Some people prefer to take a binary approach to dieting. They eliminate all desserts, sugar, added fat, or certain food groups. There’s nothing wrong with this approach as long as you let yourself enjoy these foods later, in moderation, when you’ve reached your goal.

Most people don’t. They deprive themselves of their favorite foods and end up miserable or, more likely, bingeing on them later. This also usually happens before they’ve gotten as lean as they want to be, which makes them even more depressed.

With flexible dieting, you let yourself enjoy your favorite foods, whether it’s cake, brownies, bagels, ice cream, cereal, pizza, pasta, french fries, or steak throughout your diet. You don’t damn up your cravings and let them break through later on when you can’t control them.

In most cases, it’s best that your fat loss diet be essentially the same as your regular diet.

3/. Stay calm and stick to your diet if you do overeat or have something that’s not “on” your diet.

Whether accidentally or intentionally, you’re going to eat more calories than you mean to, or you’re going to eat a food that isn’t “on” your diet.

It’s going to happen. The only thing that separates successful dieters from unsuccessful ones is how they react.

If you’ve been depriving yourself of your favorite foods and forcing yourself to stick to a diet you don’t enjoy, you won’t react well. You’ll either hate yourself for failing to stick to your diet, or binge, and then hate yourself even more.

When you break the rigid and unrealistic rules you’ve set for yourself, you feel like there’s no point in trying. Five Oreos turns into

an entire box. An extra scoop of ice cream turns into the whole carton.

On the other hand, a flexible dieter stays calm in these situations.

Flexible dieters put the magnitude of their mistake into perspective. They realize that one scoop of ice cream or an Oreo has literally delayed their progress by about 100 calories — the equivalent of maybe an hour or two.

Flexible dieters don’t feel like they’ve failed, cheated themselves, or broken any rules, because they set reasonable expectations from the beginning. They expected to overeat on some days and to eat some foods that weren’t “on” their diets. It’s all just part of the plan.

Rigid dieters do not. They expect to eat exactly the right foods in exactly the right amounts every day, and when they can’t, they give up or hate themselves for not reaching their unreachable expectations.

4/. Focus just as much on maintaining fat loss as on achieving it.

If you’re a rigid dieter, you think in the short-term for two reasons:

1. You want results as fast as possible, so you set up a diet you hate because you rationalize that it won’t last that long.

2. After you’ve set up a diet you don’t like, you become even more focused on the short-term because that’s the only way you can make your diet bearable.

When you don’t enjoy your diet and set impossible standards, the only way to have any hope is to focus on the short-term. You adopt an “it can all be over soon” mentality.

In some cases you might reach your goal. However, losing fat isn’t the hard part. It’s maintaining fat loss that’s really hard.

This is where rigid dieting almost always fails.

The behaviors that help you lose fat are the same ones that will help you stay lean. If you can’t maintain the diet and exercise habits that you used to lose fat, you probably won’t be able to stay lean in the long-term.

For instance, studies have consistently shown that meal replacements and weight loss shakes help people lose a lot of weight.(1-5) It helps them control their portion sizes and calorie intake. The problem is that these people never learn to control calories without the shakes and meal replacements. They never learn how to maintain weight loss with sustainable and enjoyable behaviors. That’s why longer studies have generally shown that meal replacement diets are not great at helping people maintain much weight loss.(6)

With flexible dieting, your fat loss diet is almost identical to your habitual diet. There’s no abrupt transition from your fat loss diet to your regular diet, because the only real difference is your calorie and macronutrient intake.

Instead of seeing your diet as an obstacle that you can forget about once you’ve gotten lean, think of it as a long-term transition to healthier behaviors that you’ll use to stay lean for the rest of your life.

Eat a Diet You Can Maintain

That’s essentially what it means to be a flexible dieter.

You want to get lean as fast as possible, so you rush. You put up with cravings, hunger, lethargy, and social isolation because you’re willing to suffer. You set rigid, impossible, miserable standards that you can’t achieve.

You either give up before, soon after, or long after reaching your goal, because being lean wasn’t worth the trouble anymore.

Flexible dieting is about finding a diet that works for you, and deviating from that diet in a way that doesn’t impede your long-term progress.

How has rigid dieting helped or hurt your efforts to get lean? How do you eat a structured diet to lose fat while maintaining your sanity, social life, and happiness?

If you’re struggling with weight loss (or would like to lose weight easier) and want

to know how to speed up your metabolism, you want to read this article.

 

When people want to lose weight, the advice they’ll often get is to simply “eat less and move

more.” It’s just calories in vs. calories out, they’ll be told.

But how does that explain the women that come to me at 140, 150, or 160+

pounds, eating 1,300 calories per day, exercising 6 – 7 hours per week…

without losing weight? According tostandard calculations, such women should be burning

upwards of 2,000 calories per day.

How the hell can they be eating so little without losing fat? And what should they do? Should they

suck it up and eat even less? Push through another hour or two of grueling exercise each week? Or

is something else needed?

Well, in this article I’m going to break it all down and show you why

preserving your metabolic health is the key to consistent, pain-free weight

loss.

So let’s start at the beginning: what the hell does metabolism even mean?

The Metabolism Made SimpleThe dictionary defines metabolism  in the following way:The chemical processes that occur within a living organism in order to maintain life.

Two kinds of metabolism are often distinguished: constructive metabolism, oranabolism, the synthesis of the proteins, carbohydrates, and fats that form tissue and store energy, and destructive metabolism, or catabolism, the breakdown of complex substances and the consequent production of energy and waste matter.

In short, when we speak of the metabolism, we speak of the body’s ability to use various chemical

processes to produce, maintain, and break down various substances, and to make energy available

for cells to use.

As you can imagine, this is an incredibly complex subject as it encompasses the entire set of

processes whereby life is sustained, so let’s hone in on the aspect of it most relevant to this article:

metabolic speed.

Now, what does it mean to have a “slow” or “fast” metabolism?

Well, such distinctions are referring to what is known as the body’s metabolic rate, which is simply

the amount of energy the body uses to perform the many functions involved in metabolism.

Basal metabolic rate excludes physical activity, and we often measure it in terms of calories. (One

calorie, or kilocalorie as it’s technically known, is the amount of heat required to heat one kilogram of

water one degree Celsius)

The faster one’s metabolism is, the more energy the body burns in performing

the many tasks related to staying alive. The slower it is, the less energy it

burns performing these tasks.

In a funny sense, a slower metabolism is actually more “efficient” than a faster one because it

requires less energy to maintain life. (This doesn’t mean a slow metabolism is good.)

Now, the body’s metabolic rate is influenced by various factors such as age,

fat mass, fat-free mass, and thyroid hormone circulation, but some people’s

bodies also naturally just burn more energy than others’.

For instance, one study reported basal metabolic rates from as low as 1,027 calories per day to as

high as 2,499 calories per day, with a mean BMR of 1,500 calories per day. Much of this variance

was due to different levels of fat-free mass and fat mass, age, and experimental error, but a

significant portion (about 27%) of the variance was unexplained.

Another study demonstrated that basal metabolic rates can vary between people with nearly

identical levels of lean mass and fat mass. Researchers found that despite their subjects all having

comparable body compositions, the top 5% BMRs metabolized energy about 30% faster than the

lowest 5%.

Alright, so that’s what the metabolism is and how it works. Let’s relate it to weight loss.

How Your Metabolism Affects Your Ability to Lose Weight

As you probably know, you lose fat by feeding your body less energy than it burns every

day. Your body deals with this energy deficit, or calorie deficit, by tapping into fat stores to get the

energy it needs (that it isn’t getting from the food you eat).

From where are most of these energy demands coming from, though? That’s right, the

metabolism.

For instance, a 180-pound man with 10% body fat and a healthy metabolism has a basal metabolic

rate of about 2,000 calories per day. Through regular exercise and other activity, total daily energy

expenditure could increase to about 2,800 calories per day.

Well, as we can see, about 70% of an in-shape, active man’s total daily energy

expenditure still comes from the metabolism.

This is why preserving metabolic health is so important when it comes to weight loss. When you

reduce your calorie intake to induce weight loss, you’re counting mainly on your metabolism to keep

humming along, pulling from fat stores. Sure, you use exercise to increase overall energy demands

and thus fat loss, but your metabolism is a major player in the game.

The slower your metabolism is, the less food you’ll have to eat and the more

exercise you’ll have to do to lose weight effectively.  The faster it is, the more

you’ll be able to eat and the less you’ll have to exercise.

The Surefire Way to Slow Your Metabolism to a Crawl and Get Fat

Most people know that losing weight requires eating less food than they’re currently eating and

moving more, and most people want to lose weight as quickly as possible.

What do many people do, then? Well, they dramatically reduce calorie intake and dramatically

increase energy output (through many hours of exercise each week). And while this approach will

induce weight loss for a bit, it will ultimately fail. Why?

Because your metabolism adapts to the amount of energy you feed your

body. Its goal is to balance energy intake with output–to maintain homeostasis.

When you restrict your calories and feed your body less energy than it burns,

your metabolism naturally begins slowing down (burning less energy). The more

you restrict your calories, the faster and greater the down-regulation.

The opposite is true as well, by the way. As you feed your body more, your metabolism

will naturally speed up (burn more energy).

Now, when someone dramatically decreases calorie intake and their metabolism finally slows down

enough to match intake with output, weight loss stalls. This is usually met with further calorie

reduction or more exercise, which only results in more metabolic slowdown, and thus a vicious cycle

begins.

In most cases, the dieter finally can’t take the misery anymore, and goes in the other direction,

dramatically increasing calorie intake (bingeing and gorging on everything in sight for days or

weeks). This, in turn, has been shown to result in rapid fat storage, often beyond the pre-diet

body fat levels (people end up fatter than when they started dieting in the first place).

What’s going on here is very simple: these people have systematically crashed their metabolic rates

and then overloaded their bodies with way more calories than they needed, and the body’s response

to this is to store much of the excess energy as fat.

Ultimately what happens is the person winds up fatter than they started, and

with a slower metabolism. If they repeat this cycle a few times, they can find themselves in a

really bad place metabolically: eating very little food to maintain a high body fat percentage.

This process of dramatically and chronically slowing the metabolic rate down is often referred to as

“metabolic damage,” and fortunately, it can be resolved. (Click here to tweet this!)

How to Speed Up Your Metabolism for Easier Weight Loss

Your metabolic health is going to determine how effectively you can lose weight, so here’s the

bottom line:

If you want smooth and consistent weight loss, you want your metabolism to

be running quickly before you start. (Click here to tweet this!)

As the metabolism adapts to food intake, you want your weight to be stable with a high amount of

daily calories before you start restricting them for weight loss purposes.

Ideally, you should be eating at least your total daily energy

expenditure (TDEE) without gaining weight before you start a weight loss

routine. (Click here to tweet this!)

If you’re not currently there–if you’re eating quite a bit less than your TDEE and your weight is not

moving, you need to improve your metabolism before you attempt a weight loss routine.

Fortunately, this is easy to do if you remain patient. Here’s how it’s done:

1. Engage in heavy resistance training (weightlifting, ideally) 3 – 5 times per week.

This has two big benefits for your metabolic rate: it speeds it up in the short term, burning a

significant amount of post-workout calories; and it builds muscle, which speeds up your

metabolic rate in the long term.

My Bigger Leaner Stronger and Thinner Leaner Stronger programs are built around heavy,

compound weightlifting, and are perfect for repairing metabolic health.

2. Slowly increase your calories each week until you’ve reached your target intake (your TDEE).

In the bodybuilding world, this is known as “reverse dieting,” and it’s a very simple but effective way

to speed up your metabolism.

Instead of dramatically increasing your calorie intake, you want to work it up slowly, allowing your

metabolism to keep up and match output with intake (resulting in little-to-no fat storage).

I like to increase in increments of about 100 – 150 calories with 7 – 10-day

intervals. That is, you increase your daily intake by 100 – 150 maintain that new level of intake for

7 – 10 days. You then do it again  and again and again until you’ve reached your TDEE.

3. Eat plenty of protein.A high-protein diet is important because it will promote muscle growth, which is what we want to

achieve with step #1.

I recommend that you eat 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight when

you’re working on speeding up your metabolism.4. Eat a moderate amount of dietary fat.

While I’m generally not a fan of high-fat dieting for athletes (and I explain why here), I do

recommend eating a fair amount of dietary fat every day when you’re working on improving

metabolic health.

The reason why is it boosts testosterone production (albeit slightly), which in turn speeds up

metabolic rate. It’s a relatively minor point, but every little bit helps.

I recommend that you get 30 – 35% of your daily calories from dietary fat

when you’re working on speeding up your metabolism.

A Healthy Metabolism Allows for Healthy Weight Loss

When your metabolism is healthy–when you’re able to eat plenty of food every day without gaining

weight–weight loss is very easy.

As discussed in my article on meal planning, you will simply utilize about a 20% calorie

deficit with 4 – 6 hours of exercise per week (a combination of weightlifting and high-

intensity interval cardioworks best), and it will be easy, effective, and enjoyable.

Yes, your metabolism will slow down, but not by much. This approach will give you at

least a good 2 – 3 month window in which you can lose plenty of fat while potentially even

building muscle.

And if, over time, your metabolism slows down too much but you haven’t hit your body fat

percentage goal yet, you simply take the above steps to speed your metabolism back up, and then

move back to weight loss.

7 Diet Mistakes That Make It Damn Hard to Lose Weight, Build Muscle, and Feel GoodBy Michael Matthews on November 3rd, 2014CATEGORIES:BUILDING MUSCLE NUTRITION WEIGHT LOSS 57 COMMENTS

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DON’T FORGET TO FOLLOW MUSCLE FOR LIFE 

If you stop making these diet mistakes, you’ll be able to lose

fat and build muscle with ease, and actually enjoy the process.

 

If you want to get really confused about how to eat to lose fat, build muscle, and stay healthy, go read a few of the latest-and-greatest bestselling books on dieting.And if you want to add some misery to the confusion, start following them. Eliminate every food you actually enjoy from your diet. Try eating like a caveman. Starve yourself with “cleanses.” Swear off carbohydrates, keep protein intake low, and eat all the nuts and oils you can stomach.

Go ahead. But when you can’t take it anymore and you’re ready to take the red pill, come on back. I’ll be patiently waiting with the good news…

When you know what you’re doing, “dieting” is an enjoyable lifestyle, not a miserable, masochistic period of self-denial. You can lose fat eating foods you like and without ever feeling starved or deprived. You can build muscle without eating obscene amounts of calories and piling on body fat. You can “cheat” frequently and guilt-free.In this article, I’m going to share with you seven insidious diet mistakes I’ve made throughout the years and that millions of other people make every day, basically guaranteeing they’ll never achieve the types of physiques they ultimately desire.

Diet Mistake #1:Thinking It’s All About “Clean Eating”

Oh the joys of clean eating! 

I’m all for eating a bunch of nutritious foods, but if you think that’s all it takes to lose weight or build muscle, you’re mistaken.

You can be the “cleanest” eater in the world and still be weak and skinny fat.CLICK TO TWEET

Sure, those fundamentals include providing your body with enough vitamins and mineralsthrough nutritious foods, but they include a lot more if our goal is to build muscle, get lean, and stay healthy.Let’s talk fat loss first. Losing fat over time requires feeding your body less energy (via food) than it burns every day. We measure both the energy burned and eaten in calories or kilocalories.When you do this, you are keeping your body in a state known as a “calorie deficit,” because it’s short on energy (you’re putting greater energy demands on it than you’re giving it fuel for).It has two options, then, to stay alive: get the energy from somewhere or physically shut down. And fortunately, it has a ready store of energy made just for these circumstances: body fat stores. It begins breaking these stores down into cellular fuel to make up for the deficit, and voila, total fat mass decreases gram by gram, day after day, so long as a calorie deficit is maintained.

Now, here’s what most “clean eaters” don’t understand: “clean” calories count just as much as “dirty” calories when it comes to gaining or losing fat.

“Clean” calories count just as much as “dirty” ones   when it comes to gaining or losing fat. CLICK TO TWEET

When we’re talking body composition, the calories from peas are no different than the calories from a Snickers bar. Sure, the latter is more calorie dense than the former and doesn’t fit well into a proper meal plan, but people that think that eating a bunch of peas is, in and of itself, conducive to weight loss whereas a Snickers bar isn’t don’t understand the simple mechanism explained above.“Clean eating” guarantees nothing in the way of weight loss. Feed your body too much of the absolute “cleanest” foods every day and you simply won’t lose weight. Period.And what about when you’re focusing on building muscle? Many people are surprised to learn that total calorie intake affects your body’s ability to build muscle just as much as its ability to reduce body fat percentage.

This biological factor known as “energy balance” is the key. Think of energy balance like your body’s energy checking account. A negative balance is a situation where your body is burning more energy than you’re feeding it (it’s in the red as far as energy goes). A positive balance, on the other hand, is a situation where your body is burning less energy than you’re feeding it (it’s in the black).Now, as you already know, when a negative energy balance is sustained over time, total fat mass decreases. But this comes at a price: it also impairs the body’s ability to synthesize muscle proteins.What is means is when you’re dieting to lose fat, your body simply can’t build muscle efficiently. This is why it’s commonly accepted that you can’t build muscle and lose fat, which is generally true but not always the case.So, what this means is that when you want to maximize muscle growth, you must ensure you’re not in a calorie deficit. Instead, you must ensure that your body is in a slight calorie surplus, or a positive energy balance.

When you want to maximize muscle growth, you must ensure you’re not in a calorie deficit.CLICK TO TWEET

Diet Mistake #2:Eating Too Much or Too Little For Your Goals

Surprise, asshole! Bet you never saw this coming! 

This mistake may sound simplistic, but it’s one of the most insidious pitfalls that prevents millions of people from reaching their fitness goals. And it revolves around one simple fact…

If you don’t plan or track your food intake, and simply eat according to your appetite, your weight is likely to remain the same.

If you simply eat according to your appetite, your weight is likely to remain the same.CLICK TO TWEET

This “programming” is a good thing, actually, and helps your body accomplish its goal of homeostasis.

You see, your body doesn’t want to get fatter or leaner–it wants to maintain its current state, and to accomplish this it uses a complex system of mechanisms to carefully regulate both hunger and fullness as well as metabolic rate.Changing your body composition–losing fat and/or building muscle–requires conscious efforts to under- or overeat, which are often uncomfortable at first. When you place your body in a calorie deficit to lose fat, expect to deal with some hunger and energy issues for the first week or two. When you place your body in calorie surplus to maximize muscle growth, expect to feel over-stuffed at first and, well, like you’re overeating.

Many people mistake these discomforts as signs that something is wrong, and revert back to “eating on instinct,” and then wonder why they can’t lose or gain weight easily.The key is trusting the process and staying the course, and the result always follow.

Diet Mistake #3:Starving Yourself

Click here to learn one “weird” trick Africans use to melt away belly fat! 

The easiest way to see the scale go down is to simply starve yourself. And that’s why many people do it.

And by “starve yourself,” I mean feed your body less than 70% of the energy it burns every day (keep your body in a 30%+ calorie deficit). And the lower you go, the worse things get.To put this in perspective, consider the following:

A 140-lb woman exercising 3-5 times per week will burn approximately 1,600-1,700 calories per day.

If such a woman ate less than, ~1,100 calories per day, she would be entering the problem area.

A 200-lb man exercising 3-5 times per week will burn approximately 2,500-2,600 calories per day.

Anything less than ~1,900 calories per day would be under-eating for such a man.

Many starvation diets have you eating anywhere from 30-50% of the energy you burn daily, and while they do  induce weight loss, there’s a lot more to consider…

Much of the weight initially lost is water, which goes…and comes…very quickly.

When someone loses 6 pounds in a week, at least 50%, and as much as 75-80% of it is water, and could actually be gained back within 1-2 days of overeating.

You also lose muscle, and the less you eat, the more you lose.

As you lose muscle, your body not only begins to take on that amorphous “skinny fat look,” but your metabolism slows down, your bone health decreases, and your risk of disease increases.

You feel progressively worse and worse. Your energy levels plummet, you battle intense food cravings, you become mentally clouded and even depressed, and more.

 So, while severely restricting calories is great for losing weight quickly…it’s ultimately a bad way to go about losing weight.

Much better is to maintain a moderate caloric deficit of about 20% (eat about 80% of the energy your body burns every day).By doing this, you’re able to lose 1-2 lbs of fat per week while preserving your metabolic health, energy levels, mental balance, and mood.

Diet Mistake #4:Overlooking “Hidden Calories”

“I’ll just do some extra cardio.”

 

A huge, killer diet trap that many people fall into is eating a lot of “hidden calories” throughout the day. Then they wonder why they aren’t losing weight.

Hidden calories are those that you don’t realize are there and account for, such as the following:

the 2 tablespoons of olive oil used to cook your dinner (240 calories),

the 2 tablespoons of mayonnaise in your homemade chicken salad (200 calories),

the 3 cubes of feta cheese on your salad (140 calories),

the 3 tablespoons of cream in your coffee (80 calories), and

the 2 pats of butter with your toast (70 calories).

These “little” additions add up every day and are by far the number-one reason why people fail to get results from what would otherwise be a proper dietary regimen. There just isn’t a large margin for error when you’re trying to maintain a moderate calorie deficit every day.For example, let’s say you’re looking to maintain a 500-calorie deficit every day to lose about a pound of fat per week, but you accidentally eat 400 more calories than you should have, leaving you in a 100-calorie deficit instead. It’ll now take a month or longer to lose that pound of fat. It’s that simple.

It might seem paranoid to be careful about how many tablespoons of ketchup you have in a day, but if you watch your calories that closely when dieting for fat loss, you’re guaranteed to get results.The best way to avoid hidden calories is to prepare your food yourself so you know exactly what went into it. For most people, this just means preparing a lunch to bring to the office, as they usually eat breakfast and dinner at home.

Diet Mistake #5:Eating Too Little Protein

Whenever I talk about eating enough protein, I can’t help but think of this video:

And then I want a protein shake, hahah.

Seriously though–here’s a dietary guideline that you can take to the bank:

Eat too little protein and you’ll always have trouble building muscle, even in a calorie surplus, and preserving it when in a calorie deficit.You may already understand the physiological reasons for this, but I want to give a brief summary just to make sure.

In the body, a protein is a special type of molecule that is comprised of substances known as amino acids. Think of amino acids as the “building blocks” of proteins–without the requisite amino acids, the body can’t create protein molecules.There are many types of proteins in the body, and they perform a wide variety of functions ranging from the replication and repair of DNA, to cell signaling (insulin is a protein, for instance), to the formation of tissues and other substances like hair and nails, and more.

The building of “muscle proteins” (the types of protein molecules that our muscles are made of) requires a variety of amino acids, some of which must be obtained from food (these are known as “essential” amino acids).When you eat a food that contains protein, your body breaks the protein molecules in the food down into the amino acids they’re comprised of, and then uses those amino acids to build its own proteins.

If you eat too few grams of protein every day, your body can become deficient in the amino acids it needs to build and repair muscle, and thus, muscle growth becomes impaired.The body has certain protein needs even if you don’t exercise. Remember that every day cells are dying and being regenerated, and this requires amino acids. When you do exercise, however, the body needs even more amino acids to repair damaged muscle fibers and, depending on what you’re doing, grow them larger.Now, this all sounds good in theory, and we all know bodybuilders eat large amounts of protein, but what does the scientific research say?

Research shows that high-protein diets… are more effective for building muscle are more effective at reducing body fat , including abdominal fat in

particular, help preserve lean mass increase satiety , helping you avoid hunger pangs and cravings.

A low-protein diet, on the other hand, is great for accelerating muscle loss while in a caloric deficit.The abundance of research available on high-protein dieting makes it very clear that it’s simply a superior way to diet for weight loss, and especially if you’re exercising as well.How much protein should you be eating, then?Research has shown that protein should comprise approximately 30% of your daily calories, but going as high as 40-50% is okay as well. For most people, that comes out to be about 1 – 1.2 grams of protein per pound of body weight.(In case you’re wondering if a high-protein diet is bad for your kidneys, this myth has been thoroughly debunked.)

Diet Mistake #6:Eating Too Little Carbohydrate

The low-carb diet feels… 

Yes, you read that correctly. I’m advocating eating carbohydrate. And no, I’m not a neo-Nazi and I don’t sacrifice babies to Moloch.

Seriously though, despite its current popularity, low-carb dieting sucks and is not only unnecessary for most people, but downright counter-productive.If you find that statement blasphemous, give me a minute to explain…

You don’t lose fat faster on a low-carb diet.That statement is basically blasphemous these days, but the general advice of going on a low-carb diet to maximize fat loss is scientifically bankrupt.

There are about 20 studies that low-carb proponents bandy about as definitive proof of the superiority of low-carb dieting for weight loss. This, this, and this are common examples. If you simply read the abstracts of these studies, low-carb dieting definitely seems more effective, and this type of glib “research” is what most low-carbers base their beliefs on.But there’s a big problem with many of these studies, and it has to do with protein intake.The problem is the low-carb diets in these studies invariably contained more protein than the low-fat diets.  Yes, one for one…without fail.In many cases, the low-fat groups were given less protein than even the RDI of .8 grams per kg of body weight, which is just woefully inadequate for weight loss purposes. Research has shown that even double and triple those (RDI) levels of protein intake isn’t enough to fully prevent the loss of lean mass while restricting calories for fat loss.So what we’re actually looking at in these studies is a high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet vs. low-protein, high-fat diet, and the former wins every time. But we can’t ignore the high-protein part and say it’s more effective because of the low-carb element.

In fact, better designed and executed studies prove the opposite: that when protein intake is high, low-carb dieting offers no especial weight loss benefits.

There are four studies I know of that meet these criteria and gee whiz look at that…when protein intake is high and matched among low-carb and high-carb dieters, there is no significant difference in weight loss.The bottom line is so long as you maintain a proper calorie deficit and keep your protein intake high, you’re going to maximize fat loss while preserving as much lean mass as possible.Going low-carb as well won’t help you lose more weight.

You build less muscle on a low-carb diet.When you reduce your carbohydrate intake, you reduce the amount of glycogen stored in the muscles. This, in turn, compromises your performance in the gym–you can expect a dramatic reduction in both muscle endurance and strength, which then limits the amount of progressive overload you can subject your muscles to in those workouts. (And less progressive overload in workouts = less muscle growth over time.)There are other downsides to low muscle glycogen levels.

Research conducted by scientists at Ball State University found that when muscle glycogen levels are low, post-workout signaling related to muscle growth is impaired. This, by the way, is especially unwanted when you’re dieting for weight loss because a calorie restriction alone already impairs   your body’s ability to synthesize proteins.In athletes, a low-carb diet has been shown to increase cortisol and reduce testosterone levels. This too is particularly problematic when you’re restricting calories, which also reduces anabolic hormone levels.So, we already know that a low-carb diet won’t help us lose fat faster, but as you now see, it’s looking pretty damn ugly for us weightlifters looking to get lean. It looks like all a low-carb diet does is make our workouts suck and speed up muscle loss.

This isn’t just theory, either.

A study conducted by researchers at the University of Rhode Island looked at how low- and high-carbohydrate intakes affected exercise-induced muscle damage, strength recovery, and whole body protein metabolism after a strenuous workout.The result was the subjects on the low-carbohydrate diet (which wasn’t all that low, actually—about 226 grams per day, versus 353 grams per day for the high-carbohydrate group) lost more strength, recovered slower, and showed lower levels of protein synthesis.In this study, researchers at McMaster University compared high- and low-carbohydrate dieting with subjects performing daily leg workouts. They found that those on the low-carbohydrate diet experienced higher rates of protein breakdown and lower rates of protein synthesis, resulting in less overall muscle growth than their higher-carbohydrate counterparts.All this is why I never drop my carbohydrate intake lower than about .8 grams per pound of body weight when cutting (and yes I get to 6% body fat eating this many carbs per day), and I’ll go as high as 2 to 2.5 grams per pound when bulking.

The bottom line on low-carb dieting.

Despite my general distaste for low-carb dieting, I actually do recommend it in certain cases.

For instance, if someone is severely overweight, his insulin sensitivity is going to be poor, and his body may do better with a lower carb diet than I recommend above. If someone is sedentary (no regular exercise), he too would be better served by a lower-

carb diet because his body simply doesn’t need the abundance of carbohydrate energy for anything.That said, if you exercise regularly, and especially with resistance training, a low-carb diet will do nothing for you but slow muscle growth when “bulking” and accelerate muscle loss when “cutting.”

Diet Mistake #7:Taking “Cheating” Too Far

I EARNED THIS 

Now that you know that “cheating” on a diet doesn’t mean eating a food deemed “unclean,” we can get at its real meaning:“Cheating” on your diet has nothing to do with what you eat–it’s simply erasing your calorie deficit or adding to your surplus by overeating. 

“Cheating” on your diet has nothing to do with what you eat–it’s all about HOW MUCH.CLICK TO TWEET

And you can accomplish this by slightly overeating every day or by going buck wild one or two days per week, which can then add back some or all the fat you lost during the week (effectively reducing or erasing your calorie deficit for the week) or cause you to gain too much fat too quickly if you’re in a calorie surplus every day.

If you’re dieting for fat loss (maintaining a weekly calorie deficit), I recommend having a moderate cheat meal every week. It’s a nice psychological boost and, depending on where you’re at in terms of body fat percentage, it can help keep the weight loss going.Notice I said cheat MEAL, though. And moderate. Not a cheat DAY or an all-out binge meal, because either can undo some or all of a week’s worth of fat loss (super high-fat meals with alcohol are the absolute worst).If you’re dieting for muscle growth (maintaining a weekly calorie surplus), I also recommend having a moderate cheat meal every week, but I also

recommend that you avoid dramatically spiking your calorie intake for that day.The number one mistake that people trying to “bulk” make is simply using it as a license to eat more or less whatever they want, and the result is rapid fat gain that in turn impairs muscle growth, partially defeating the point of being in a calorie surplus in the first place.When you’re in a calorie surplus and are cheating, you can end the day a few hundreds calories above your normal daily intake, but don’t go crazy.

If you need to, you can even reduce your carbohydrate and fat intake throughout the day to “save up” calories for the larger meal and thus keep your overall intake for the day in a reasonable range.

Stop Making These Diet Mistakes and Your Body Will Change

Like anything, proper dieting doesn’t require utter perfection to get results. It just requires that you do enough of the important things right.There are, of course, many other potential diet mistakes you can make, but they’re inconsequential compared to the seven outlined here. These are the key, “make or break” factors of dieting that you simply can’t screw around with.

Stop making these mistakes and get these things right, and you’ll never fret over dieting again. You’ll learn to use it as a tool for changing body composition as you desire, and you’ll gain freedom and control over what and how you eat.