Amped Training

So to recap, here are the steps to designing a diet:

Establish baseline calorie needs

This means that you'll ideally want to consider 15 calories per pound as being your maintenance point. Start with a mild deficit, say 20-30% below this value, or 12 calories per pound, whichever is lower, then adjust your intake as needed.

If you're looking to gain weight, simply do the opposite. Start with a small surplus, then adjust as needed.

Set a protein intake between 1g/lb and 1.5g/lb

Remember not to go below 1g/lb. If you're eating more carbs and total calories, protein doesn't have to be as high. The lower your calories and carbs go, the more protein you'll need.

Ironically you actually need more protein while losing weight than you do while gaining, so keep that in mind as well.

Set carb intake appropriately, either low, moderate, or high

Here you could define low as under 75-100g, moderate would be 100-200g, and high would be anything over 200g per day.

For performance needs and weight gain, 200g or more per day is a good starting point. If you're looking to improve body composition and drop fat quicker, keeping carbs under 100g per day is a good idea. The moderate approach is the balance point, still allowing improvements in body comp while not entirely sacrificing performance.

Fill in the remainder with fats

Once you've established your protein and carb intakes, you simply fill in the rest with fats.

If you're 120 lbs, are shooting for 12 cals/lb (1440 cals) and getting 1.25g/lb of protein (150g/600 calories) along with 100g of carbs (400 calories), then you'd simply add that up (1000 calories) and subtract it from your calorie goals (1440 – 1000 = 440 cals). Then take the number of calories you have remaining and divide by 9 (there are 9 calories per gram of fat), so 440/9 would give you roughly 49g of fat, which I'd probably round up to a ballpark figure of 50g.

It really is that simple, folks.

Add refeeds if your calories are too low or when you become lean enough to require them.

How do you know? Well, it's really hard to say without trial and error, but considering that BMR is around 10 cals/lb, anything below that will be “starvation level”. Eating below that point for extended periods of time is not a good idea.

However, this will also depend on your current body fat levels. The more fat you hold, the longer you'll be able to diet at that level with minimal negative effects (due to the leptin signaling).

The opposite holds true as well. If you're already pretty lean and trying to get leaner, you'll likely need more refeeds. In women this seems to hold especially true beyond a certain threshold. A lot of women find they don't do well with larger carb loads, so spreading it out into more frequent, but smaller, refeeds can be beneficial. Cravings for carbs seem to become more common at this point, as well, which may be another indicator.

If you're eating above this point, chances are you can go quite awhile without the need for an actual refeed. It will always be a trade-off of bodyfat levels and calorie intake. The fatter you are, the more you can get away with brute-force approaches. Once you become leaner, it becomes more beneficial to cycle things by including more calories and carbs.

Stick to it. This is not an overnight or a temporary process.

Which is where most people fail. A diet is not something you go on for six weeks to drop 5 pounds, then just go right back to how you ate before. It's no surprise you gain it all back, if not more on top of it.

Dieting requires consistency and it requires that you not ever go back to how you ate before. The psychological elements of dieting, not surprisingly, are why you have people constantly failing and some even going as far as to say diets don't work.

You have to stick to it, and sticking to something is always a lot easier to do if it's not a miserable process. This is why I ranted so much earlier about “clean eating” and the OCD weighing and measuring of food. All of those things might make you feel better mentally, like you're “doing something”, but they won't net you any better results.

For all the OCD women with food issues that do these things and get results from it, there are a great many more that suffer, see no results, and ultimately end up binging in response to the ultra-restrictive diets.

Don't get me wrong, some respond well and do just fine on ultra-restrictive diets. If that's your cup of tea, more power to you. But it is not a requirement to see success, it won't ensure any better results, and you're not a failure if you can't eat that way.

And that's just about that. It really is just that simple; follow a few basic rules, do the math, and you've got your diet.

Notice I didn't give out any meal plans. That's because meal plans are stupid. It takes away your freedom to choose foods for one, and rigidly locking yourself into a strict plan is not typically the best way to go about things.

You can use www.fitday.com, www.calorieking.com, or several other online calorie-counting web tools to track your diet. The USDA website has a food database for download that has the nutrient values for most common foods. Or just use a simple pen and paper.

Control your food choices in the context of your calorie and macronutrient needs, and you're fine. It doesn't have to be exact. If your total comes out to 48g and you're supposed to get 50g, don't freak out. You're well inside the margin of error anyway. I don't even bother rounding things to less than 10g for that very reason.

In short, dieting as a concept is not hard.

Up next: Part III – Working in the Real World

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