Before getting into to how to eat, it’s important to realize the first step is to plan and track what you eat. If you don’t plan and track what you eat, you can end up eating far too little or too much. Always remember that eating to lose weight, get lean, or lose fat only matters in the context of your maintenance calories.
How to Track Your Food Intake
I highly recommend you Cronometer to plan and track your food.
When you weigh your foods, always convert your scale to grams to weigh in grams. Also, always weigh your food raw when possible. You may be able to find a cooked version of a food in the Cronometer database, but not always. You can almost always find the raw equivalent food.
Furthermore, food loses water when it is cooked. Food that is weighed after cooking will have a different weight than before it is cooked. If you mistakenly use the “raw version” of a food in the database to plan cooked versions, your daily calories will be off by many calories.
How to Eat — Prioritizing Macros and Calories
As stated in earlier articles, you WILL lose weight if you eat below your maintenance calories. But the question is, will you stay full and satisfied? This answer will always depend on the source of your calories.
To stay full and satisfied while losing weight, how you eat should be prioritized in the following order.
- Hit your protein goal.
- Hit your calorie goal.
- Prioritize your carbs over fat.
To be clear, I want you to hit all these goals. I only added a prioritized list because I don’t want you to leave your protein up to chance. If your protein goal is 200 grams daily, I want you to manage your meals so that you try to get an equal amount of protein at each one. For example, if you feel you need to eat five times per day, each meal should contain at least 40 grams of protein.
Technically, you don’t have to do this. However, I’d rather you reach your daily calorie requirement by hitting all your protein than to reach it by eating too many carbs and fat. If you eat too many carbs and fat without properly managing your protein you can end up with only a few remaining calories for protein.
To hit your calorie goal, you may sometimes overeat your carbs while undereating fat. Or you may sometimes do the opposite. You may sometimes overeat fat while undereating carbs. This is okay. What’s not ok is going over your calorie goal, missing your protein goal if you’re trying to keep or build muscle, or undereating fat all the time. Try to always stay within plus or minus 10 grams of your fat. Remember, dietary fat helps you digest your food.
What to Eat — Finding the “right” Foods
To hit your goals, technically, the easiest approach may be the traditional bodybuilder approach of eating chicken, broccoli, and rice, if you add enough fat. But I want you to take a more sensible approach that allows you to eat foods you’re going to be committed to for life. So, in reaching your macronutrient goals, I want you to take what’s commonly referred to as a flexible dieting approach.
With this approach, if you hit your calorie and macronutrient goals, you can pretty much eat whatever you want. But there’s a caveat. Not all foods are created equally.
Focus of Feeling Full
Some foods you eat are not going to make you feel full. For example, the most popular carbohydrate choices are rice, potato, or pasta. If you want to feel full while minimizing the number of calories you eat, you should try to prioritize potatoes over pasta and rice. And next, you should prioritize rice over pasta, because pasta is way too easy to eat a lot of and it has a lot of calories for such a little amount of food. So, you should try to choose pasta last. But you absolutely can eat all three types of those carbs. I like to eat a lot of rice because I pair it with Chicken breast, and Chicken breast helps keep me stay satisfied.
“Trigger” Foods
Some foods are going to be trigger foods, meaning, you won’t be able to stop eating them. Only you know yourself. You can eat whatever you want if you plan for it, but if you find eating a certain food makes you eat more of it when you know you only want to eat a certain serving size, you probably should try to avoid it.
“Restaurant” Foods
Generic restaurant foods, as I discussed, will be way too difficult to track. If you must go to a restaurant, try to go to one that’s internationally recognized. Their calories may be inaccurate, but at least you’ll have some data you can use. But if you go to, say, a mom and pop’s restaurant you’ll have no way of accurately guessing the number of calories you’re eating.
If you must go to a mom and pop’s restaurant, it’s best to plan a day around it by having two small but filling protein meals before you go to these. And as I said earlier, try to go to them no more than once per week, try to have just one meal, and try to avoid any fillers like “chips and salsa” or “bread.” Remember, calories matter if you want to win this game.
Consider Avoiding Liquid Calories
Some foods will quickly take up way too many calories. Dieting and choosing the right foods is a lifelong game.
Like I said, you’re always going to be playing a game of “how can I eat the most amount of food, using the least amount of calories to stay under my maintenance calories, while also hitting my protein goals.” Here are two critical cheats that I want you to strongly consider:
The first is to stop drinking calories.
The second is to swap sugar with sweeteners.
