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by Tony Gjokaj February 25, 2020 5 min read
With fitness, there’s plenty of non-absolutes. Simply put, there’s no direct or secret way of getting in the best shape of your life. It’s all consistent effort.
Since I started working out, I’ve seen a constant cycle of dieting styles: Keto, Intermittent Fasting, Low Fat diets, and more. Every couple of years, the trends repeat cyclicly.
We can choose any of these diets. A lot of them sound appealing, HOWEVER: What if you can’t stick with the newest diet in the long term?
Truth is, there's no one way to diet. We all require different nutrient intakes based on our genetics, training style, personal preferences, culture, and more.
With that, I wanted to propose a systematic solution to your own dietary preferences: Flexible Dieting.
In this post, we are going to explore Flexible Dieting.
Let's dive in!
Flexible Dieting is a system that revolves around a few of the following principles:
With these six principles, you can develop simple dieting guidelines that you can follow to craft a powerful diet around your lifestyle.
Let's explore these six principles below.
While a calorie is a simple measurement of energy, there are many methods you can utilize to help you eat properly. You can track calories to help gain or lose weight, track using a food journal, or you can start by developing portion control through something like the "PFFT" Method.
We will discuss these methods in this section.
Use the one that seems easy to get into and build a habit around!
If you’re just getting started with tracking, I would encourage you to start by JUST keeping a “Food Diary” or Journal. A simple 1% change per day is manageable. If you go all-in immediately, you most likely won’t be able to build a solid habit in nutrition.
Don’t disregard this one; this simple step will change your lifestyle drastically! This small sort of incremental change will keep you motivated to push drive you in the right direction.
Just like tracking your monthly expenses, I believe it’s important to track what you eat. This is because you build AWARENESS when it comes to what you eat. When it comes to meal tracking, you can write it down, or download a meal tracking app like MyFitnessPal.
MyFitnessPal will help you track foods by searching in their database for the food you eat. I do this to track my food when I eat out at restaurants too: even if the calories aren’t exact, I have the food tracked and I’ll be more inclined to share my dessert.
Other great apps would include:
There are plenty of apps you can use to track food. If this is not necessarily something you prefer, we can always use the portion control method in the next section.
If you don’t want to track your foods, portion them. This is where the Palm-Fist-Fist-Thumb strategy comes in! From Precision Nutrition‘s method on portion control, you can use this to size our portions PER MEAL. Here’s how to do it:
As you can see here, this is a less complicated method of “food tracking”. By default, this is should put you in a good spot for “maintenance calories” if you do some form of activity.
If you find that after a COUPLE OF WEEKS you are struggling to drop weight, take out 1/2 portion of carbohydrates out in one meal (or take a fruit out) and assess. I guarantee you will notice results over time.
Once you get used to food tracking AND you want to take your calorie tracking further, you can now get a MORE accurate calculation of your calories to “move the scale in the direction you want it”.
The following steps are what I use in getting a more accurate estimation of maintenance calories before I dig into either a “gaining weight” phase or fat loss phase.
This method was created by Dr. Eric Helms (he knows his sh**), and it’s fairly solid:
First Step: Get your “Base Calories”. Take your body weight and multiply it by 10. This will give you a base calorie intake. The base calorie intake is what you technically burn through daily without activity.
Second Step: Find the “Activity Multiplier”. The activity multiplier is a generic estimation; you might need to adjust depending on how much energy you expend. This is determined by the following:
Third Step: Take your base calories and multiply them by your multiplier to get your “Maintenance Calories”. This will determine the calories you can POSSIBLY eat to maintain your current physique.
Fourth Step: Determine your phase (whether fat loss or gaining), then add/subtract from “maintenance calories”.
And there you have it!
So there it is, methods and a brief intro to flexible nutrition. There is so much to cover with nutrition that we cannot cover in just one blog post. This is why we encourage discussion!
Any questions, comments, or insights? Throw them below! Let's discuss!
Until next time, legion!
Tony is the Owner of Reforged. He is a PN1 Certified Nutrition Coach and has been in the fitness space for over a decade. His goal is to help millions exercise their way out of depression and anxiety.
by Tony Gjokaj April 25, 2023 3 min read
Exercise can feel like a chore, and even if you know it’s good for your health, the motivation to get moving sometimes just isn’t there.
But it doesn’t have to be a burden - by making exercise meaningful to you, it can become something fun and rewarding!
Here are five ways to make exercise more meaningful!
by Tony Gjokaj October 07, 2022 4 min read
Men, I know what it is like to be overweight and depressed.
Not having the energy to do anything but relax and sleep.
While relaxation and sleep are incredibly important, they can make us feel like we are not making progress in our lives.
And when depression hits, it’s very difficult to push through with exercise and weight loss.
But did you know that even though it takes time and some effort, you don’t need to get obsessively crazy over it?
In fact, with just a few small adjustments, you can lose weight, fight back against depression, and take your life back.
If you're serious about shedding pounds and pushing away those depression demons, here are five tips that can help get you started.
by Tony Gjokaj September 05, 2022 4 min read
A few weeks ago, my buddy Grant and I talked about nutrition.
We talked about how he's lost over 120 pounds so far with the weight loss progress he's been making.
This is all because he has been making healthier decisions over time.
One of the newest challenges he's facing right now is he's got a new job. He's working 10 to 12 hour days with physical demanding labor.
And what's been happening for him is that he's been super exhausted, he's not motivated to meal prep, he's having trouble trying to sit down and cook foods doesn't have the energy doesn't have the time.
So what I propose is five tips that you can use to live a more on the go fast food healthy eating lifestyle.
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