There are many different diet plans available, and with so many to choose from, it’s important to choose the one that’s a good fit for your individual lifestyle and preferences. The macronutrient diet is easily adaptable to any dietary schedule, lifestyle, and preference. This chapter will take you through both the science of the macronutrient diet and also the wide range of benefits that this flexible diet offers. You’ll also learn about your body’s different energy burning cycles and how properly integrating your macronutrients throughout the day can help your progress.
The macronutrient diet doesn’t always make sense. After all, you’ve probably been told your entire life that you can only lose weight eating “clean” foods. Candy bars and pizza? Those foods make you fat. If you want to lose weight, you can only eat grilled chicken, sweet potatoes, egg whites, spinach, and asparagus.
This information is well-meaning—most of the time. A lot of so-called experts truly believe that you must eat these clean food sources if you want to lose weight and get healthy. This book isn’t trying to show that eating indulgent foods is bad, not by any means. A diet full of whole foods is going to have significantly more nutritional benefit than a diet full of processed and packaged foods.
You must understand that the “clean eating” diet isn’t the only way. It’s very possible, and in fact more sustainable in the long term, to eat the foods you enjoy in moderation on a regular basis. The idea of giving up any one food forever is a scary idea, but if you know you can enjoy your favorite foods whenever you want, guilt-free, so long as you account for them, it makes the prospect of long-term dieting much easier.
As you’ll recall from Chapter 1, a calorie is simply a measure of energy, excess calories are stored as body fat, and calories come from protein, carbohydrates, and fat. That’s a good basic understanding, but it’s time to get a little more in-depth with that and look at the various ways your body uses energy and which macronutrients support those energy systems. The idea that excess calories will be stored for later usage is the big picture; now it’s time to look at the details.
There are three categories of energy systems in your body—complex processes that produce the required energy for whatever activity you’re doing. Within these categories are various subcategories, but unless you’re concerned with elite levels of human performance optimization, the subcategories aren’t particularly important to understand. For fat loss and nutrition, you just need to know the basics of the big three systems.
Whether you’re sleeping in bed or sprinting up a hill, one of the three energy systems is at work. The scientific names for these systems are the ATP-PC system, glycolytic system, and oxidative system, but just think of them as the fast, medium, and slow energy systems.
This fast energy system is your maximum effort, short-duration system. It can supply an intense burst of energy for around 10–12 seconds before it runs out of steam and the next system takes over. This is used when you are jumping, lifting something very heavy, or doing a fast and short run, like sprinting across a basketball court.
In terms of nutrition, you don’t really need to worry about this one too much. Just know it exists. Because it’s such a short burst of energy, it uses something called adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which is made and stored in your muscle cells. As long as you’re getting enough calories and nutrients, you’ll have plenty of ATP available.
Next up is the glycolytic system, or medium energy system, which is pretty complicated. All you need to know is that this system powers your moderate-to-high intensity, short-duration activities, such as sprinting, lifting weights, playing a sport, or anything else that would feel like a workout. The medium energy system kicks in after about 10 seconds, when the fast energy system runs out, and works for slightly longer—although it still runs out fairly quickly.
This energy system primarily uses glucose produced from stored glycogen. To put it in simpler terms, glucose is a simple sugar molecule, so this system is running on sugar. When you consume carbohydrates, they are stored as glycogen in your muscles. Glycogen is readily available for your body to use during exercise, and while the body can produce it naturally using protein or fat, nothing is faster than having stored glycogen ready to go.
Those carbohydrates, in the form of glycogen, are later broken down further into simple sugar molecules that fuel the glycolytic (or medium) energy system. This is why athletes talk about carb-loading before a race or big sporting event; they want to make sure their glycogen stores are filled so their bodies have plenty to draw from.
Even if you aren’t an athlete, consuming carbohydrates around your workout is important for maximum performance. Now that you understand how this system works, you should be able to see why. Giving your body readily available fuel in the form of glycogen is essential if you want to run at your highest level.
So what happens if there is no glycogen in the muscles to be used? If you remember, you learned that carbohydrates are not essential for life. If they aren’t essential, and you aren’t consuming any and storing them as glycogen, how does this medium energy system operate? Well, your body can undergo the complex process of gluconeogenesis. This process involves breaking down stored muscle tissue, ripping it apart, and converting it to glucose. This is a much slower way to get glucose and is not optimal.
If you regularly exercise intensely, your best bet is including carbs in your diet, at least on workout days. You can work out without carbs, but your performance will suffer, as you won’t have that glycogen ready for easy access. Think of your glycogen stores as a fuel tank for the car that is your body and carbohydrates as the fuel. Without fueling up, you’ll have a difficult time operating at peak efficiency for any length of time.
The last of the big three you need to know about is the oxidative system. This is the slow energy system and provides a sustained release of energy for low-to-moderate activities that last a bit longer. Long runs, swimming, hiking, hot yoga, yard work—these are all activities that are more intense than your resting state but can be sustained for a long time.
This system uses a mixture of carbohydrates and fats for fuel. While carbohydrates are still important and will benefit your body when it’s using the oxidative system, they aren’t quite as important as they are to the medium energy system.
If you regularly go on long walks, hikes, or swim laps for your exercise, carbs are optional for you. They may help, but your body can also run just fine off of fat during these long-duration exercises. The choice is yours. Carbs are very useful during moderate-to-high intensity, short-duration exercises, but with these easier forms of exercise, carbs aren’t quite as important.
A flexible diet is adaptable to any lifestyle and schedule. Where most diets are focused solely on fat loss, the macronutrient diet works with any goal, whether that goal is fat loss, muscle gain, athletic performance, or simply general health.
The next section will provide real-life examples of how this diet can be the perfect fit for any lifestyle. It may sound too good to be true; after all, diets aren’t supposed to be fun, right?
Well, not only can this diet be fun, but it’s also the best option for a sustainable, healthy plan that you could realistically follow for the rest of your life. Most diets are too restrictive and aren’t meant to last longer than twelve weeks. If you put in the time to understand and learn how flexible dieting works, you’ll know how to eat for optimal health for the rest of your life.
The number one benefit of this diet, and the reason so many people find it sustainable for the long haul, is the lack of restriction. It’s not a free-for-all diet and you do need to exercise some self-control and portion control, but you can still eat any food you want, so long as it fits your macro targets for the day.
Freedom to choose what foods you want to eat is a refreshing approach to dieting, and the one that will be the most sustainable. Basic psychology reveals that humans tend to be more drawn to what they aren’t supposed to have. If someone walked up and told you that you could never eat your favorite food again, how much more would you crave it? Even if you didn’t want it that badly before, knowing it would be off the table forever probably makes you want it.
With flexible dieting this is never an issue. You don’t have to have one last cheat day before giving up bread for the summer. You don’t have to skip dessert at social events. With the macronutrient diet, if you plan ahead of time and make the correct adjustments, any food you can imagine can fit your plan.
Once you get this diet down, which does take practice and a bit of mental training if you’ve dieted before, you can start to remove the guilt you may associate with eating “junk” food. It’s very common to see someone on a diet slip up and eat something they weren’t supposed to, feel guilty and ashamed, and then just blow off the diet completely, promising to start again on Monday. This is a bad cycle and an unnecessary negative association with food. Flexible dieting allows you to break this cycle for good if you take the time to practice it and make it work.
From a physical health perspective, flexible dieting is a great way to get in shape and ensure you’re getting the proper nutrients you need without any guesswork. The precision required means that if you set up your numbers and food sources properly, you can give your body exactly what it needs to feel and look good day after day.
Other diets tend to take a broad approach; they ask you to eliminate certain food groups, try to control your portions, and hope for the best. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t, but they don’t always ensure you’re actually getting the right nutrients.
Simply telling you to cut out processed foods, for example, doesn’t mean you’ll understand the ins and outs of nutrition and make sure you’re eating the right foods every day. Because flexible dieting requires you to get involved and pay attention to what’s in all the foods you’re eating, you’ll learn a lot about nutrition and what’s actually in various foods as you begin tracking.
As far as body composition is concerned, flexible dieting is the most precise way to control your food intake and make small adjustments as needed. If you always have an idea of exactly where your calories are at, as well as your individual macronutrients, it’s easy to make a small adjustment, like removing 30 grams of carbs from your daily intake, or adding 10 grams of fat, things like that. An untracked diet makes it impossible to be precise, and this precision is needed to push through plateaus and continue to see results.
The number one benefit of the flexible diet is that as long as you track your macros, you can eat any foods you want at any time of the day, and if the numbers add up, you’ll still see the changes in your body that you desire. No other diet out there allows this sort of customization to your individual lifestyle.
Time is the biggest reason given for why people can’t get in shape. Exercising takes time, cooking healthy meals takes time, and most people have very full schedules. Between work, a social life, and family time, the idea of cooking three to four healthy meals every day and finding time to exercise throughout the week can seem nearly impossible.
With flexible dieting, you can build a meal plan that fits your schedule. If you find you have a very busy morning with no time to eat, you can grab a light snack and save most of your calories for later in the day. If you wake up starving, you can eat a huge breakfast. If you work split shifts or are a student with an irregular schedule, you can simply eat whenever you have a minute to sit down and make the numbers work.
There is no rigid schedule, or strict meal plan to follow. Every part of the macronutrient diet can be tailored to your exact needs and preferences.
On to the most fun part of the book: how to eat all the foods you love without sabotaging your progress. This may be the only diet in existence that not only allows you to eat your favorite foods but encourages it. You also shouldn’t have to use negative words like “cheat meals”; these meals and snacks should fit into your diet without causing you to miss your macros, and as such are perfectly acceptable.
The biggest problem people have is regarding health concerns. You’ll hear lots of false claims about artificial sweeteners, processed foods, GMOs, and other “evils” of the food industry. It may be worth addressing those things if you’re in the medical field or you have a special condition, but those are irrelevant for most people. Are artificial sweeteners healthy? Probably not. However, their dangers are severely overstated, and unless you’re consuming ten cans of diet soda a day, you should be fine. The other fact people tend to overlook is that carrying excess body fat is far more unhealthy than whatever trace ingredients might be in your afternoon snack.
If someone is maintaining a healthy body weight with the occasional vending machine snack or diet soda thrown in, that person is much healthier than the person who’s still 40-pounds overweight and worrying about GMOs and artificial sweeteners. This book is meant to help you finally make a lasting change and not get caught up in the minor details. Worry about those little things later.
The truth is, the most effective diet is the one you can stick to for a long time. Making a lasting change takes time, and bouncing from diet to diet, losing and gaining the same five pounds over and over, isn’t going to get you anywhere. If having a cookie every night after dinner helps you finally reach your goal weight, that’s significantly better than trying to cut out all sweets and resorting to binge eating every weekend, making no long-term progress.
Now that you know it’s okay to eat fun foods on a regular basis, you need to understand how much of your diet should consist of these treats. The big concern here is overall internal health, not pure weight loss or weight gain.
If you recall in the section in Chapter 1 about micronutrients, you read that they are vital for internal health. Heart health, bone health, mental health, energy levels, your mood . . . all of these things and many more rely on adequate nutrition. These micronutrients come from fruits, vegetables, lean meats, healthy fats, and other things that would typically be considered healthy foods.
The issue then with eating processed foods is that they are generally lacking in these micronutrients. Spending your macros on processed foods means you’ll have less available for whole foods that provide those good nutrients. Many people try to use a multivitamin or greens supplement as nutritional insurance, which isn’t a bad idea, but nothing will be as good as eating whole foods every day.
A good rule is to follow the 80/20 rule. Eighty percent of the time try to eat whole, unprocessed foods. These are the foods that supply the nutrition you need to feel your best. The other 20 percent of the time, have some fun. Think of a few treats you love and figure out how to work them into your meal plan. You can do a small treat every day, or eat whole foods most of the week and have one or two fun meals. The choice is yours. Just keep in mind that the more processed foods you eat, the greater risk you have of feeling less that optimal, as you’re lowering your nutrient intake.