“Because life is complicated enough with counting calories…”

Dave was on-track. He’d been following an IIFYM (If It Fits Your Macros) diet plan for a week and was nailing it.

Every day was almost the same. He’d have the same breakfast, snacks, lunch, protein shake and supplements. And rotate his dinners around….Sometimes. But it was mainly chicken.

He measured out ever grain of rice meticulously to ensure he had the correct portion size and used scales to weigh every ounce of meat that entered his mouth.

He knew exactly how many grams of carbs, protein and fat he was eating each day.

Dave felt as though he was on the direct train to success-ville, with a quick stop stop via ripped up and shredded town. He felt epic.

The problem with IIFYMs and any other strange diet…

If you’ve used IIFYM or any other kind of diet before and it worked, that’s cool. I’m not saying it doesn’t work for some, but in general anything that is complicated is hard to follow long term.

Who wants to be counting grams of food at every meal? Not me.

It’s Complicated…But doesn’t have to be

We humans have a tendency to over complicate things. The simple solutions are the ones which work best. Counting calories, macronutrients, etc is hard, time consuming and very inaccurate. It’s not necessary for 99.9% of the population.

Throw away the scales and eat clean…

The basic principle here is to avoid processed food where possible and to instead replace with foods like lean protein, good-for-you carbs and fats, fresh fruits and vegetables.

There is a raft of info and recipes online on this, and the good news is that it’s not rocket science. The trick however is to not approach this as a ‘diet’, but instead as a lifestyle shift – so it’s much better to make small incremental changes that can last for years than a complete change which only lasts for weeks…

oh and as a nice added bonus this will also give you more energy, healthier skin and a longer life.

Why it works

Our bodies have not changed in the last few thousand years, but our diets have. We are now eating more frankenstein food than ever before. Less fresh, more processed.

If it needs an ingredients list it’s not a fresh, whole food. If it ran around, grew on a tree or came directly from the ground you should probably eat it.

A back-to-basics approach is the only long term, sustainable, healthy and easy to follow plan in my opinion. But it’s not easy to get right.

The things we buy…

Enter any supermarket and you will see thousands of items of processed, nutritionally poor foods. How do you spot them? Easy. They are usually bright, attractive items designed to make your desire them. They’re usually on offer, buy one get one free type deals.

Super charge your transformation

For those wanting to accelerate their body transformation, it is possible to also do DNA profiling to understand how your unique genetic make-up responds to different food types, e.g. are you carbohydrate or fat sensitive?, and to then tweak what you eat accordingly. More on this later in the genetics section.