Not Just a Man's World

I’ve just been helping Chris write his diet for his weight loss cycle which will start at Easter.

I’m also going to be following a short weight loss cycle to keep him company.  Since we do our workouts together and also eat similar meals it is convenient for me to follow a weight loss regime with chris.  However, I won’t be taking it as hard as I did in January.  I’ll hopefully be doing just enough to get rid of the pub dinners from our walking trip in the Lakes last week!

While I will be following the diet I used to such great effect in January, we have had to start from scratch with Chris’s diet, learning from mistakes we made last autumn and lessons learned from my January cycle.

I thought it might help to outline the top ten things I do when I am writing a new weight loss diet for someone.

1. Decide on your goals: Before starting, decide what you want to achieve.  Do you want to reach a particular body fat percentage?  Have you decided how many kilos you want to drop of inches you want to lose from your waist/hips/bottom etc?  How long will your weight loss period last?  If you aren’t sure how much you want to lose or how long you have then you will struggle to pitch your diet at the right level.
   

   Have a goal you can measure and work towards

2. Sign up for a free FitDay account: FitDay is a superb tool and a free account gives you all the functionality you need to get a good grasp on what you are eating and what you are planning to eat.  I don’t tend to take much notice of the RDA analysis of vitamins and minerals but it provides a useful guideline for how many calories you are eating and how they divide up between fat, protein and carbohydrate.
3. Analyse what you eat at the moment: Put a standard menu into FitDay.  Chris and I are probably a bit unusual, since we eat the same meals every week and menus for each day are almost identical.  It makes doing this step very easy for us.  However, if your daily menu varies widely in content or you are starting from a completely blank canvas then take the time to put a few days (or even a full week) of data into FitDay.  This information will give you a good idea of where your problems calories are at the moment.
4.  Invest the time to record custom foods for brands that you eat regularly: FitDay is good, but the fat/protein/carbohydrate breakdown and total calories of some of their foods certainly don’t resemble the brands I buy.  If you eat a particular brand of cottage cheese or yoghurt every day, or you intend to put it into your new diet, then there is no substitute for creating a custom food.  For us this became time worth investing when we found that swapping to custom foods reduced the overall calories in Chris’s diet by about 500 calories.  At the time, I was trying to put additional calories into his diet!
5. Do some careful research: Nothing beats detailed research and the internet is loaded with good advice to help you get started if you are prepared to invest the time.  The initial information you want to find out is the total calories you should be aiming for (depending on your current weight or lean body mass and what your goals are).  Next up, you want to get comfortable with how you want that to split out between carbohydrate, protein and fat.  Finally, you may find there are other things that matter to you – for me acid-base balance and keeping net carbohydrates low are of most importance.  It would be impossible for me to list here all the sources that I recommend, but for starters, I suggest articles on Testosterone Nation (although women should take some of the numbers with a pinch of salt, they are often targeted at male physiques) and the archives at Figure Athlete for women-specific advice (in particular the articles by Chad Waterbury).  In addition, there is plenty of really good diet and nutrition advice to be found from Robb Wolf, Brian St Pierre and John Berardi.  And of course, I’ve done quite a few detailed posts over the last few months on weight loss and fat loss diets.
6. Create a replica of your current diet in FitDay to amend (using the “view my recent foods” function): I’ve tried building diets from scratch and it is incredibly difficult.  It is much easier to start with what you’ve got and improve it.  This serves two important purposes: (i) you aren’t trying to reinvent the wheel; (ii) you will find it easier to stick to your diet if it doesn’t represent a radical change.  Better to make a few changes, let those settle, then make some more changes.
7. Check you’ve got all your oil-based supplements included in your analysis: Fish oil is known to assist with fat burning and Chad Waterbury provides a recommendation on how much to take when following a female physique diet which may work out at quite a high quantity.  Unfortunately it’s fatty nature also means that it provides a surprising number of calories.  The quantity that I take during a fat loss diet provides me with 117 of my 1,000 calories!  It is therefore crucial that you remember to include your supplements in your analysis to account for these easily forgotten calories.
8. Get your calories to within 150 calories of the right number: This may take some effort.  Start by running your eye down the calories column in FitDay.  Where are the obvious big-ticket items?  Do you need to eat them?  If they serve a good nutritional purpose (eg. they are high protein content, like beef) then is there something equally nutritious but with fewer calories that you can substitute (eg. chicken), or should you reduce the quanitity?  I recommend scanning down this column alongside the carbohydrate column.  Nearly all cutting diets benefit from being low-carbohydrate and if you are eating any potatoes, pasta, rice or processed carbohydrates they will add huge numbers of calories for minimal nutritional benefit.
   
9. Get the protein levels right: Now you’ve got your calories near the goal, focus on the protein.  If you want to lose fat without stripping your body of all of its muscle then you need to maintain protein levels.  Protein sources also have the benefit of being very filling, so keeping your intake of protein very high can ensure that, even on reduced calories, you don’t feel hungry.  The easiest way to improve protein levels is to identify your current main sources of protein and improve these.  For a cutting diet, swapping to leaner meat sources like chicken and removing the yolks from eggs can help you keep protein levels high without pushing calories up due to the calorie-dense fats.
   

   Chicken is good for a weight loss diet

10. Get the carbohydrate levels right: As I mentioned before, low-carbohydrate diets have been shown to be beneficial for weight loss.  I tend to concentrate on “net carbs”, calculated as the total carbs less the dietary fibre carbs.  I do this on the basis that I still require fibre in my diet but it makes me concentrate on replacing carb sources with the most fibre-dense sources I can find, such as broccoli and cabbage.  My personal preference is to keep this net carb figure below 30g, but you may reach your own conclusions through your research. 

Once you’ve done all of this you may need to go back and insert a bit more food, or cut out some of the remaining fat-heavy foods to reach the right total calories, but otherwise you should find you have a decent menu to start you off.

I hope these tips have been a helpful starting point.  Let me know how it goes!

Related posts:

1. Alternative approaches to weight loss diets
2. Foods to avoid to lose weight
3. Improving nutrition for muscle gain
4. Resistance training for weight loss