• You shouldn’t eat fruit past noon

• I’m trying to eat clean so I’m switching to plant-based proteins

• Eating carbs - or fat - or both - makes you fat

It is quite popular to talk about entire food groups being bad or good. Fasting and eating windows is also a hot topic. But when it comes down to it, there are only three things that really matter.

Once I can get this across to anyone, then it becomes quite clear that the food group or food timing guidelines are all doing roughly the same thing. And none of these methods are essential to have a healthy diet. So let go of the distractions and buzz words and focus on these three things instead:

Food Quantity

Every diet that transforms your body and helps you reshape by dropping fat and maintaining muscle does so the same way. The diet creates an energy deficit. You consume less calories than you burn each day. Over time this leads to a drop in bodyweight, since your body starts to use your own fat for energy.

All diets have some mechanism for controlling calories. In the intermittent fasting example, by restricting the time window that you eat, you reduce calories inadvertently. If you subscribe to low carb, then by reducing carbs in the diet you inadvertently reduce calories. If you make the switch to plant based and remove animal products, then you can inadvertently cut out large sections of calories.

But with any of these diets, you can find a way to hack the system and sneak in more calories than you need. Even if you fast and skip breakfast, you can have a bigger lunch, dinner, and dessert and negate the calorie deficit. If you go low carb but start eating tons of high fat KETO snacks and desserts, your calorie deficit will vanish. And that giant bag of potato chips that was vegan had 1200 calories in it and you ate it all without blinking. There goes your plant based calorie deficit.

No diet is magical. Some can make a calorie deficit feel easy. For that reason they can be beneficial. But you can mess them up just as quickly as they helped you get into a fat loss phase.

Nutrient Density

Every diet that transforms your body and helps you reshape by dropping fat and maintaining muscle also shares this in common. They all deliver enough of the right nutrients to your body without pushing your calories overboard.

The most important nutrient that we are concerned with in our fat loss and muscle building approach is PROTEIN. Next up would be essential fats and micro nutrients. Overall, we want our diet to first deliver the right amount of CALORIES for our needs, and then within that calorie budget, get us the right amount of protein.

WHAT THE HECK IS CLEAN EATING?

I hear people talking about eating “CLEAN” often. A good working definition of CLEAN eating is food that is low in calories and high in nutrients. One example is egg whites. This is essentially pure protein. It has a lot of protein with minimal calories. Other examples are fruits and vegetables, as they have lower calories when compared to other carbohydrate sources and are generally packed with fiber and micronutrients.

So as you evaluate whether a food is good or bad, remember that how “CLEAN” the food is should be a reflection of how many nutrients are in it that we care about combined with lower calories. In order, this is what makes a food “cleaner:”

1. Low Calories

2. High Protein

3. High Fiber

4. Essential Fats and Micronutrients

Consistency

Every diet that transforms your body and helps you reshape by dropping fat and maintaining muscle also shares this in common. They are diets you can do for a long period of time consistently.

It is relatively easy (though uncomfortable) to lose 10 pounds. Before you disagree, hear me out. If you just spent this week and didn’t eat any carbohydrates, reduced your calories to 500/day, limited your water intake, and sat in a sauna most days for about an hour, you could probably drop 10 lbs of water weight in 7 days. I’m not advocating for this, but changing the scale 10 pounds vs losing 10 pounds of body fat are totally different things.

In the first example, you will gain all the weight back quickly. In the second example, you’d have to really go off the rails for weeks or months to gain back 10 pounds of fat.

Consistency in dieting is the only way we can truly transform our bodies. Therefore, the sustainability of a diet matters. If skipping breakfast and following an intermittent fasting schedule works for you long term and feels sustainable, then, by all means, use that. If cutting out all bread and pasta is something you know you can do for a long time, then be my guest.

But I encourage you to be wary of diets that force you to lower your calories super dramatically, cut out entire food groups from your diet, and ask you to skip meals on a consistent basis. This sort of black and white, all or nothing approach to dieting is hard for most people to stick to.

To recap, you can eat fruit past noon and still lose weight. You can eat animal protein or plant protein and lose weight. Eating clean doesn’t mean shopping at an expensive grocery store and buying organic food. We define eating clean with more specific rules that have positive impacts on dietary success.

The most important thing you can do any time you have dietary success or failure is to review what it was about your habits that led you to have the positive or negative change you experienced. It makes me sad when people lose weight or gain weight and have no idea how or why it actually happened. This then leaves them vulnerable to more nutrition misinformation and myths.