Before we get started I should point out that I am not a doctor, certified nutritionalist, certified personal trainer or anyone who is qualified in a legal sense to provide instruction on what you should do to your body and I refer you to my disclaimer page for more detail on this. If you want to send me a message with your email there's a Contact page also.

“You can’t out-train a bad diet” and “a six pack is made in the kitchen” are two popular cliches that get trotted out - but I think they are true. If you want to lose weight/shred some fat then you have to be in a daily AVERAGE caloric deficit (use a daily average calculated over the previous 7 days (i.e. add up your total calories for the previous 7 days and divide by 7). In order to find a starting point for how many calories you allow yourself per day there are two approaches you can take: firstly there are a few rough guides you can find online (or in the Ultimate Performance books), the other approach will be to work out what you're currently eating - log your intake for a week or two and work out what your average daily calorie intake is (for more details on logging/adjusting see the previous article).

I knew roughly what my daily average intake was when I started (because I had been logging prior to starting my transformation) so I knocked off an extra few hundred calories and then used the data to tell me if it was right. I started at 1600 calories per day (I'm 5 foot 8 tall and started off weighing around 170 pounds), but dropped to 1440 (down 10%) after a few weeks because I wasn’t losing weight. Another important point is that I never changed my calorie allowance based on exercise - some people will say “well I did a 5k today so that means I can have an extra ~300 calories” - I never did this, I just stuck to my target of 1440 per day. The two primary reasons that I didn't adjust my calorie allowance due to exercise was that firstly it's not that easy to know exactly how many calories you burn during a given workout, and secondly because the exercise was to get stronger/fitter and leaner - not to justify me eating more.

It’s also important to remember that we are measuring our daily average over 7 days, so if you go a bit over one day, you can try being a bit under on subsequent days in order to balance it out. Another example of this could be if you’re going out to dinner in the evening and know it will be hard to keep the calories low enough you might decide to eat/drink less during the day, or the day before to make up for it. If you aren’t sure what the right amount of calories is, then you could just start logging how you eat now for a week to get your daily average, then cut down by a few hundred calories and measure your progress - if you’re losing 0.5%-1% of your body weight per week then it’s about right. If it’s not shifting after two consecutive weeks of being in your caloric deficit then you need to cut it down further. 

In terms of macros (protein, fat, carbohydrate) I only measured protein. I aimed to keep my protein quite high for two reasons: firstly because it helps to avoid losing muscle mass and secondly because it tends to keep you feeling fuller for longer. I aimed for around 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight. I think you can actually do a bit less than this but it worked ok for me. The reason I didn’t measure fat or carbs is just because I felt it would get too complicated to manage and because at the end of the day calories are calories - I didn’t care too much about where they came from (other than protein). I will point out however that some people I know have found that they are particularly carb sensitive - as with every other principle the key is in accurate logging and measurement. If you decide to log carbs and notice that you react poorly to high carb intake (even while remaining under your calorie goal) then you may have to factor this in. 

What I ate

When it comes to what I ate, protein was of primary importance. For breakfast I had eggs (sometimes just the whites - it makes a big difference in terms of calories), turkey bacon, or yogurt with some blueberries and pineapple. Typically my breakfast was something between 200-350 calories. 

For lunch I relied heavily on salads, I would use cajun spice as a dry rub on chicken breast - grill it then throw it onto some romaine salad, or do salad nicoise with tuna steak. Occasionally I’d have other things but they were my go-tos. 

Later in the afternoon before working out I would often have a snack with a little bit of carbs to help fuel my workout (I didn’t always do this and it might have been partly placebo effect but I felt like it helped nonetheless). I would either have some banana in yogurt or occasionally a slice of toast.

For dinner it varied quite a bit but some tried and tested options included: baked salmon with green beans and carrots (beware though - salmon is quite fatty so the calories are higher than you would want in an ideal world), or stir fry vegetables with shrimp (no rice or noodles usually - or if so very little).

When it comes to working out what you will eat, the rule of thumb was maximize the protein and minimize the calories. But nutrition information on labels isn’t actually very helpful for this. Often it will tell you how much protein and calories is in a given quantity, but what you actually want to know is how many calories do you have to ‘spend’ in order to take on a given amount of protein? It’s the ratio of calories to protein that you want to know. So for this I made a basic spreadsheet to calculate some of the options - I've since created a simple app for iOS which ranks foods you add by protein per 100 calories which you can find here.

What I drank

Firstly avoid any sugary drinks/sodas/etc alcohol - when you’re on such a tight balance of calories and protein these drinks are going to be very difficult to incorporate without pushing you over your calorie allowance (and taking calorie allowance from where you need to ‘spend’ it such as protein). I mostly drank diet sodas, tea, coffee and water…lots of water. I aimed to drink around a gallon of water a day - there’s quite a bit of evidence to support keeping your water intake up including helping the body burn fat, keeping your metabolism up and helping to take the edge off feeling so hungry (see here for more details on this and here for an article on how much water to drink).

Supplements

On the topic of supplements I took four things - whey protein, creatine, magnesium and a multivitamin. I used the whey as a protein top up, if I was a bit low on my daily protein I would have a shake but with the diet I was on this wasn’t something I leaned on too heavily. I had one every morning but often that was it - the rest of my protein came from the chicken/fish built into my diet. For creatine I had a monohydrate in powder form and stuck with the recommended amount on the back of the container - I know some people take a lot more but it can be tough on the kidneys so I played it safe. One of the primary benefits of creatine is that it can help with performing explosive movement exercise - like weight lifting (you can read more about it here). My aim with the magnesium was to try to maintain a good night’s sleep while putting my body (and mind) through the stress of a body transformation (you can read a bit more about it here). My take on supplements is that I could have done the body transformation with or without them and I think I would have been successful, that being said - it’s hard enough as it is so if I can supplement my diet with something that has evidence backing its efficacy as well as its safety then I’m open to it.