How to Design Your Own Diet

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To eat is necessity, but to eat intelligently is an art.
––François de la Rochefoucauld

Updated in September 2023.

In my previous article, I outlined the basics of flexible dieting and focused on one approach that I believe to be a stepping stone to more complex ways of flexible dieting: counting calories and macros.
 
In this piece, I want to cover some guidelines on how to design a diet for either fat loss or muscle gain, including a proposed diet duration, macros and calories calculations, and how to transition away from dieting.

How to Design Your Own Diet: Fat Loss
 
First, let’s define what a “successful” fat loss phase is: it’s a period of time spent in a calorie deficit, during which fat loss occurs at a moderate rate, so that the “new” weight achieved at the end can be maintained in the long term.
 
This is the method I use to help my clients get incredible fat loss results:

• Each fat loss phase lasts about eight to 16 weeks in total, often with a few days at maintenance calories sprinkled here and there across this timespan;
• We lose weight at a moderate rate of 0.5-1% of your starting bodyweight per week;
• At the end of a fat loss phase, we spend some time at maintenance before entering a new dieting phase.

The maintenance phase post-diet is paramount to helping you practise the habits needed to keep your hard-earned results for life.

Furthermore, you’ll get a mental break from dieting and will be able to increase your food intake, thus decreasing the risk of overeating, binge-eating, or excessive preoccupation with food (also known as “food focus”). This is especially useful if you need several fat loss phases to achieve your goal physique.
 
The maintenance phase would ideally last at least four weeks or at least a third to half of the time spent in a calorie deficit.
 
After this time period, you have three choices:

1. If you are as lean as you’d like to be, it may be time for a massing phase to put on more muscle. Keep reading to find out how to set that up.
2. If you’re happy with how lean you are and don’t want to build muscle, you can increase your calories to maintenance and design a training program to preserve your current musculature.
3. If you need to lose more fat, design another fat loss phase following these same guidelines, run another maintenance phase, and rinse and repeat until you are happy with the results.

 
The more fat you have at the moment, the longer it will take to achieve a healthy weight and body composition. Don’t take this as a negative. Look at it as an opportunity to learn about a balanced diet and healthy nutrition.
 
Moreover, celebrate every maintenance phase that you run.
 
Most of us tend to focus on the amount of weight lost as a success, but the true success is to be able to maintain that loss after the diet.
 
The more numerous successful maintenance phases you have, the more skilled a dieter you will become, empowering yourself to retain a healthy mindset about food for the rest of your life.
 
Calculating your calories and macros for fat loss
 
As a rule of thumb, 3500 calories equals roughly 1 lb of fat, whereas 7700 calories equals roughly 1 kg.
 
There’s a caloric difference between 1 lb of fat and 1 lb of muscle, which makes this equation not 100% accurate, but it’s still a valuable metric to use when you’re planning your starting numbers. As mentioned in last week’s article, these are all estimations that you’ll change along the way, depending on your weekly weight changes.
 
That said, you can follow these steps to calculate your initial calorie deficit:

1. Choose either 0.5% or 1% of your starting bodyweight as your weekly weight loss goal. The leaner you are, the closer to 0.5% you want to be in order to avoid muscle loss, whereas you can aim for a faster rate of loss if you’re carrying more body fat to begin with.
2. Translate the percentage of weekly weight loss into your weekly weight loss target by multiplying your current weight in kilograms or pounds by 0.005 or 0.01. e.g. 100 (kg of starting bodyweight) * 0.005 = 0.5 kg per week
3. Calculate your weekly calorie deficit by multiplying your weekly weight loss target by 3500 (if you’re using pounds) or by 7700 (if you’re using kilograms), e.g. 0.5 (kg to lose per week) * 7700 = 3850 kcals for the week.
4. Divide your weekly calorie deficit by the seven days of the week to work out your daily deficit: 3850/7 = 550 kcals per day
5. Refer to the previous article to calculate your current maintenance calories, then subtract the daily deficit from that figure to obtain your starting fat loss calories. For instance, if your maintenance is 2500 kcals, your starting fat loss calories will be: 2500 – 550 = 1950 kcals per day.
6. You can then use the guidelines in the previous article to partition your daily calories among the three macros.

 
How to Design Your Own Diet: Muscle Gain
 
Again, let’s start with the definition of a successful muscle-building phase: it’s a period of time in which weight is gained at a moderate rate to maximise the accrual of lean mass and minimise the accumulation of body fat.
 
There’s no minimum or maximum percentage of bodyweight to gain during the overall phase and, for this reason, there’s no recommended length of time, either. In general, you could aim to gain weight until you reached a level of body fat you were uncomfortable with.
 
These are some signs that you might be at an excessively high body fat percentage:

• You feel winded after going up a flight of stairs, performing a set of squats, or doing any activity that in the past did not leave you out of breath.
• Although your bodyweight keeps going up, your strength has plateaued or has slowed down considerably.
• Your waist circumference is over 94 cm for a person assigned male at birth (AMAB) or over 80 cm for a person assigned female at birth (AFAB) due to excess body fat.
• You feel mental fatigue from the time spent in a calorie surplus.

 
Not all signs may apply to you, and you might experience some that are not mentioned here. To note, the last side effect of weight gain listed could be mitigated by a period of time spent at maintenance, before a calorie surplus is resumed, so it might not necessarily mean you have to end your weight gain and start dieting for fat loss.
 
This list is meant to offer some guidance on what a “high” body fat percentage actually means. Many struggle with the thought of fat gain, so they may be tempted to cut a muscle-building phase short when they have barely gained any weight.
 
The rate of weight gain depends on your training experience:

• For those new to training: Up to 1.5% of starting bodyweight per month
• For intermediate lifters: Up to 1% of starting bodyweight per month
• For advanced lifters: Up to 0.5% of starting bodyweight per month

 
These guidelines may work best for individuals at a healthy average body fat percentage, not for those in a condition of extreme leanness.
 
For example, a bodybuilder coming out of contest preparation would be down to essential body fat levels, therefore gaining at a fast pace of 1.5% bodyweight per month or even more quickly would be more beneficial to reverse negative adaptations to dieting and restore the athlete to full health.
 
Once you’ve chosen your desired rate of gain, you could use Steps 4 to 8 from the previous section to calculate your daily calorie surplus and translate that into macros and calories. However, you want to add instead of subtracting this calorie surplus from your maintenance calories.
 
To note, during a muscle-building phase, you’re likely to be training harder than you are when maintaining, thus expending more calories. Moreover, the process of repairing tissue after a workout requires additional energy, therefore the suggested calculations might not actually put you in a true surplus.
 
You might be eating more calories than before, but those calories are too close to maintenance – which is higher because you’re burning more calories – to create an effective surplus.
 
As an alternative to that strategy, you could increase your calories by 10 to 20%, choosing the lower end of the spectrum if you aim to gain at a very slow rate and going towards the higher end if you aim to gain a little faster. You can then adjust calories as you progress with the diet, judging from the way your weight reacts to the increases in food intake.
 
For the first two weeks, don’t worry about your weight.
 
If you see a quick spike, consider that you are eating more than before. You may have more food in your stomach, more glycogen in your muscles, and more water retained with the glycogen, all of which contribute to the apparent weight jump.
 
If you’re still gaining too fast after two weeks, you may want to adjust your macros and keep experimenting every week until you find the calorie intake and macronutrient split that best complements your goal and your training.
 
In Future Episodes:
 
Due to high demand from my vegetarian and non-meat-eating clients, next week I’ll have some veggie-friendly protein hacks for you.
 
Your Turn:
 
Any questions on diet design? Let me know in the comments!