Nutritional Programming - Part 1

So one of the biggest minefields and one of the areas I have been asked for advice on recently is planning a writing out a nutrition program for people. With all the 'bro-science' out there and poor education material available that contradicts just about everything else that you can find, I thought it best to take things right the way back to basics and start from the ground up.

All the diets that we see touted out there all come with fancy names;

• Intermittent Fasting
• 5:2 Diet
• Cambridge
• Herbalife
• Cambridge
• Carb Cycling
• Paleo
• Atkins
• I could go on and on but there is far too many to do so, and I really don't care for them either so back to where we are heading with this short piece of a blog.

Nutrition works on a very basic equation, of Calories in -vs- Calories out, or Energy Balance as I like to refer to it. In laymans terms should you want to gain weight you need to eat more calories than what you use during the day, this being your TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure), so therefore you need to be eating at a Calorie surplus.

Likewise if you want to lose weight, you want to be creating a calorie deficit. You can do this two ways, firstly by limiting the amount of calories you eat (This is not something I like to do) or by upping the intensity of your training, therefore upping your TDEE and causing you to burn more calories and creating the required deficit.

The area where people struggle more often than not is when they are cutting / trying to lose weight, they start at ridiculously low level of cals, and when your body adapts, which it will, they then cut 500kcals as they read in a magazine somewhere that that was what they need to eat below maintenance to drop weight. 

Just to highlight the dangers of doing such drastic cuts in your calorie intake lets use a number of 2000kcals as someones starting point, as thats not unheard of and people tend to think they only need 2500kcals daily to maintain because again they read it somewhere on line once, or someone in the gym told them. So they start at 2000kcals and they lose some weight for the first two weeks as they are '500kcals' under they maintenance (They're not they are a lot more than 500kcals under but hey ho) but the body adapts to this and the weight loss stops. So what now? Oh yea, that magic number of 500, lets cut 500kcals from their food and reduce calories even further meaning they are now on 1500kcals. So now not only are they feeling shit but they are starving, satiety levels are at an all time low, energy levels suck and they are a horrible person to be around. What happens when the weight loss inevitably stalls again as they have no energy to go train and the body adapts to the low levels that it is getting? You going to cut 500kcals again? You see what I am saying here.

When I have dieted clients down I look at digestive feedback, and monitor how people feel after every meal and we slowly and I mean slowly introduce a deficit. For example I can diet on 3300kcals just by upping the intensity or duration of my workouts. If I need to drop cals I will never drop by more than 5-10% so 330kcals at most to begin with and spread that across the meals of the day, rather than dropping out one whole meal. Main reason for this is to maintain satiety levels between meals and keep you feeling normal. There is no reason to starve yourself to lose weight. Yes there are variable that we need to look at sometimes such as hormonal issues and health issues but for the whole there is absolutely no need to start that low and only head lower when you can manipulate it in so many other ways.

Notice I haven't once mentioned Macro's in any of this? Again for the whole most people just want to lose weight or gain weight, so to do so the best way is to follow a nutritional hierarchy triangle (see pic 1)

 (PIC 1)

You will see that the building blocks for any nutrition program is calories first and foremost, or energy balance as I refer to it as. Then and only then we move up the triangle and look at Macros, Micronutrition (vitamins, minerals etc), meal timing/frequency and lastly supplementation.

Over the coming weeks I will start to expand on this piece and look at how we start to build up from the bottom once we have got the calories right and how we go on to looking at Macro, Micro, Meal Timing and Supplements.

First and foremost though guys and girls, get the basics right. Calories first, then we will start to look at the rest. Keep things as simple as possible!

Part 1 done, part 2 will follow in the coming days.

Paul...