Flexible Dieting

I get asked about flexible dieting all the time. What are my thoughts on it? Personally, not a fan. But there is a catch to that. I’ve never said flexible dieting isn’t an effective and viable option. If you’re talking about a stress free, simple, somewhat relaxed way of eating that allows a variety of foods that will suit everyday life, it’s great.

My issue with flexible dieting or IIFYM is there is no way of knowing what is doing what, and when you’re trying to change your body, knowledge is essential for you to be able to accurately measure and adjust your intake.

No one wants to be dieting forever. People want to achieve their goal and have their new body in the shortest time possible. And rightfully so.

The entire popularity growth of flexible dieting is based on people being able to stick to a diet for a longer period of time because they can continue to eat all the lovely foods they enjoy so much while working within specific macro guidelines. But let’s be honest, we aren’t talking about substituting steak for lamb or rice for quinoa. We are usually referring to taking out good natural sources of nutrition and replacing them with highly processed foods. I don’t care that 100g of vanilla ice cream has basically the same macros as 100g of potato, they aren’t the same and can have different effects on your body.

I won’t even get into the whole psychology of how eating sweet and indulgent foods makes you crave those foods more, which means doing a diet that allows you to continue eating such foods is actually making your dieting harder in the long run, as you’re unable to break the cycle of bad eating which got you the body you hate in the first place.

Now if you take someone who eats like a person going hypo with low blood sugar in the lolly aisle and clean up their diet with a variety of organic, real food, it really doesn’t matter what you do, they will lose weight. 

They will do this for a period of time, but eventually the body will adapt. When that happens the changes stop. Anyone who has been on a diet has experienced this.

The diet needs to be changed. But what do you change? There are that many variables you have no idea what was working and what wasn’t. True, overall the entire diet got them changes but how do you know that half the diet wasn’t actually causing issues and the other half was just countering that? They could have been taking 2 steps backwards with 1 meal and 3 steps forward with another. Yes they made progress but I’d personally rather take 5 steps forward and get to my goal quicker.

The simple example I give for how different foods can affect your body differently despite having the same macros or calories, is of 3 different carb sources: rice, pasta, potato. 

From a calorie and macro perspective, rice and pasta are 1-1. 100g of rice is basically the same as 100g of pasta. Potato on the other hand is 5x the amount of rice and pasta. So to get roughly the same calories and macros you would get from 100g of rice, you need 500g of potato.

Starting with rice. Which rice? White rice or brown rice? White rice is tolerated by the majority of people. Brown rice on the other has phytic acid in it. The anti-nutrient that stops your body from absorbing nutrients. If you’re sensitive to it, it causes bloating, gas, diarrhoea. If you were to have white rice 4 times a week and then brown rice 3 times a week and each time you had the brown rice you have gut issues, that can affect your body and fat measurements.

Due to gluten, pasta can also affect people. If you’re sensitive, this can cause the same issues as phytic acid. 

Once again, if you have rice a few days per week and then pasta on others, your gut could be bloated which means your measurements will be out.

Finally, we come to potato. 500g of potato is a decent amount of potato. the volume of food can have a different effect on the body. Also, potatoes are a starch and starchy foods can cause a gas build up in the gut. Potato skins contain glycoalkaloids which are toxic to humans and don’t break down when cooked. They can cause, you guessed it, bloating, gas, diarrhoea.

Now mix your week up using all 3 of these carb sources. Measure what happened at the end of the week. Was it a good result? If it was then fantastic. Something worked. Not sure what, but something worked. Was it a bad result? If it was, ok, let’s make a change. Let’s take out what didn’t work.  Hmmm, what didn’t work? Was it the brown rice? Was it the potato? Was it the starch the glycoalkaloids or the gluten? What do we change? No idea. Because we don’t know what did what.

Let’s also not overlook the uncomfortable feeling of walking around with a bloated gut or needing to sprint to the toilet after eating certain foods and how this can affect every day life and training, which will negatively affect your results.

I’m not saying flexible dieting can’t get results. Of course it can. Clean eating in general will get results to some degree. But when the time comes to adjust the diet, and all diets need adjusting over time because the body adapts to anything you do, you have no way of knowing what did what which means you really don’t know what to adjust.

A far more efficient way of achieving your goal is to eat the same foods every day for say, 7 days. Measure what it does and if you want to make a change to the food, change it. Then, eat those foods for another 7 days and measure again. If you made 1 change to the diet and suddenly you measure fatter now you can assess and say maybe it was that change you made. Did swapping rice for potato give you a bad measurement? Now, you have the choice of keeping the food where it is for another week to see if that change was the issue, or you could change it right then and there. Either way, you now know exactly what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. 

An important factor of dieting is consistency. Eating the same foods for that 7 day period is the consistency you need, and allows you to accurately measure what those foods did to your body. With that knowledge you can make educated decisions in manipulating the diet to help you achieve your goal quicker. 

Once you’ve achieved your goal and reset your body with its new levels of muscle and fat, you can then start to loosen the diet up a little and bring some more flexibility into your daily eating. But achieve something first!

Strict, in fact I won’t call it strict because that’s negative. Controlled? No, controlled sounds like something has power over you. Let’s call it measured. Measured dieting isn’t a punishment. It’s a scalpel where flexible dieting is a hammer. 

Again, I’m not saying it isn’t effective and can’t work. However, I have seen more clients switch from flexible dieting to something more measured and make more body composition changes and achieve their goals quicker. At the end of the day they are doing this because they want those changes. Now!

So the choice is yours: make a little sacrifice and eat measured for a short period of time and achieve your goal quickly. Or, keep it loose and flexible and take considerably longer to achieve it. If you achieve anything at all.

I know what id rather do.