I can’t keep up with how often I’m asked if a food is good or bad. It’s such a hard question to answer. The answer is pretty much always “it depends”. How much of it are you eating? What are you eating with it? Are you trying to lose or gain weight? How much else have you eaten that day? Do you like the taste of it? All of these must be considered when deciding if the said food is “good” or “bad”.
I really don’t think any food should be classed as bad. I said in the last blog that we all need a basic amount of calories to survive. Once a food is providing us with these calories it’s serving its purpose. All foods have a set number of calories and we use those to fuel our bodies and activities. Some foods are very high in calories and so provide us with a lot of fuel. It is when we do not use all the fuel that we put on weight, usually as fat, which is stored energy.

When some of my clients came to me first they were struggling to lose body fat yet insisted they were eating “clean foods” all the time. The problem was they were simply eating too much. Sweet potatoes, grilled chicken, brown pasta, steak, eggs, porridge oats, nuts and fruit are all classed as clean foods. No matter how “clean” it is, eating too much will lead to fat gain, or not losing fat if that is the goal.

To give an example of this we’ll talk about Erin again. Erin needs 1,850 calories a day to stay the same weight. If she eats 2,100 calories a day and it all comes from the clean foods I mentioned above she will put on weight. Whether this is fat or muscle depends on the type of training she is doing, not the types of food she eats. If Erin eats 1,850 calories a day and it is made up of a variety of foods, both good and bad, she will remain at the same weight. This sounds crazy to some people but has made, by far, the biggest changes to all of my clients.

Some people like to mix cheat meals or cheat days into their diet plans. This is fine if it works but for me I find it very hard to draw the line at where a cheat meal or day ends. It nearly becomes a challenge to fit in as much junk food as possible in one day. This led to being bloated and generally feeling down in myself for letting myself go. The solution I have found to work best is flexible dieting. I know the basic calorie amounts in most foods now and can substitute in a “bad” food for a good food when I feel like I need a treat. An example would be to half the amount of rice I have with dinner so there is room for a couple of biscuits afterwards. It’s obvious that the fuel from rice would be much healthier than the biscuits but doing this once or twice a week still keeps me on track for my calories and allows me to have those treats.

The key to making this work is in understanding how many calories or macronutrients (I’ll talk about these in more detail in another blog) are in a food. Our main aim each day is to hit the calories we need to fuel our activities. There are obvious choices to be made when picking where our calories come from. 200g of normal potatoes will provide us with longer lasting fuel and fill us more than 50g of Haribo jellies yet both will give us the same calories (170). I certainly wouldn’t recommend eating 50g of Haribo everyday while I would recommend potatoes as a healthy source of carbohydrate, yet once a week, this is a simple way of allowing for a treat in place of something else without messing up your diet plan.

How many of us enjoy a takeaway at the weekend? Whether it’s Chinese, Chipper, Pizza or Indian we all need that break. Having a takeaway on a Friday night can throw so many of us off for the whole weekend. We feel like we’ve ruined our plan with bad food and find it hard to get back on track. The simplest way to get over this is to work out how many calories are in the meal. All values can be found through a simple Google search or through the MyFitnessPal app. If a full pizza has 1,900 calories and our daily target is 1,850 then we really don’t need to eat the whole thing. Halving the pizza with someone else would give us 950 calories. This means we just need to eat a little less across the rest of the day to leave room for one big meal at night. That can come from leaving out a scone with our coffee in the morning and having an apple or yoghurt instead, or having a green salad at lunchtime instead of a sandwich.

I don’t expect anyone to get this calorie balance exactly right at the beginning. It takes a bit of experimentation with lower calorie options to fit the treats in. It also takes some discipline to stop us trying to fit a treat in everyday. The goal of flexible dieting is not to survive on McDonalds and Poptarts everyday but to allow us fit in some of the things we really enjoy while staying on track towards our goals. There are obvious choices to be made when it comes to where our calories come from. A large muffin at 11am might have us feeling satisfied for the following 30 minutes but if it leads to a boiled egg and spinach for dinner later that evening then it may not be the wisest choice in the long run.

Flexible dieting allows us to be exactly as the name suggests, flexible with our diet. Trying to survive on brown rice, grilled chicken and broccoli four times a day may seem super healthy but would not be achievable long term. Mixing up where our carbs, protein and fat come from is the easiest way to remain on track and have some variety in our food. Rice, potatoes, pasta, quinoa and bread are all sources of carbs. While some may be slightly healthier than others, a combination of all will provide a varied diet and consistent amount of calories in our meals. Staying on track long term is much more beneficial than eating super healthy all week then falling apart at the weekend. Similarly eating clean for a month then letting yourself go for a week will have more negative effects in the long term.

If you would like to find out about flexible dieting in more detail or get some sample meal plans then contact me at fhsperformance @gmail.com.

In the meantime I suggest you experiment with some foods, enjoy all types of flavours and keep up the training.

John