Flexitarian Diet

My Method for Flexible Dieting As most who've tried to count calories for an extended period of time know, the monotony and tediousness of it all (weighing food, or other methods of measuring your intake) can easily drive someone away from their fitness goals all together. If this sounds like you, try my method out. First, in my experience, the easiest macronutrient to count is protein—coincidentally, it's also the most important in terms of satiety (feeling full), the most thermogenic (requires the most energy by your body to break down), and the most important in terms of muscle gain/retention.

So, the first part of my method is to roughly gauge your protein intake on a day-to-day basis. If you've been tracking protein for some time, this will be extremely easy. If you haven't been, it's still easy to learn. Some general -wise) as 20 grams

So, if you weigh 160 pounds, that's 160 grams per day of protein. The second part of my method is dependent upon my or anyone else's ability to roughly figure out the caloric content of a meal. If protein is set (part 1 of the method) it's not very difficult to fill in the caloric content of the rest of your meal. So, for example, today isn't a training day for me. I typically eat 100 grams of protein at my first meal on a non-training day, which comes out to about 500 calories if it's a lean cut of meat. I would then estimate how much more I need to eat to hit my target number - maybe some vegetables drizzled with 2 tbsp olive oil and a whole, large avocado on the side, which I typically count as 250 calories apiece.

So, you're essentially still counting calories but it's a greatly relaxed way of going about it. Some more general tips: large avocados and 2 tbsp olive oil as 250 calories apiece. There are more that I've developed for myself and it really revolves around the foods that you choose to eat often. The protein rule from the first part of the method is a plan to eat. I eat three meals per day; so, I've split up my intake into these three separate meals.

This way makes it easier to hit your total intake goals on a meal-by-meal basis, rather than day-by-day. The key to long-term success in your dieting and fitness goals is to keep it simple - a super-complex program is bound to fail.

Try my simplified tracking rules or develop similar ones of your own, whatever works best for you.