What I Do

I have friends and clients who are baffled by the incredible amount of hype and misinformation out there.  I feel for them.  Sometimes starting this journey - it can seem completely overwhelming.  In fact, maybe that's better.  Overwhelming might lead someone to read more and research more, rather than just buying into the hype of the latest fad diet plan.  It's crazy simple actually.  We have to go back to the first fad diet.  The Paleolithic Diet.  It requires a bit of sacrifice.  Put down the Ho-Ho.  Grab your pen and write this down.

1. Eat as many veggies as you can.  Every meal!  The huge bulk of my meals is basically meat on a plate full of veggies.  Pretty easy.
2. Eat a lot of meat, fish, poultry, and eggs.  It's all good stuff.  The "meat will clog your arteries" myth is just that.  Ideally grass fed beef is the best, but at this point, just eat meat.  It's good for you.
3. Don't eat grains.  This includes Wheat, Rice and Corn.  It's really bad stuff.  Someday really soon, I'll write up a noob's guide to grains, but for now, just take my word on this.  Stay away.  As a side note - you have to read ingredients - tons and tons and tons of stuff here in our world has grains added in.
4. Don't eat sugar.  Look - basically grains takes care of this, but to be clear.  Don't eat real sugar or fake sugar (our bodies don't see a difference.)  They both rock up your insulin - which leads to fat gain.

That's it.  Those are my Primal rules for myself and my clients.  Of course, as we dig deeper we can get a bit more exact on some of these and a few more gray areas (looking at you dairy.)  For those of us who are habitual calorie counters - here's what I rock out to every week.

If you want a bit more specific numbers - I'm currently following a LeanGains approach to nutrition.  It's so easy, it's a shame more people don't know about Martin's brilliant work over at www.LeanGains.com.  Here's the exact plan.

Calories:  This goes up and down depending on workout, hunger, opportunity to eat.  Usually I'm around this:

1800 calories, 200g Protein, 125g Fat, 30-50g Carbs  (non-lifting days)
3200 calories, 225g Protein, 125g Fat, 150g Carbs (lifting days)

I tend to eat the huge bulk of my 150g carbs post workout as quickly as possible after.  It's so easy this way. Every meal is basically the same, except post lifting workout, then I get to eat some carbs.  Sweet potatoes are often my go-to post workout food.

I never cut short the amount of veggies I eat - it just usually works out to around 30-50g, but some big day might be 80g.  I don't care.  Eat them all.

--------------------------------------

OK, so how do you eat this way.  I developed a wonderful eating system over the past couple years, but since have become familiar with Robb Wolf's great eating matrix that makes this crazy simple.  Here it is.

The instructions are on there, but basically:

1: Brown meat in a skillet

2: Add veggies and spice

3: Eat.

Crazy right?  Seriously - about 90% of my meals are done exactly like that.  It's not that complicated.