- Eat every 2-3 hours, balanced meals of protein, carbohydrates, and fat. Exception: you don’t necessarily have to eat carbohydrates with your last meal or two of the day, you CAN just eat protein and fat. Unless it’s post workout (post strength training), then you NEED to eat some carbs.
- Try to keep the protein intake in each of your meals consistent. If you are resistance/strength training, eat a minimum of your bodyweight in grams of protein, divided up equally into each of your meals.
- Don’t be afraid of fat, you NEED fat in order to BURN fat. You need to turn your body into a fat burning machine. In order to do this, you keep your carbs fairly low (30-40 grams per meal is a good rule of thumb, but it does depend on your activity level) and your fat intake moderate. As in, the lower your carbs, the more fat you should be consuming.
- Avoid sugars and over-processed foods like the plague. Read your labels, avoid food with sugar listed in the ingredients.
- Avoid processed foods, like those in boxes/packages and also anything made with white flour. White flour is over-processed. Also anything that says, “enriched” avoid it as well, it basically means over-processed.
- Eat as close to nature as you can. In other words, the closer the food to how it occurs in nature, the better for you it is, and ESPECIALLY for fat burning.
- Avoid starchy carbs like corn, bread (esp white bread), pasta.
- For your last meal or two of the day, consume only green veggies for your carbohydrates. Generally for your last meal you should consume less carbohydrates and more fat. You basically taper off your carbohydrate intake as it gets later in the day.
- Last but not least, do NOT cut your calories too low. For starters I wouldn’t even drop ANY calories. I would eat maintenance calories (eat normally) and just focus on cleaning up your diet (get rid of drinking sodas, etc) and getting consistent with a good macronutrient ratio (protein, carbs, fat). Some examples of good cutting ratios (percentage of total calories) are: 40P/30C/30F, 40P/25C/35F, 40P/20C/40F, or 35P/35C/30F etc.
- A good website (free) to help you keep track of your calories, protein, carbs, and fat is:
How to implement these changes:
- Don’t get overzealous on these rules & implement them all at once. Add one rule per week. I typically like to start my clients off with the following rules & slowly add the rest of them until their diet is clean:
- Eat every 2-3 hours, balanced meals of protein, carbohydrates, and fat.
- Avoid sugars and over-processed foods like the plague.
- Avoid processed foods, like those in boxes/packages and also anything made with white flour.
- For your last meal or two of the day, consume only green veggies for your carbohydrates.
- Here are some good choices for foods to eat, conducive to burning fat and/or staying lean. If the food you are eating is not on this list, I would question it.