The diet for life.

I may have just discovered a diet I can eat for the rest of my life…and it may just be a good balanced diet for the average person too…who likes exercise. I have tried numerous diets over the years with mixed results. I tried the zone diet (30% P, 40% C, 30% F), the bodybuilder diet (40% P, 40% C, 20% F), the Mediterranean diet (30% P, 30% C, 40% F), and the good old conventional diet (20% P, 50% C, 30% F). I tried each of these diets for a couple months at about 2000 calories and kept working out as usual, and now I can tell you what they did to me. The zone diet got me pretty ripped as long as my calories remained real low and the protein was from real solid sources and not powders and eggs. This is not a good muscle building diet though. The bodybuilder diet had way too much protein and get ready for this. The excess protein building muscle idea is a total myth. The only thing eating extra solid sources of protein will do is make your body work harder, which in turn can shed some extra fat, but it will stress out your kidneys too. The Mediterranean diet made me real flabby. High fat diets, low carb, and moderate protein diets are not the answer either because the carbs help shed some fat by keeping the metabolism up. Believe it or not I gained the most muscle on the conventional diet. The secret to building good muscle is eating between .5 and .8 grams of protein per pound of lean mass body weight. The rest is just more carbs to keep fueling that body to power. I understand most people do not have body fat testers and scales around the house like I do, so when people ask how much protein to eat I tell them to aim for half their weight in grams of their desired body weight. If you are 100 pounds then eat 50 grams a day.

Now I am ready to move onto the diet I discovered through all my playing with numbers. The problem with all the other diets was they gave you a set percentage to calories to eat each macronutrient at. In other words, no matter how many calories you are eating you have to eat a certain percentage of that from protein, carbohydrates and fat. My new diet allows you to eat what you body tells you to eat based on what your shape is. Once again this takes a body fat tester and a scale to calculate. Math and science will not let you down kids. Let’s say I weigh 187 pounds and then use the body fat tester to find out that 30 pounds of that is fat. That means I am 157 pounds of lean mass. Since I only need .5 to point .8 grams per a pound of protein to maintain or build muscle, I multiply that number by .8 and get 125.6 grams of protein. The reason I use the higher of the two numbers on the spectrum of grams per pound is because I am likely to continue to gain muscle, and eventually that .8 will become .5 of my lean mass as I grow, and every few months I will have to add more protein to my diet.

As for carbohydrates I will double the number of my grams of protein, and that will be the grams of carbs I eat in a day. That means 125.6 x 2 = 251.2 Obviously you can round these numbers up or down a tenth to get whole numbers. As for fat, 20% of total calories seem to work well. We want just enough to stay healthy because the carbs are what make us run well for energy and muscle growth. You just add together the grams of carbs and protein and multiply it by 4 and that will tell you how many calories you are eating. 125.6 + 251.2 = 376.8 x 4 = 1507.2 calories. Add 400 calories of fat and divide that by 9 to get 44.4 grams of fat. That makes a total of 1907 calories. This balance will keep you lean and give you good energy too. I personally multiply my grams of protein by 3 for my carbohydrates in the winter to build more muscle and then when I am ready to lean out for the summer I switch back to 2 my grams of protein a day. By this point I have more lean mass so I can eat more carbs every summer as I grow through the years, but muscle will atrophy with age and that is okay, because based on my lean mass I will know what to eat for that weight in lean mass and that is why this is a life diet based on your own body and not some other balance someone makes up out of the air to suit everyone.