Designing Your Nutrition

There are a number of things to take into account when designing your nutrition. Let’s start with your goals. Since this website is about optimizing your body composition and athletic performance, we’ll assume those are the goals. In terms of body composition, we want to get our body fat percentage into a range that’s at least somewhat athletic. We also want to build some muscle (or avoid losing any), so we can enjoy a decent amount of food without putting on fat.

As stated in the Body Composition Baseline article, the first step is to determine your body fat percentage, and your resting metabolic rate (RMR). Once you know your body fat percentage, you can compare where you fall relative to your goals for your gender and your age. Women will naturally tend to carry more body fat than men, even with an athletic appearance.

According to the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, there are healthy body fat percentages based on your age. For people aged 20 to 39, women should aim for 21% to 32% of body fat. Men should have 8% to 19%. For people 40 to 59, women should fall between 23% to 33% and men should fall around 11% to 21%. If you’re aged 60 to 79, women should have 24% to 35% body fat and men should have 13% to 24%. It’s not uncommon for athletic conscious people to be on the low end of the range for their age, or even below that. Carrying less body fat than normal will generally make you look younger than what you are, and of course, the opposite is also true.

For the purposes of discussion, let’s assume you want to reduce your body fat percentage while preserving as much muscle as possible, or maybe even adding a little more muscle. There are nutritionalists who will swear you cannot do both simultaineously, but I, and others I know, are living proof that you can. But you have to be smart about it. The biggest mistakes people make when designing their nutrition are:

• • Not eating enough calories
  • Not eating enough protein
  • Over doing cardio
  • Not leveraging resistance training

Not eating enough calories and/or not eating a suffient amount of protein will cause you to lose muscle. As metioned in Body Composition Baseline, muscle burns calories, so losing muscle will reduce your RMR. That is NOT what we want.

Overdoing cardio is a huge mistake. It is nearly impossible to burn enough calories doing cardio or even high intensity training to offset not getting your nutrition right. Another problem with the cardio/HITT approach is that it’s not sustainable. The other downside of overdoing cardio is it depletes your muscles of glycogen, which is required for resistance training performance. In general, cardio is really good for heart health, and that’s about it. 

Resistance training is your best bet for improving body composition because it builds muscle, and it makes you stronger. If you do resistance training without long breaks between each set you will get a cardio effect as well. 

If we want to lose body fat, and not lose muscle we need to work smart. One successful approach is to set our calorie target at our RMR, and then let our resistance training and other physical activity create a calorie deficit. Remember that exercise doesn’t burn that many calories, so it won’t be a huge deficit on a daily basis, but it will add up over time. This is exactly what we want. Gradual, sustainable improvement!

The next step is to employ a systematic approach to macro nutrients. The first thing to think about is what distribution of protein/carbs/fat works best for you for losing body fat. This will take some experimentation to figure out. Since we know that protein is muscle sparing, and of the 3 macros protein takes the most energy for our bodies to process, we want our ratio to be high in protein.

There are many approaches to setting your macro nutrient distribution. The trick is finding one that meets your needs and that you can live with long term.

• • Mediterranean –  15% protein, 50% carb, 35% fat
  • Standard American – 20% protein, 50% carb, 30% fat
  • Keto – 25% protein, 5% carb, 70% fat
  • Carnivore – 25% protein, 0% carb, 75% fat
  • Paleo – 25% protein, 25% carb, 50% fat
  • The Zone – 30% protein, 40% carb, and 30% fat
  • Standard Body Building – 40% protein, 25% Carbs, 35% fat

 There is considerable evidence in the literature that the carb heavy Standard American macros are responsible for the explosion in obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. Here is a Youtube video that features investigative journalist Nina Teicholz, explaining how a pathologist named Ancel Keys from the University of Minnesota sold his hypothesis that saturated fat was to blame to the American government.

It turns out there was no substantive evidence or studies that proved his case, yet his hypothesis was adopted. Ancel also visited Greece and was gratified to see healthy people eating according to his his beliefs, however, his visit took place during lent when the majority of the population was abstaining from meat. 

My wife and I both experienced great success with the Zone and Keto. Of the two, the Zone was far more sustainable, but we weren’t exercising at all at the time, so muscle retention wasn’t on our radar. 

The macro distribution that works for you is an individual thing. Having said that, maintaining or building some muscle requires protein. Unlike glucose and fat, your body cannot manufacture protein. On top of that, protein requires more energy for your body to use than carbs or fat. As we age our bodies become less efficient at absorbing protein, so later in life we need even more.  

For an athletic body the best approaches are likely the Zone or the Standard Body Building diet, because both are high in protein. Now, individual tweaks are worthwhile to try, because everyone is different. You don’t know until you try. 

Here’s an example using the Standard Body Building macros 40/30/30:

If your calorie target is 2,000 calories a day, you would eat 800 calories (200 grams) of protein, 600 calories (150 grams) of carbs, and 600 calories (67 grams) of fat, per day. It’s generally a bad idea to shortchange yourself on carbs and fat because both are needed for performance and biological function. 

Another thing to think about is your age. When we are younger carbs can make a huge difference in our muscle gains. In fact, we want as much or more carbs as protein. As we get older our bodies become more sensitive to carbs, meaning we don’t tolerate them as well as when we are younger. And, our bodies become less efficient at absorbing and utilizing protein, so we need even more than what is advised for the general population. 

In general, you can eat whatever you want so long as you hit those macro numbers. For health you will want to make good choices in the quality of foods you choose. If you satisfy your calories/macros with fresh produce, lean meats, and good fats, you will be amazed how much volume of food you will be eating. A positive outcome of adhering to this approach is you will be educating yourself through reading labels. You will start recognizing just how bad most of the packaged food is in the grocery. You will also likely need to supplement your food intake with a good protein shake, preferably from whey isolate, because it’s hard to get that much protein from food alone. That said, you should get the majority of your calories/macros from food, not supplements. 

The other thing is you want to perform resistance training regularly, like at least 2-3 times a week. The reason is that resistance training is also muscle sparing. The old saying “use it or lose it” applies. 

Finally, here’s a list of what you want to avoid to lead a healthy lifestyle:

• • Fast food. It’s loaded with salt, simple carbs and fat. A typical fast food meal is 1,100+ calories.
  • Fried food. It’s loaded with salt, flour, and fat
  • Sugary food and foods made from white flour. Sugary foods, and especially white flour are extremely high in the glycemic index. This means they spike your blood sugar, which causes an insulin response, which then makes you hungry again. Over time these foods make you insulin resistant.