The Case for Rigid Meal Planning

I've never not seen someone lose weight if they eat chicken, rice, and broccoli for every meal because it's inherently almost impossible to overeat that. I mean, if I want to lose, if I want to change my body, I'm going to eat the same shit every day. I find what I like and I eat that same thing every day. So meal prep is easy. Everything's consistent. I'm eating the same amount of the same foods every single day. And guess what? You lose weight. People are like, oh, I can't lose weight no matter how little calories I eat. Okay, do a three day fast. Don eat anything at all just water and vitamins and see if you lose weight And they like oh my God I lost all this weight Okay You can lose You may just have to eat less than you want to eat So we need to create a strategy that allows you to you know be able to enjoy your food when you do eat, but also be goal specific. At some point, if you really want to create a gnarly physique, you have to start thinking of foods just as fuel and people go, oh, that's so dysfunctional, But it's not because it's a goal specific thing and it's a temporary thing. You understand this isn't a forever thing. So if somebody needs to eat chicken, rice and broccoli to change their physique, if they understand that this is a this is a this is not a forever thing, but this is a fundamental foundational part of my diet that when I start when I start eating more food to come out of my diet, maybe I do still have chicken, broccoli, rice. but maybe I have a little bit more of that, or maybe I throw in a little bit of this. Maybe I throw in some bread, but people tend to treat these days. Like every meal has to be a fucking celebration. And that's where people are fucking up. They won't, they don't want to eat just to sustain their bodies and just to fuel their day. They want to eat like they're like, it's a fucking birthday for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And, and then they wonder why they can't lose weight. But, you know, if you have a high goal specific thing, you have to do high goal specific stuff, especially if you want like a radical physique transformation. You know, you look at the evidence based crowd saying like you can have you can. It doesn't matter what you eat as long as you match your calories and macros. OK, if you just want to lose weight, sure. But if you want to put a health focus on it, if you want to put sustainable energy component on, if you want to speed this up really quickly. I never tell people to do that. Like I like, you know, if it fits your macros, I like flexible dieting, but the reason a lot of people can't lose weight is because they're way too flexible. So if you could eat like a very rigid plan and then add those treats in, get some momentum and then learn how to modulate more treats. because part of the problem is those treats for a lot of people will, will stimulate binging. It's usually not, it's usually not the fact that the dieting it's once they have something that's off diet, they can't control themselves. So if you're like, like you, you have these amazing, um, you have these amazing recipes that you give all your clients. So, and I love that stuff. after I've had a small period of them understanding like how to actually control and regulate their appetite because a lot of these people yes that this is something I want you to dive into more because a thing that I find even more prevalent in today's because of freaking social media and everyone out there trying to say oh you can have alcohol every weekend you can eat like this every weekend and still get the body of your dreams well it's like a lot of people cannot control that and if you've been over dieting your whole life you can't control that and then there's a reward and people have different ways of processing like to me i can't moderate my dopamine doesn't let me moderate i'm an abstainer there are people that don't appreciate that part of them because then there's other people saying oh you should intuitively eat oh you should include it in your house and it's like for some people that's not like you need to that what you have to do now isn't what you need to do forever and this is why a diet isn't a lifestyle it's the smallest part of and why dieting isn't the most important thing to be with a coach for because you get really good at dieting and the the saying i've got a few which is amazing is that we don't have a fat loss problem we have a weight maintenance problem yeah yeah and that's the thing it's like losing weight is really easy losing body fat is easy and actually transforming your body like you said earlier it's actually very simple and it's easy it's easy on paper the consistency the application sometimes sucks. But it depends on like, do you want it bad enough or not? Or what are you willing to give up? What are you willing to sacrifice? There's a currency involved. If I want to, I've got to trade something to get my body to where it wants to be. What are you willing to give up? Are you willing to give up three days, four days, five days to go train? Are you willing to give up 15, 20, 30 minutes to your conditioning? Are you willing to give up, you know, four slices of bread for one slice of bread. It's, it's, it's, you know, it's that type of thing, but it's not that people need to be that stringent, but if you want, you've got a, you know, I love my continuums. It's like, I've got fat loss over here. Okay. That can be a lot of intuitive eating, flexibility, whatever. And I've got body composition transformation over here. And that's a completely different animal. And I'm the same way. Like I'm, I'm, I have to be very stringent on my diet. And I find a lot of my clients do because I train a lot of coaches and they're very coaches tend to be really extreme people. They're either fully on or fully off. And I find a lot of gym pop people that way as well, is if you can just avoid trigger foods for a long time and start seeing some results then those trigger foods have less of an impact on your mentality And then you can start slowly adding those things back in So because intuitive eating and lack of understanding how food works is what's getting us in this problem in the first place. That's, that's part of this issue. It's like people don't understand how much energy is in food. People don't realize how little calories they actually burn unless you're doing like endurance training. When you lift weights, you don't burn that much. When you go for an hour long run, you burn a lot. That means that the more activity you get, the time output, the more food you can leverage. But yeah, so there's a lot of, like I said, there's a lot of nuance in this stuff. And I think if a lot of people that think they can't lose weight, they would knuckle down and they would make a menu or work with your coach to make a menu of something. This is a meal structure I could live with for three months. Nail that, eat the same shit every day. Watch how quickly your body transforms. And this is what I've noticed with all my clients over the decades. I go on a chronometer and the people that have the best results eat the same food every single day. It doesn't mean there are any chicken, rice, and broccoli. Like one of my guys, Warren, I've trained Warren for a couple of years. We've had these from 104 down to 84. We brought him back up to 98, brought him back down. Every time we've gone up and down, he's changed, changed, changed. But we created a menu that he loves. He eats a serving of steak every day. He eats a lot of chicken every day. He eats a lot of broccoli and veggies and all this. When you look at his actual diet, most people would look at that and go, I could actually live with that every single day. but people need to use more variety but they need to understand that variety there's boundaries there's always boundaries around this stuff like if you're if you're thinking you're going to eat you know two snicker bars every day and get the body of your dreams well those those are that's energy that could be better utilized if you ate unprocessed whole foods but also keep you more satiated and it would also drive performance and drive better quality of physique and better quality of health.