Flexible Dieting and General Population Clients

I want to ask, we kind of having discussion before this about the impact of flexible dieting the IFYM principles on Gen Pop. So it's like, okay, you know, client comes into the gym, they are very inconsistent. Some days they have breakfast, some days they skip breakfast. They might have four or five cups of coffee a day. They don't sleep. They don't drink enough water. Don't eat vegetables. They've got all these problems. And then I think a lot of trainers in the industry have so much discipline and they've done dieting for so long. They've trained really well and they themselves are nothing like their clients. They don't realize that yet, right? They don't have the experience. And what's worked for them is they go, okay yeah i want to have this pizza i'm just gonna like build it into my calories i want to have this burger build it into my calories i want these twizzlers and twinkies or whatever it is uh i'm i'm disciplined enough to eat all my vegetables and tick all my protein boxes and then fit this treat in at the end and they try and use that on their clients and we were guilty of it ourselves we'd go to people oh no food is evil like you can just kind of eat whatever you want but kind of disgusting i don't feel like that doesn't really work with gen pop clients because they miss so many of the big low-hanging fruit at the start so what do you think of that when applying those principles to gen pop well i mean look it's not just gen pop that this problem like we train gen pop but we specialize in training other coaches and i can tell you personal trainers have no idea how fucking food works man and we tried i didn't want to have to write people meal plans when we started i said okay coaches should understand flexible dieting they should be able to pick a protein from a list and then understand how to weigh it and track it and things like that. And we, it was disastrous. Like you would have, if they were from the physique side of things, they were pretty good, but everybody else sucked. So it got to a point where we said, okay, we've got, we have to make layers of this and we have to make progressions and regressions, just like you would with exercises, right? If I can't do a Bulgarian split squat, I can regress it to feet flat. If I can't do that front foot elevated. So I said, okay, we have to have that for dieting structure as well. If I give you your calories and your macros and I say, okay, I want you to eat four to five meals a day. Here's how I want you to structure it. Pick off this thing. And I also want you to try to track this. They couldn't do it. So it got to a point where how do I regress that back? Okay. I'm going to have to simplify this until we get to a point where I'm going to have to tell you exactly what to eat for a short period of time. So you actually understand how to track properly and how to follow instructions and also how food works. and then we'll take him from a couple, two or three months of doing that and then we'll say, okay, we're going to start trying a little flexible dieting, pick off this list for a little bit of time. Then we start talking to him about, okay, now you can pick things off the list. If you want to have Twizzlers, if you want ice cream, let's build that into your program, right? So if you have some calories left over at night and you want to have like my favorites, like white chocolate raspberry ice cream, if I have 400 calories at the end of the day I know that if I weigh out say 200 grams of that I can have that that's not a problem right considering too I'm dieting right now I'm losing by so I have to be more meticulous with my tracking losing weight and also eating for Brazilian jiu-jitsu competition I have to I have to tick all those boxes and you know that's something that people aren't doing too is ticking the boxes like making sure you get all the all the fluids you need every day making sure that you're cutting your caffeine off at a certain time so that you sleep better making sure that you try to eat a fistful of veggies or more at each meal those are boxes have to be ticked off and if they're not taking those boxes off we can't over complicate their their program by giving them too many choices because when you give a human free will and allow them to have too many choices they start doing stupid shit until they understand how this stuff works right