No-bullshit, dead simple weight control method

Failing so many diets. All of them requiring jumping through so many hoops.

All of it just to yoyo back to your original weight, because potato chips, ice cream, and pizza are just so delicious.

I’ve seen enough of fancy diets and none of them got me the lasting result of a lean body that I wanted.

Few reasons why I dropped them; Too restrictive that I snacked my way out of my lost kilos. They suggested boring food that I couldn’t keep eating it. My life situation gave me a beer and I made a hangover out of it. Just felt like pizza and I already failed the day so ate a bit more.

In the end, none of those diets stuck. Mainly because they were too much hassle for their worth.

I wasn’t really looking for a simplistic weight control framework, but that’s what eventually worked when I started working with my lifting and nutrition coach.

N.B. This is aimed for people who lift with compound movements from programs like Stronglifts 5×5, Starting Strength or something more advanced and would like to fuel muscle growth. It probably works for others too, but it’s optimized for my combined goal of muscular and lean physique.

Calories

All diets are essentially build on top of “Calories In, Calories Out” (CICO) or, in other words, if you eat more than you consume you gain weight and vice versa.

This framework’s main principle “as long as it fits my macros” isn’t any different in that it builds on top of CICO. It mainly adds additional info on how to iterate the calorie targets when the progress eventually stalls.

To make CICO work, you need to know roughly how many calories you eat i.e. calories in and spend i.e. calories out.

We know how much we eat by weighing and counting what we eat, and tracking them with e.g. MyFitnessPal. These might need to be guessed and estimated when you, for example, eat out, but being consistent in tracking is more important than 100% accuracy.

How much we spend can be tricky, because people have varying metabolic rates and activity levels. However, these don’t need to be accurate either, because you can make adjustments based on your bodyweight trends to approximate the spend closely enough.

Macros

Macronutrient calculations are based on that gram of fat is 9kcal, while a gram of carbs and protein are 4kcal per gram.

Protein

Protein is the king, because those are fuel for your muscle growth and maintenance.

Protein suggestions are most often based on your bodyweight. When cutting, you would aim to get between 2.2-2.6g per kilo of bodyweight. When maintaining and bulking, you would aim for 1.6-2.2kg per kilo of bodyweight.

Because we are aiming for simplicity, we pick the overlap of 2.2g per kilo of bodyweight (1g / lb) as the good enough™ suggestion.

However if you are overweight, using the above suggestion most likely overshoots your protein intake by a lot.

Instead, use your height as an estimate with 1g per 1cm. I.e. my goal would be 175g per day because I’m 175cm.

Fat

The suggested range that I got from my coach is 15-25% of daily calories from fat when cutting, and 20-30% when bulking.

So if your daily goal is 2500kcal and you’d aim for 20% of calories from fat, you’d set target to 2500kcal * 20% / 9kcal/g = 56g.

That’s nice and simple.

Carbs

Rest of your calories should come from carbs.

Example Macro distribution for me

Let’s take my situation at the time of writing.

Because the protein suggestion for bulk tends to be lower, we’ll pick 165g of protein.

For fat, we’ll go with higher end so it’s easier to fit fatty foods in, so we’ll pick 96g of fat.

That leaves 2875kcal – 4kcal/g * 165g – 9kcal/g * 96g = 1351kcal for carbs, which equals 1351kcal / 4kcal/g = 338g.

So my macro distribution would be 338g carbs, 96g fat and 165g protein.

Adjusting your targets

What you set your initial calorie target or macro distribution is not that important, because you should adjust it going forward when you gather data.

In addition to macro tracking, you should measure our daily weight and waist, and track them with e.g. spreadsheet like Excel or Google Sheets.

With the body measurement data, we can fine tune how much we eat to achieve the weight loss or gain we want.

We take the average of each week’s weight measurements over 3-4 week period to see what is the trend for your weight and make adjustments based on that.

Typical adjustment of ~100kcal is 15g of carbs and 5g of fat. However, at times you do want to recheck the macro distribution to keep within the suggestions mentioned above.

An adjustment example

With my weight of 75kg and goal of bulking, I should be gaining between 0.125-0.5% of my bodyweight per week, which amounts to 100g-375g per week.

If I’m gaining less than 100g per week i.e. essentially maintaining, I would raise my daily calorie target by 100kcal. If I was gaining more than 375g per week, I’d drop my target by same 100kcal.

In contrast if I was cutting, I should be losing 0.5-1% of my bodyweight per week, which amounts to 375-750g per week.

If I was losing less than 375g per week, I’d drop my daily target by 100kcal. If I was losing more than 750g per week, I’d increase my calories 100kcal.

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So, here is the whole framework how to control your weight. Simple, isn’t it? No foods that are off-limits, no specific expensive alternatives, no fancy hoops for timing or anything. If anything, you can eat anything including pizza, icecream or whatever is your favorite craving as long as it fits your macros.

If weight control is this simple in its bare form, how come so many people fail? Because the simplicity is deceptive and the hard part is not in the diet. The hard part is in doing it consistently for months or even years.