Body nutrition-facts-copy

March 2nd, 2013

18

4 Reasons Why Your Diet Sucks

By

1. You have no idea how much you are eating.

Ever wonder why you can’t gain any muscle or lose any body fat? Well, the first place to look for the answer is your diet. Are you eating the requisite amount of calories for your goals? If you want to gain muscle you have to eat more calories than you burn, whereas if you want to lose body fat you have to eat fewer calories than you burn. There is no way around this simple fact. Even though this is nothing more than a grade school physics problem, I’m still baffled by the number of guys out there whining about being “hardgainers” or “endomorphs.” Invest in a food scale and track your intake. It’s really not that hard.

2. You are constantly looking for the next best supplement to take.

This is the game equivalent of asking for the one magic pick up line that will allow you to swoop top shelf girls left and right. The hard truth is that the vast majority of supplements are a complete waste of money. Guys flock to supplements because it’s an easy fix. Instead of putting in the time and hard work needed to obtain the results they desire, they look for shortcuts in order to get ahead. Unfortunately, these shortcuts don’t exist. The only time you should be worrying about supplements is when you have all of the other nutritional building blocks in place.

3. You think you don’t have the time to eat healthy.

A lot of guys complain about being too busy to eat nutritious meals made mostly of whole foods. Guys will also complain about not having enough time to hit the gym after work (or during their lunch break). The problem here is not one of time, but rather of priorities. Guys would rather sleep-in than get up early to make themselves a good lunch to take to work. The bottom line is this: if you value your health then find the time to make yourself nutritious meals. Ditch the excuses.

4. You think there is one “best” diet for everyone

I’ve been in this game long enough to know that there is no one particular diet that is best for everyone. I remember about 10 years ago people were losing their minds over The Atkins Diet. About 5 years later people moved on to The Paleo Diet, and now Intermittent Fasting is all the rage. New diets will always be on the horizon, which pretty much guarantees that arguments on the internet about which diet is the “best” will never end. I do not know what the “best” diet is. What I do know is that all good diets have several things in common such as being based around whole foods, and acknowledging the importance of portion control, protein, fiber, and other important nutrients. Aside from these basics, whether you eat low carb or high carb, three meals a day or six meal, is entirely up to you and your lifestyle but make sure you get the basics down first.

If you can get a handle on just these four areas of your nutrition you will be ahead of the vast majority of individuals out there.

Read More: Juicing: Flash In The Pan Or Growing Lifestyle Movement?



About the Author

is a Canadian freelance content writer and fitness enthusiast.

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  • Rich

    Good stuff.

  • JerseyShoreIntrovert

    The first one is critical. Whenever I explain it to anyone who asks for my advice they are completely dumbfounded by the statement. Most people seem to think you need to run 10 miles a day to lose any sort of weight. If your diet is in check you will see results. Another error people make is not adjusting as they lose weight. The more you lose, the less calories you can have a day to maintain the desired amount of weight loss.

  • Chase

    While the calories in/out principle is true, its not the whole story. You have full control over the number of calories you take in, but you don’t have as much control over what your body does with those calories. Someone with a high metabolism can eat 10k calories, sit on their ass all day, and still burn up most of those calories. Doing work requires calories be burned, but burning calories does not require work be done.

    • Spaniard

      It’s still calories in/calories out. High metabolism = calories out at a higher rate, low metabolism = calories out at a low rate,and average metabolism = calories out at an average rate.

      • Stuki

        But metabolism & anabolism are functions of calories in. Starving people freeze, fatsos stuffing themselves sweat.

    • anon1

      See initially i am inclined to agree with you. Everybody from Gary Taubes, Tim Ferriss (citing michael phelps daily consumption) , and Mark Sisson et al tell you calories in/out isn’t the end story. It’s all about insulin and hormones and sleep patterns they say.

      I’ve been on CKD for maybe 5 months now and i’ve combined that with IF too.

      Results: lots of muscle growth, but not much in the way of weight loss. I look muscly but the gut is still very much there. I now know that quite simply its because of too much calorie intake.

      If the solution really was paleo or keto all the time, then why the hell are crazy veggie people/ vegans/juicers/highcarb vegetarians skinny?

      so i think the calories in/outmodel is more accurate than we’d like to believe.

      note: veggie people may be skinny but they are not necessarily healthy. (often skinny fat or gaunt, they don’t have redness to their cheeks or any real sign of strength and life in their bodies)

  • Western Cancer

    #1 is probably the downfall of everyone who’s ever had trouble gaining/losing weight. There are tons of calorie counting programs out there and I’d suggest people having trouble get one and count every single thing that goes into their mouth for at least a month. Snacks here and there will add up. Getting drunk and fast food binging is another one. One could easily match their daily caloric intake with 6 drinks and a few slices of pizza and that will mess up your whole week’s gains.

    Same goes for dudes trying to gain weight. An old girlfriend used to talk about how her brother was always trying to gain weight, but couldn’t no matter what he tried. She said he ate mcdonalds snacked all day etc, but when I calculated it in my head he was only eating about 1600 calories in any given day.

  • Major Tom

    Great article. The first one was definitely the reason I plateaued for such a long time after starting out. I used to subscribe to the idiotic notion of having to eat x amount of meals a day, but wasn’t even aware of my caloric needs, let alone how much I was actually eating on a daily basis (this goes hand in hand with tracking your progress in the gym with a notebook). Keeping track of your macros/calories these days with tools like MyFitnessPal.com allows you to eat [mostly] what you want, have a life, and adjust accordingly if you’re not getting the results you want.

  • Hindu American Nationalist

    No need to

  • Pingback: 4 Reasons Why Your Diet Sucks | Online Diets and Weight Loss

  • http://www.facebook.com/john.loo.273 John Loo

    If anyone here is still in high school, join a sports club. Seriously, it’s easier to stay/get back in shape if you’ve been fit once in your life. Once you’re working it’s a lot harder to get fit.

  • Ovid

    #1 is huge.

    If you fast for a couple of days it teaches you a lot about when you’re really hungry and need to eat for your bodily health, vs. when your habits and social conditioning try to make you eat. It’s eye-opening. Due to the relative prosperity of the first world compared to everywhere else, there is an abundance of food here, all of which does a pretty good job of sustaining a person. (Even if you just eat Big Macs, you’ll do OK compared to the poor wretch in Africa who is happy when he can catch a rat for the stew pot.) Most of us eat far more than we really need to for nourishment, which is why most Westerners are increasingly fat. (In addition to the plentiful supply, food here is also generally over-processed and deliberately engineered to taste delicious, which plays a role in making us eat more, too. But that’s really another issue.)

    The typical American sits all day at work, sits in the car going to work, and sits on his ass in front of the TV, computer, or other entertainment device of choice when he gets home from work, and then wonders why, when he eats the same thing now as he did in high school, back then he was fit, and now he’s pushing 300. In high school, he probably didn’t have a car, walked between every class, played football, and banged a lot of cheerleaders. All of which burn calories. Now, he barely moves, but he still eats like a champion racehorse.

    Even if people eat “healthy,” and go to the Indian place instead of McDonald’s, they’re usually still taking in more calories than their body needs, which is why so many people nowadays are fat. Then they make a new years’ resolution to lose weight, run themselves crazy on a treadmill at the gym for a week or two, find that they’ve lost very little, if any, and give up. If they’re prone to voicing their opinions, they will blame the “fat gene,” or try to sue their favorite restaurant. But they never even think about analyzing their own quantity of food intake.

  • Johnny

    Oh, so as long as I expend 2500 calories a day–I can eat 1500 calories worth of candy and chocolate and still lose weight? It’s not that simple.

    • Stuki

      But, if you expend enough energy to have calories in = calories out at 3500/day, you can eat 1500 worth of candy. As long as you brush your teeth, at least.

    • Spaniard

      It actually is that simple. Try it. Expend 2500 calories a day and eat 1500 calories of candy and chocolate. You will lose weight.

  • Stuki

    Unless you are a competitive bodybuilder, professional fitness model, actor or perhaps athlete, weighing your food crosses the crazy line in my opinion. What a life; counting food grams!

    Again, unless you compete in a strength/muscle activity, simply ramping up caloric burn by doing more cardio is a much less contrived way to stay in decent shape. As a bonus, due to the fact that micro nutrient requirements vary much less with caloric burn than caloric requirements themselves, the extra calories can be pretty much anything without much in the way of adverse effect. Which allows one to do something as recklessly crazy as eating food one enjoys, rather than obsessing over nutrient composition.

    Competitive lifters trying to max out on mass gain, need to focus all available energy on lifting. Not waste some of it on running/biking. Which is where the cardio fear in “serious” weight rooms across America comes from. But Joe a-bit-above-average doesn’t (or need not) focus all available energy on mass gain anyway. And due to our old friend law of diminishing returns, those last 15% of mass gain, requires at least a doubling of effort. Effort which if deployed to cardio if starting from zero, may well get you 85% of the way there as well. IOW, 50 + 50 = 85 + 85, while 100 + 0 = 100 + 0. If you’re a competitive lifter, 100 > 85, which is all that matters, but if not, I don’t agree with the tradeoff.

    A side bonus I have noticed in many “serious trainers” (as opposed to the fitness dweebs that tend to give cardio a bad rep), is that they become much better at determining when they are in caloric surplus or deficit than pure lifters. If they don’t eat enough, they get, tah-dah, hungry; often enough so to wake up early with a rumbling stomach. And if they eat to much, they wake up stuffed. IOW, they regain the kind of autocalibration that has kept people in reasonable shape for millennia, but which have largely;y disappeared amongst those that do not move.

  • American Yogini

    You don’t have to count calories with this food pyramid;

    http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/raw%20food%20pyramid

  • Ross

    Intermittent fasting! Breakfast is unnecessary!

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