November 17, 2019
Simplified Diet How-To’s
Meal Scheduling
Each meal has a timing recommendation, such as “within an hour of waking” or “evening”. Meals are spaced this way to help you feel full and energetic throughout the day and supply your muscles with the nutrients they need. Do you HAVE TO eat ex- actly like the schedule says? No way. But being within the ballpark is a good start. So if you don’t have breakfast until 1.5 hours after you wake up, it’s not the end of the world. Generally speaking, your first meal can be anywhere from the time you wake up until 3 hours after. Your second meal can be anywhere from around 11am to 4pm, depending on if you wake up early or late, and your last main meal can be anywhere between 6 and 11 pm, depending on your schedule and preference. Don’t sweat the details, and just eat regularly when you can!
Creating Each Meal
When you’re making each meal, go from left to right. You’ll notice that the categories for each meal’s food sources are:
• Lean Proteins
• Veggies
• Fruits/Grains
• Healthy Fats
When choosing foods for each meal, make sure to select the right amount of food from each category to make the meal you want. If you would like to have additional choices to those listed under Your Healthy Food Choices, you can eat foods not listed, but please make sure they fit within the category’s main function. Please see question 19 in the FAQ: “[Can I] Have foods for my main meals that are not on the provided list?” in the FAQ for some more details on making such substitutions.
When picking the amounts of each food, make sure you get the amounts listed as close as possible. How close is that? Within 5g of weight, 1 oz, or 1⁄4 of a cup or tablespoon is JUST FINE. There’s no need to count to the gram! And how much is a “small handful of veggies?” It’s about a cup. Just be honest with yourself and don’t over-grab on purpose when you’re hungry, and you’ll do very well on the diet.
Once you’ve picked your proteins, move onto your veggies. You can mix and match foods from all categories as much as you like, so long as the total amount fits the recommendation. After you’ve picked your veggies, you can pick your healthy carbs. For carbs, there are two categories to choose from; fruits and grains. So long as the total amounts add up to the recommended value, you can combine any grains or any fruits. Combining both in one meal is a bit tricky. If you’d like to do the math, go for it, but if you just want to eat your fruits in one meal and grains in another, that will keep things simple and effective. After you’ve picked your healthy carbs, choose your healthy fat source(s) and you’ve got a healthy meal all ready to go!
Do you have to make these meals fresh every single time you eat? Nope. You can batch cook either once a day (for the rest of that day or the next day), every couple of days and refrigerate, or even for the week and freeze! All are equally healthy and most successful healthy dieters tend to find that batch cooking works best. Since all of your meals are of equal size and composition, you can just make a bunch of them at once and make your diet that much easier to follow.
When cooking in larger batches, you can always simplify your life by choosing the same ingredients per meal for every single cooking session. So if you, for example, cook once every 3 days, you can make all of your meals with chicken breast, broccoli and spinach, oatmeal with apple slices and avocado for every single one of those meals if you want. But, if you need more variety and you want to make each day or even each meal different, feel free! The only thing we’d recommend against is eating the exact same sources week after week, to give yourself variety to look forward to and keep diet fatigue at bay.
If you’re REALLY just not into counting and measuring, or are often on the go, you can just use the sample meal pictures at the top left-hand corner of each diet. Just make your plate look as close to the one on the picture as you can, make sure a deck of cards (or an object of comparable size) compares like it does in the picture, and you’re good to go.
If you’re losing weight at the pace you want, you can feel free to choose any of the protein, veggie, carb, and fat sources for your meals. However, you have another option. If you don’t want to take the caloric reduction of moving into Weight Loss 1 or Weight Loss 2, or are already on Weight Loss Diet 2, you can do choose more from sources lower on the list of foods. For example, choose to eat egg whites and chicken breast more often than salmon and steak. More broccoli and celery and less zucchini and tomatoes. More melons and berries and fewer bananas and cherries. More white rice and quinoa and fewer breads and wraps. More almonds and walnuts and less olive oil and peanut butter. We’ve ordered these foods not only by their calorie quantities, but by the degree to which they reduce your hunger, calorie-for-calorie. Thus, if you choose foods lower on the list, you automatically lower your calories while getting more fullness for each calorie, which can help you lose weight faster and more sustainably. That said, we highly recommend you save this technique for when you NEED it, not using it right away when you’d be fine without it.
Choosing Your Snacks
Each day has three meals, but it also has the “snack” section. The only thing the snack section tells you is how many calories you should limit your snack to. You can always skip the snack if you like or eat fewer calories than listed, but don’t go too far over the calorie amount on a regular basis if you’d like to optimize your health.
What should you eat for your snack? Literally anything you want. So long as you get your whole food in and your calories are in check (which if you follow the plan, they will be), junk food in moderation will have no negative effects on your health. So you can have cookies, ice cream, a burger… or more healthy foods. Feel free to get creative!
How bad is it to go over the listed calories on your snack allotment regularly? Well, if you do so often, we can’t guarantee health improvements on the diet. But if you’re successfully losing weight or holding a healthy weight and can still manage to have a big binge or two per week on top of the plan, we’re not going to stop you! But if you’re overeating on the snack and not seeing the results you want, the first line of defense is to get your snacking back in order and stick to the recommended calorie amounts.
Weight Loss Diet 1
You’re going to follow the Base Diet for a week so that you can get used to eating in this new way. After a week, you’ll switch from following the Base Diet to the Weight Loss Diet 1 page. The food amounts will be reduced, and this will allow you to lose fat, lose weight, and get that much closer to your health goals. You can stay on this diet for up to 12 weeks, but if, and only if, you are losing enough weight per week. How much weight? The very top of the document, right next to the name, tells you just how much. If you don’t lose that much weight for two weeks straight, it’s time for you to move onto the Weight Loss Diet 2. If you do keep losing at least as much weight as the top of your template says, you’re good to just continue on with Weight Loss Diet 1!
Weight Loss Diet 2
If your weight stalled enough on the Weight Loss Diet 1, you’ll be instructed to move onto the Weight Loss Diet 2. This diet cuts your calories much more, and is kind of the “final frontier” for weight loss in this template. It’s going to be tough, and you’ll experience more hunger and less energy, but, in return, you should be seeing your weight continue drop. Keep this diet up ei- ther until 12 weeks go by since you began Weight Loss Diet 1 (that’s since you began Weight Loss Diet 1, NOT since you began Weight Loss Diet 2) or until the hunger and fatigue are too much and you need a break. No matter how you finish, you did your best, and it’s time to recover by using the final page: the New Base Diet.
New Base Diet
Once either 12 weeks of dieting (on Weight Loss 1 and 2, combined) go by, or you just have to call it quits sooner, this is when you begin the New Base Diet. If your diet enabled you to reach a weight you’d like to maintain, you can use this diet indefinite- ly. On the other hand, if you want to lose more weight, we HIGHLY recommend you stay with the New Base Diet for 12 weeks before jumping back into Weight Loss 1. Why? Because your body and brain are evolved to resist losing weight, and your recent weight loss will activate countermeasures such as hormonal pathways that make further losses much more difficult. By giving our bodies a long break, we can cool those reactions and have another productive round of weight loss after that time. Such breaks are one way to avoid falling into an ill-fated yoyo dieting.
If you’ve lost 25 lbs or less since beginning your diet template, you can reuse it by going back to your Weight Loss 1 diet after 12 weeks on your New Base diet, and doing a “rinse/repeat” of all 4 phases, start to finish. But if you’ve lost more than 25 lbs on your prior run and wish to lose more, you’re probably due for a new template that’s calibrated to push your weight even lower, and will be much more effective than simply reusing your old template again.
Your Path to Success
When using this diet program, please remember that consistency, not perfection, is the most valuable tool of the successful dieter. If you’re following the plan most of the time, and find yourself off track just some of the time, you’re likely making great strides on your weight loss journey. Even – and especially – when it gets hard, keep doing your best and resisting the urge to sweat the small stuff.
With that: Take a deep breath, get excited, and start your Base diet!