Dieting made easy

Eating is overcomplicated nowadays.

Should I restrict it? Should I be free?

The short answer is: it depends.

But, here’s the long, true answer:

What I’d recommend, and what I did do is the following: when you’re just starting to lift/train, eat unrestricted, until you’re full, prioritising whole nutritious foods.

When you’re a beginner, you must fuel your progress.

If you’re not gaining weight, eat a little more. You want to achieve a slow but steady weight gain that is in one-one correlation with your strength and size gains.

Do not overeat, but don’t fear food either; in this stage, it’s pretty much impossible to gain pure fat.

Then, in the intermediate stages, restrict eating a bit; go through a couple of bulk/cut cycles, since this will encourage muscle gain while keeping bodyfat levels under control. This also has the benefit of switching metbolisms, since you’re giving your body both breaks from eating too much, and eating too little!

This should be done when your progress stalls a cetain amount, where you need bigger calorie ups and downs to see progress.

In turn, at this point you’ll have more experience and will be able to control weight gain and loss more accurately.

Now, when you’re a really advanced lifter, you come full circle: you finally un-restrict your eating again; you eat whole, satiating foods with no restriction. If you have to gain weight, you will. If you have to lose weight, you will.

This may seem tricky and confusing, and it is; it requires experience and practice to be able to closely listen to your body. Because, here, “without restriction“ does not mean “eat a ton“, it means to eat as much or as little as you need to neither feel hungry nor extremely full and bloated.

At this point, you can just eat by feeling, and keep only loose track of your various nutrient intakes and their amounts and still make progress.

When you’re advanced, you’ll probably slow down in your gains anyway, so why contribute to this by dieting too hard? Yes, staying in caloric surpluses or deficits may help, but they should come and go as our bodies ask for; an experienced lifter will ride his body’s ups and downs, instead of fightig them.