Summary of SIMPLE Eating

If you want to jump right in and start using SIMPLE Eating for your benefit this post is for you! Whether you have already read the associated posts, are an experienced nutritionist, or just want to roll your sleeves up and jump in, this will give you the no-frills information to get you started. I don’t go into many of the “why’s” and “how’s” below, but rather focus exclusively on the “whats”- the things you need to do to start eating more deliberately to realize your goals and get the results you expect.

In short here’s what you’ll need to do to get started with SIMPLE Eating:

Set Your Goal(s)– Your goals enable you to realize your life expectations as they relate to nutrition. While the most beneficial goals are beyond simple weight loss, I focus much of the information on weight loss as a starting point. If you have specific family medical histories that you want to mitigate (e.g heart disease), those make great goals that nutrition can help with as well. Of course the simplest goal is to just eat the best way known to humanity according to current science and let the benefits roll in!

Determine Daily Intake- If you have a favorite Dietary Flavor (e.g. Mediterranean, plant based, etc.), keep following it. Everything I present should be compatible with all responsible nutritional approaches, though in some cases we’ll tweak the details. Dietary Flavors can save you a lot of time that would be spent selecting a fat vs carbohydrate energy balance and the foods/recipes to get you where you want to be.

The following is the only guidance that SIMPLE Eating provides about the types of foods you should eliminate or minimize to the extent possible.

Stay away from processed foods, including fast foods and pre-prepared/packaged food from the grocery store
Control the overall amount and type of protein you consume
Stay away from the 3-Ss: Salt, Sugar, and Saturated Fat

In addition to avoiding some ‘bad’ foods, your daily macronutrient and caloric intake need to be determined from your physical characteristics (e.g. height, body type) and desired energy balance based on your activity level and gain/loss goals. This must include a breakdown of your target macronutrients, specifically, protein, fat, and carbohydrates.

Prepare Your Plan- Setting goals and estimating your daily nutritional targets are pretty simple (pun intended), but the reality of changing your daily eating habits, which are some of your foundational daily behaviors, can be profound. In other words, depending on how much you are changing your diet it may not be easy to actually implement and follow your new dietary plan.

Hence, the next step to follow SIMPLE Eating is to prepare for how you will implement the changes.

Track and Control Progress– One of the most tedious tasks we face in learning how to eat differently, and just better, is to track what you eat and your progress toward your goals to make sure you are progressing. It’s not enough to simply estimate your daily caloric intake and macronutrient composition- we need to learn how to actually satisfy those estimates at a detailed level (I.e. to the gram). The only way to do that is to track everything you eat in terms of overall quantity (i.e. amount/weight) and estimated macronutrient composition.

If you are not progressing toward your goal(s), your tracking information will directly point to how you need to refine your eating to correct and adjust your intake. For the most part though, you only need to track things until you have it all dialed in and KNOW you are eating in a way that is aligned with your goals and showing progress. It should take about 2-months tracking and adjusting until you are a master SIMPLE Eater and can ease up on the detailed daily tracking.

The following sections provide overviews about how to go about accomplishing each of the above steps in greater detail. Additionally, each of these steps is supported by more material, usually entire posts, in this book to help inform you and provide additional guidance where needed.

Establish Useful Goals

As mentioned above, I think it makes sense to assume many people will be establishing weight loss goals, but I also think it’s worth noting that I originally developed the SIMPLE Eating approach to enable me to extend my life expectancy and safely gain weight as I started an active weight training campaign. Whether your goal is to lose weight (eh hem, FAT), gain weight (usually muscle), or to achieve some other non-weight-based outcome (e.g. lower cholesterol/LDL levels, reduce insulin resistance), SIMPLE Eating is a tool to help you take direct control of your nutrition to achieve your goals.

Whatever you want to accomplish, your goal(s) must be specific, verifiable, and actionable- in other words your goals need to be meaningful. To establish meaningful and useful goals we need to include short timeframes in which the goal can easily be tracked and verified which requires us to identify at least one measurable characteristic (e.g. percent body fat). The following is an example of the useful goals we are after.

Lose 25 kilograms of fat in six months at a rate of half a kilogram each week through diet with no change to my current activity level.

As you can see from the above example, useful goals are specific and include, at a minimum the rate at which you expect to change (i.e. half a kilogram per week), the total amount of change (i.e. 25 kilograms), and the duration of the goal (i.e. six months). It’s important to note that you can only pick two of those goal components (i.e. how much change and how fast it will change)- the remaining characteristic will be set from the first two (i.e. how long it will take). So if you want to lose 25 kilograms of fat at a rate of half a kilogram per week, then it will take you 50 weeks, or about one year, to achieve your goal (half a kilogram a week for 50 weeks equals 25 kilograms). Chapter 6, Section 4 delves into goal-setting in much greater detail, so if you’re ready to set your goals you might want to consider jumping to that section.

NOTE: For weight related goals I strongly recommend using a rate that is weekly. This makes tracking much easier in the long term, which we cover in more detail below and in Chapter 6, Section 4. Some goals however, like the example about reducing blood cholesterol levels, don’t lend themselves to weekly tracking so rates can be selected based on the type of goal for non-weight based goals.

It’s important to write your goal down in a place where you will see it often- perhaps a note in your phone or on a page in your journal (if you are into journaling). For the most part we’ll be tracking nutrition daily and review it on a weekly basis regardless of your specific goal(s).

Determine Your Daily Intake (Type & Amount)

It’s probably obvious that your daily nutritional intake is the core of what this book is about. Now that you have a goal in mind it’s time to figure out how to tailor your eating to meet your goal(s).

Pick Your “Dietary “Flavor”

Since SIMPLE Eating is an approach to managing your nutrition and not a prescriptive Dietary Flavor, you might need or want to select an established flavor as your starting point. As discussed in the introduction, the term Dietary Flavor is used in reference to what you might commonly call a ‘diet’. Examples include the Mediterranean Diet, Keto, Plant-based, vegan, pescaterian, as well as others. I call them “Dietary Flavors” because they usually have direct implications for the types of food you eat and the associated tastes and flavors that you enjoy. I review the common flavors in Chapter 5, and contrast the recommendations from each flavor against SIMPLE Eating to highlight things you might want to consider.

Where appropriate, SIMPLE Eating makes use of guidelines from the Mediterranean Diet for default recommendations because studies have shown that the Mediterranean Diet has the highest correlation with longevity and overall health (Citation). You can easily modify any parameter to fit whatever flavor you feel is best for you. The most important thing to pay attention to when starting with SIMPLE Eating, beyond eating whole foods, is the relative proportions of the macronutrients (protein, fats, and carbohydrates) prescribed by your selected flavor- we’ll hit macronutrients recommendations in the next sections.

Just to underscore the point, you don’t need to select a Dietary Flavor to follow SIMPLE Eating. I’ve provided enough information and some ‘staple’ meal recipes that you can start making use of SIMPLE Eating directly without following a trendy diet.

Eliminate & Minimize the Bad Stuff

This part is pretty easy, at least conceptually. The reality in the modern world however makes this harder than it may originally seem because processed foods are so convenient and prevalent that they are just hard to avoid and most modern cultures have forgotten the diets we evolved to eat. That being said, if you keep these points in your pocket and at the top of your mind, it can go a long way to helping you implement SIMPLE Eating and realize better nutrition immediately.

Eliminate and Avoid Processed Foods: Eat Whole Foods Instead

Processed foods, as well as prepared foods from restaurants and supermarkets, tend to be loaded with saturated fat, salt, and added sugar (all of the 3-S’s we’ll talk about below). Additionally they aren’t great sources of fiber, vitamins and minerals that are commonly found in fresh ingredients. They also commonly include chemicals that you don’t need or want- preservatives, colorings, and flavor enhancers.

For that reason you should construct a diet that includes healthy portions of fresh and whole foods that are minimally processed. Think fresh fish over sausage, and rolled oats over breads, and barley and rice over pasta. The more you can identify your food in a natural state in which you could hypothetically find it while you were walking around in the world the better.

Avoid Leggs for Protein Sources: Eat Plants, Fish, and then Dinosaurs

For two reasons you can generally conclude that the findings from modern research is a fan of eating plants, and decidedly against eating animals (see Chapter 3 for the details).This is mainly due to findings about animal proteins being detrimental to human longevity (you won’t live as long), and second that animal fats are more saturated than plant sources which, again, reduces longevity. So, if you aren’t actively growing (i.e. strength training, healing from injury, etc.) the amount of protein you consume should be low and should be fixed based on your fat free mass (FFM) and NOT how much you weigh!

HIGHLIGHT BOX

As the creator of SIMPLE Eating, and the guy that did all the research about how bad it is to include animal sources in your diet, I am not a vegetarian. I grew up eating meat and continue to do so, but after all the reading I’ve done I have changed my diet. About half the days in a week I don’t eat meat at all, then the remaining days I eat fish/seafood and chicken, though in much lower quantities than I used to. I do still eat red meat, or by simple rule meat that comes from animals with four legs, very rarely.

END HIGHLIGHT BOX

If, like me, you aren’t ready to be a vegetarian then by all means eat meat. Fish, especially cold water fish like Cod, are good sources of protein (though it’s still ‘animal’ protein) AND they have the added benefit of Omega 3 and Omega 5 fatty acids- the best fats you can eat. I try to stay away from bottom feeders like Halibut, lobster, shrimp, and (gasp) filter feeders like oysters and clams (even though I love most of them).

If seafood isn’t your jam and you need some terrestrial flavor, go for the dinosaurs! Our three-toed friends who survived the mass extinction event and are lovingly referred to as chicken and turkey (along with other foul). Kidding aside (though they are dinosaurs) chicken and turkey are meats that are good sources of protein with lower levels of saturated fat than other land-based meat sources. But keep in mind that the protein they provide squarely still fits into the ‘animal protein’ box that has been shown to reduce human longevity- eating them will still shorten your life.

Avoid the 3-S’s

This book doesn’t tell you to eat, or not to eat, any particular foods- SIMPLE Eating is not a specific diet or nutritional plan. That being said there are some important factors to consider when you pick the food that you will eat whether part of a Dietary Flavor or not. There are three things that are scientifically proven to negatively impact your health and should be avoided and have an absolute minimal composition in your diet are:

Simple/Added Sugars: Sugar is the simplest carbohydrate and should be avoided as much as possible. This includes added sugar in foods (i.e. candy and anything with corn syrup) as well as processed simple carbs (pasta and bread) and high-sugar fruits (mangos). I lump alcohol into this group as well because alcoholic drinks commonly include sugars directly, but also because alcohol is processed into sugar by your liver.
Saturated Fat: The ‘bad’ fat, which is mainly from red meats as well as fried foods like french fries. Fat is a fantastic and critical nutrient for your body, but the saturated fats have many well documented negative effects. Instead eat monounsaturated fats and omega fatty acids (cold water fish, nuts, and some vegetables).
Salt: Salt is a critical mineral for life but can wreak havoc in large quantities- the amount of salt that we ingest in our modern foods is often multiples of our required daily amounts, and at those levels can lead to a host of diseases and ailments. Salt intake should be carefully monitored to ensure that you are not exceeding the required daily amount. In general I never salt my food and only use salt sparingly when cooking.

Set Your Daily Macronutrient Intake Targets

The beautiful and yet simple nutritional fact that has been covered in a plethora of books and other sources for decades revolves around how much you should eat each day. We will use the Katch-McArdle (***Citation***) method to determine your estimated daily caloric intake needs. There is a bit of math to get there, but if you are using the SIMPLE Eating dietary calculator (***Webpage link***) it’ll be super easy. If not it’s still easy enough to figure out the individual macronutrients by hand from your total daily Caloric intake estimate a calculator or similarly capable app handy.

We’ll walk through setting the portion of the three macronutrients (protein, fat, and carbohydrates) that will comprise your daily food intake. If you have a selected dietary flavor this is the time to pull out the macronutrient ratios prescribed by that flavor so you can compare and tweak to suit your specific needs and goals.

Functional Macronutrient Recommendations

One way that SIMPLE Eating is a bit revolutionary is how we determine macronutrient breakdowns. Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 explain the reasons for this better view of macronutrients. For now accept that protein and a lot of the fats you eat are NOT used for energy purposes but rather for functional purposes- literally building and running your body. Since these functional purposes are not about burning things for energy it does not make any sense to talk about their Caloric content or as a ratio of your daily Caloric intake.

Let the revolution begin…

Because protein and a sizable portion of your dietary fat are NOT used for energy, functional macronutrient needs must be estimated using your Lean Body Mass (the ‘functional’ part of your body that includes muscles, organs and bones) and not your overall weight. Your overall body weight includes non-functional adipose tissue, also known as body fat that quickly skews the numbers for functional macronutrients in potentially unhealthy and dangerous ways!

Before we get into the details however, the first thing we’ll need to do is estimate your specific Lean Body Mass, or identify your target Lean Body Mass if you are focused on losing weight. The SIMPLE Eating dietary calculator is a great resource to help with this, and for just determining your daily Caloric intake and macronutrient breakdown as well, but there are other readily available online tools that can help if you want to compare the numbers.

To get your estimate you’ll need to provide your gener, height, weight, and two more unusual measures: neck circumference and wrist circumference (women also need to input your waist size). Once you input the data the calculator will tell you your Body Fat Percentage along with a table of other useful estimates, including the recommended macronutrient breakdown.

HIGHLIGHT BOX

Protein and about half the fat you eat are used exclusively to build and repair your body and NOT for energy purposes (i.e. Calories). For that reason we need to estimate the portion of these macronutrients based on your ideal Lean Body Mass only, and NOT your overall weight. Your functional macronutrient needs should not change much as you gain or lose body fat!

END HIGHLIGHT BOX

Let’s walk through the SIMPLE Eating macronutrient recommendations in general for each of the three basic macronutrients.

Estimating Functional Protein Needs

Your body needs protein for a number of physiological purposes associated with operating and repairing your body- it is critical for life- but not used for energy AT ALL. Of the three macronutrients protein can be the most dangerous from a dietary perspective. A recent study (CITATION) revealed that, for adults, consuming more than 10% of your daily caloric content from protein has been shown to decrease overall life expectancy for people under 65 years of age. In short, too much protein can kill you, albeit slowly over decades.

SIMPLE Eating recommends minimizing your daily protein intake, and consuming protein from mostly plan-based (non-animal) sources. You can estimate your daily protein intake as 1 gram of protein per kilogram of your Lean Body Mass.

This recommendation aligns well with the World Health Organization’s (WHO) recommendation for daily protein consumptions (***CITATION NEEDED***). If you are focused on gaining muscle mass, healing from a major illness or trauma, or have other unique medical needs you may want to consult your doctor and increase your daily protein intake. Baring a specific growth/healing goal however, keeping your daily protein intake at a relatively low level may help to realize better overall health.

HIGHLIGHT BOX

SIMPLE Eating does NOT estimate daily protein intake based on your total body weight because body fat does not materially change your daily protein requirements. Therefore, your daily protein intake requirements won’t change much if you lose fat. If you include fat weight in your daily protein estimate you will overestimate how much protein you actually need! Estimating daily protein intake is covered in great detail in Chapter 3 and Chapter 4.

END HIGHLIGHT BOX

Estimating Functional Fat Needs

You may not be aware that your body uses a lot of the fat you consume for functional purposes to make things like cell walls, hormones, and other non-energy purposes. Like protein, these functional purposes are closely correlated to your Lean Body Mass and not your overall weight (which includes body fat). That’s why we need to estimate your functional fat needs separately from your energy-providing fat needs.

Functional fat intake, at an absolute minimum that should always be provided, is 0.75 grams per kilogram of Lean Body Mass.

From a less precise perspective, you can assume you need about ⅕ of your total daily food intake to be fat for functional purposes. Because it is a functional requirement you should never consume less than this amount of fat or you may risk reducing your overall health.

Energy Macronutrient Needs

In normal circumstances your body can only burn carbohydrates and fat for energy, and carbohydrates can ONLY be used for energy and have no functional needs (though dietary fibers can be considered a functional need, which we’ll address later in Chapter 3). Your daily energy needs are also closely tied to your activity level- the more active you are the more energy Calories your body will need each day to fuel those activities.

Based on your Dietary Flavor or preferences you will need to select the ratio of energy Calories you want from carbohydrates versus fat. These are ONLY energy-bearing Calories however, so the total energy Calories will be less than the comparable total daily Caloric intake estimated above. Once you select that ratio we can determine your overall macronutrient composition.

But first I need to point out an elephant in the room…

You may have noticed that SIMPLE Eating still makes use of existing daily Caloric intake estimates that include Calories for protein and functional-fat, even though those two components aren’t used for energy. So what gives- are protein and functional fat Calories or not?!

They are not! But we don’t have any accepted science or methods to directly determine only the energy portion of a diet. It seems nuts, but even Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) estimates total daily Caloric needs that include non-energy macronutrients. Without an accepted and serious (i.e. scientific) study that decouples legacy conventions of including protein and functional fat in a daily macronutrient mix, we need to back into the numbers a bit by converting the content, in grams, of protein and functional fat into chemical Caloric content and then removing these from the accepted, though bizarrely incorrect, norms.

Again, if you use the SIMPLE Eating dietary calculator all that will be handled for you… just saying.

Estimating Energy Fat Needs

In order to provide a recommendation about the amount of dietary fat you should consume each day I defer to the Mediterranean Diet and the many well studied benefits of that dietary approach. The Mediterranean diet recommends 40% of your daily Calories come from good fats, though ranges of 25%-40% are often accepted to be safe (CITATION). From the previous estimate above we know that approximately 20% of those fats are already accounted for by functional fat, so we need to add another 20% fat for energy purposes to meet the recommendations of the Mediterranean diet.

The SIMPLE Eating dietary calculator takes care of the functional fat and energy fat estimation for you if you use it directly- if not be aware that you’ll need to add both the functional fat portion estimated above to your energy fat portion to compare with your selected Dietary Flavor.

SIMPLE Eating recommends you consume 0.75 grams of good fat for energy purposes, which also equals the amount of fats used for functional purposes.

HIGHLIGHT BOX

Your diet should NEVER contain less than 25% of your overall daily calories from fat as an absolute minimum. Some parts of your body are highly selective in their use of fat for energy, notably the human heart. Hearts are pretty important organs after all- make sure you supply yours with the food it likes- high-quality fats!

END HIGHLIGHT BOX

Estimating Energy Carbohydrates Needs

Carbohydrates (‘carbs’) represent the remainder of the daily energy providing macronutrients. I presented it here as the last macronutrient because it just represents the remainder of your daily Caloric energy needs. Hence we can calculate it by subtracting out all the Caloric content from the other macronutrients already determined above from your daily Caloric estimate.

Assuming you followed the protein and fat recommendations above, 50-65% of your Calories should come from carbs, and the more complex (i.e. non-sugar) the carbs the better.

If you are using the SIMPLE Eating dietary calculator the amount of daily carbohydrates you should include in your diet will be presented directly.

Closing out the discussion of your daily macronutrient intake targets, you can see it gets a little complicated because some macronutrients are used for functional purposes and some for energy purposes. The dual role of fat for both function and energy gets the most involved. I go into much greater detail about daily caloric targets and the resulting macronutrients compositions based on scientific research to best accomplish your unique goals in Chapter 3.

Prepare Your Plan

Great, there it is, now go out and eat better and be healthy. That was easy, right? Not so fast…

Unfortunately it’s never easy to change something as fundamental as eating habits, not to mention the additional ‘overhead’ of tracking everything you eat, and regularly adjusting daily intake targets. What we covered above is the EASY part of SIMPLE Eating. Putting it into meaningful practice will take a bit more time and ‘elbow grease’ on your part. But, from my experience implementing this approach, I’m sure you will start seeing benefits after only a few days without even changing your diet directly.

To make it easier to implement, I have included a plan that I recommend you use and introduce you to the concept of “staple meals”. The recommended plan breaks the process down into steps that take one or more weeks. By the end of week eight, you’ll be fully empowered to control your nutrition to help realize your goals. Making things easier as you start, Staple meals are things you can use to simplify the daily intake tracking (because they have known macronutrient compositions and caloric quantities), are easy to prepare, and reduce your effort when it comes to meal planning.

Let’s dig in a bit more…

Recommended 8-Week Plan

To implement SIMPLE Eating in the easiest way possible I recommend that you change things in smaller steps over eight weeks. Of course you are welcome to skip the staged implementation plan and go right to the end if you are up for it, or you could even implement the changes in your own way with a plan that makes sense for you. If there isn’t a dire need for immediate change however, it will likely be more enjoyable and increase the chances of success if you make smaller changes over the recommended eight week timeframe. Doing so allows you to get used to things while your body adjusts where needed.

Here’s how I recommend implementing SIMPLE Eating over an 8-week period, and then beyond.

Stage 1: Daily Habits, Same/Old Diet: One Week

At first don’t change anything about how you are eating. After establishing your daily caloric intake and macronutrient needs, track everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, you eat. You should also do your daily weigh-ins at a specific selected time each day. After the first week you’ll have a baseline of the actual calories and macronutrients you are currently eating as well as a solid baseline of your current weight. The main goal of week-1 is to get you used to tracking things.

Stage 2: Implement Daily Caloric Intake: Two Weeks

In addition to the habits established above in week 1, in weeks 2 & 3 you’ll change your diet to more closely match your daily targets. You will likely find that hitting your macronutrient targets while hitting your daily caloric intake total is kind of hard- there are always a few grams of something that you miss while a few grams of something else that exceeded your daily quotas. For weeks 2 & 3 you only need to be concerned with the total calories though, so don’t sweat the macronutrient balance yet..

Stage 3: Review and Adjust: One Week

After week-3 you should be close to your total daily caloric intake target and know where you need to adjust things or are having issues. The third stage is all about keeping the tracking going and to make sure your protein intake isn’t too high, and then to take a peek at your fiber intake. If you are eating more whole plant sources in your diet (the top principal of SIMPLE Eating) you will likely find that your fiber intake is higher than it used to be- that that can be, uh, uncomfortable (trust me, I know) if your gastrointestinal tract isn’t used to it.

In any event, at this point it’s the first time you’ll have enough data to be able to strategically modify things. And you should have seen some progress toward your goal(s) as well, especially if they are weight based.

Stage 4: Weekly Goals: Four Weeks

The last four weeks you will continue to refine things, but you should be actively tracking and achieving weekly targets and hitting your expectations. You may need to further tweak your protein intake, fiber, and should now be actively managing energy from carbs vs fat each day. After the eighth week you should have things dialed in and know exactly what you need to do to achieve your goals- it’s just a matter of continuing to track, review, and adjust from there.

Stage 5: Live Well: Forever 🙂

After you get through the first 8-weeks things switch into a routine where you can just tweak your goals if needed, identify new goals, or just continue to progress as needed. By this point however you can likely ease up on the detailed daily nutrition tracking because you’ll have figured out what foods fit your diet, what foods don’t, and how much you can eat. You’ll be able to identify and estimate the macronutrient composition and total calories of the foods you eat just by looking at them, and a lot of what you eat should be coasting nicely on autopilot from SIMPLE Eating staple meals or your own staple foods.

At this stage the most important thing to do is track the outcomes from your goals. If you’ve realized your goal Lean Body Mass (you lost the unwanted fat you were carrying) then just keep tracking your weight- if it goes up a bit (like mine does between mid-November and mid-January each year) then cut back a bit on the total calories. I also periodically track things at that detailed daily level just to refresh my understanding of the foods I’m eating and my overall energy balance (calories).

Staple Meals

Whether you adopt the above implementation approach or choose a different path I highly recommend using ‘staple meals’ as you begin your journey to a new nutritional approach. Staple meals are things that have known nutritional values that align with your selected flavor and estimated daily caloric intake, but are commonplace in your days. In short you’ll eat them every day and be able to quickly add them to your tracking log with little thought or effort.

For example, when I modified my diet after establishing a new goal to add 10 pounds of muscle I had the following staples every day.

Breakfast: Old Fashioned Rolled Oats, 200g with 240 ml of almond milk, 24 grams of extra virgin olive oil (yes, really), a banana in the cereal, and two cups of coffee
Snack: one protein bar in the mid-morning
Lunch: Shake/smoothie made with prepackaged blackberries/raspberries/blueberries, a small amount of protein powder, almond milk, olive oil (ya, seriously, again)
Hydration: ~96 fl oz of water
Dinner: Open based on family cooking and meal planning and remaining daily intake

I selected the cereal, protein bar, frozen berry mix and protein powder that I liked and then ate these, using the exact same recipe every day. I was using a popular app on my phone for tracking and created these recipes in the app- tracking was a matter of clicking on the recipe and I was done for each staple. On occasion I did get tired of eating the same things, but this took a few weeks before I wanted something different. The motivation to find something different, when coupled with the added time while I was ‘getting tired’ of them eased the tracking burden as well as the overall ‘change’ that was happening.

Do yourself a favor and use staple meals and take it slowly, as detailed in Chapter 7. I also present a few regular meals that I eat which aren’t daily staples but can bridge the gap between everyday-staples and common meals you may eat once each week. Your Dietary Flavor should also provide a number of canned recipes that you can use as staples. Wherever you decided to get your initial staple meals from, make sure they align with your daily nutritional estimates and don’t include the stuff you shouldn’t be eating (e.g. saturated fat, animal protein, etc.).

Track & Control Progress

I’m not going to sugar-coat it: likely the most annoying and tedious task you have ahead of you, as you follow SIMPLE Eating and truly learn to eat to accomplish your goals, is to track what you are eating in a detailed way each day. All the work we did above in setting your macronutrients and establishing a plan needs to mean something each and every day- and the only way to know you are following your estimates, and that those estimates are working for you in accomplishing your goals, is to track everything you eat. Literally everything.

At times, like when you are eating dinner at your favorite local restaurant, you’ll need to take 10 minutes just to figure out what (meaning at a macronutrient and a caloric content level) you want to eat. Making that restaurant scenario even more tedious is the fact that dinner is at the end of the day. It’s extra work because at the end of the day you’ll find that you have already consumed a lot of your daily macronutrients but will likely have an imbalance for what remains.

HIGHLIGHT BOX

Learning to eat healthfully – I mean REALLY learning to eat- requires you to build a detailed understanding of what is in the foods you eat and how those contents fit into, or violate your diet. Building that understanding comes at a cost of some frustration and an investment of your time. Be patient and diligent. If you ever become overly frustrated, just make the best selection you can and move on. It’s more important to eat better than it is to capture data!

END HIGHLIGHT BOX

For example you might only be able to eat 5g of protein to stay within your daily budget, but still need 850 Calories- 5 grams isn’t a lot of protein, and 850 Calories isn’t a small portion. In this case you’d likely be looking for carb-heavy foods with a low glycemic index and a dose of healthy oil (eh hem, fat) just to boost the Calories up. It can be a challenge to search a restaurant menu for foods based on specific macronutrient composition AND caloric content, especially if you have to estimate the nutritional value because the exact recipe isn’t in your app (trust me, I know because I’ve been there many times).

In short, while it might be a bit of a pain for a while, for you to have the highest likelihood of success for any goal(s), you need to regularly track your nutritional intake and be mindful of your progress and the results. Doing so keeps the goal on your mind and makes each action you take more relevant to that goal. But most importantly, tracking things at a detailed level provides you with the information and experience (i.e. education) you need to eat better long-term and potentially realize a longer and healthier life!

Tracking & Controlling equals learning to eat.

Tracking Food Intake

I have a strong recommendation to use an app on your smartphone to track and log your daily foods. There are some good options available that can greatly facilitate tracking what you eat, and save you a great deal of time and some frustration. Some popular apps have bar-code scanning capabilities and a large database of food products that can make logging packaged foods a snap. Be mindful of the units that these apps use though- they tend to switch constantly between the Metric and Imperial units. Furthermore, you’ll find that a cup of broccoli is a bit challenging because broccoli doesn’t exactly fit well into a standard Imperial ‘cup’.

I also strongly recommend getting a small kitchen scale to measure quantities of various foods and ingredients that you eat on a daily basis. Weighing foods and portions will help you get accurate information about the calories you are eating. Moreover, weighing your food develops a deep understanding of what you are eating and how to control and adjust your diet when needed. Without such a tool you will be forced to guess portion sizes/amounts. Inaccuracies of 100-200 calories a day, which is easily surpassed when guessing, can be enough to prevent you from accomplishing your goals.

When I first started detailed daily tracking, it surprised me by how annoying it was when I ate a new dinner recipe or ate out at a restaurant. The guess-work involved in tracking portions and overall ingredients wasn’t fun, and I had to put my drive-for-perfection aside and just settle for a “good enough” guess. In doing so I had to estimate how many calories the meal was, along with an estimate of the general nutritional value (e.g. Was it salty, or loaded with red meat and cheese?) and then search for a calorically equivalent meal and hope that the micronutrient mix, vitamin, and mineral (i.e. salt) were similar. It took extra time when deciding and at times annoyed my dinner companions almost as much as it annoyed me!

The frustration I experienced was exactly what I needed however- in going through the exercise at each meal I was forced to learn the nutritional content (energy calories and macronutrient composition) of what I was eating. Just like the physical exercise adage “No pain, no gain” implies that exercise is painful, but that pain comes with benefits, with SIMPLE Eating and detailed daily tracking- “No frustration with tracking restaurant foods, no learning to eat.”

For example there were times when I would splurge on the weekends while having dinner out with friends by ordering things like lasagna and a nice dessert. While my tracking app was handy, some restaurant chain recipes aren’t in the database yet, so I had to pick something that I felt best approximated my portion. Now just imagine having to do that three times a day (if you don’t use Staple Recipes) instead of just once at dinner, AND adopting new habits on top of that…

I spend a great deal of time reviewing the tracking approach in Chapter 6, Section 4.

Monitor Goal Progress Daily/Frequently

Monitoring your progress toward your goal(s) depends on the types of goals you are setting. If you are working on lowering your cholesterol for example, you won’t be tracking your progress daily (hopefully that’s obvious). On the other hand, if your goals are more focused on your overall weight, then tracking things daily is easy and pretty helpful for staying focused. In short, how you monitor your progress toward your goals is heavily dependent on the type of goal and may require specialized equipment. Because more specialized goals are likely going to involve help from a doctors office (i.e. blood based tests, etc.) I’ll focus most of the monitoring discussion on weight based goals.

Since you are already tracking your food intake at a detailed level, for weight-based goals, you only need to do a few additional things daily:

Weigh yourself and
[Optional] Track calories burned

Daily Weigh-ins

I recommend weighing yourself in the morning shortly after you get out of bed and after using the bathroom. Doing so provides a more precise daily weight-in than other times because variation in meal amounts, levels of hydration and other factors likely lead to daily variation of weight throughout the day. Keep in mind that it’s normal to see 1-2% variation in weight on a daily basis, so eliminating additional variation will help you get cleaner numbers for monitoring.

Keep in mind, however that body weight is a very blunt characteristic since it includes adipose tissue (fat) along with your Lean Body Mass. If your goal is to ‘lose weight’ you’ll need to refine it to losing fat and identify a Lean Body Mass target and periodically estimate your Body Fat Percentage (which a scale can’t do by itself). For most purposes however a scale will tell you if you are on the right track toward realizing your goal.

[Optional] Track Calories Burned

If you have an activity tracker or smartwatch it will likely be able to give you a reasonably accurate estimate of the Calories you burn each day. These estimates are useful for monitoring and verifying that your Caloric targets and planned changes are well aligned, but tracking Calories burned is not necessary. I have used my smartwatch as a secondary verification of my daily Caloric burn to make sure I’m not missing anything- if I eat 2,600 Calories each day for a week, and burn 3,100 Calories each day during that week I should see my weight decrease by almost half a kilogram on average.

As we’ll see in Chapter 4, Calories burned includes two components however- Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) Calories and active Calories. The Calories your body burns for normal functioning, your BMR, don’t change much from day to day. Your active Calories however can change quite dramatically each day depending on what you are doing. In any event, active Calories plus the BMR Calories burned give you the total Calories you burn each day.

Tracking Calories burned each day can get a little involved. As mentioned earlier we cover tracking things in much greater detail in Chapter 6, Section 4.

Review & Adjustment Macronutrient Targets

Way back at the beginning of this chapter I recommended setting weekly targets based on your overall goal. For example if you are working to lose 25 kg of fat, a good weekly target would be to lose half a kilogram. Doing so enables you to check your progress each week to see if you are progressing and if not, tweak your approach and daily nutritional intake.

You should pick one specific day each week on which to review your progress toward your goal, your weight, total Caloric intake and the proportional contribution of each macronutrient. The benefit of accurately and diligently tracking data daily is you can clearly see if and when you need to adjust quantities or your overall goal. You should also contrast how you are feeling each week to make sure everything is falling into place as expected. Many times changes to our diets can lead to uncomfortable periods as our bodies adjust- looking at the data may provide some information about tweaks that can be made to address potential areas of discomfort.

Weekly reviews are also covered in Chapter 6, Section 4.

In Summary

So, there it is- SIMPLE Eating in a nutshell. It’s as simple as:

Set your measurable goal(s)
Determine your daily nutritional needs: total Calories and macronutrient amounts
Make a plan
Track and monitor progress

The rest of this book builds on these concepts and explains why these recommendations were made and how to go about putting SIMPLE Eating to work for you. In the next chapter we’ll take a deep dive into macronutrients to help you understand what your body does with the things you put in your mouth and the benefits and damage that may result from good and bad selections.

It’s an exciting journey and I’m so happy you’re taking this amazing step to helping increase your longevity while simultaneously realizing better health.