Lean Bodies Consulting

This is a copy of an email I recently sent out to my clients.

So, I've been doing some thinking about free meals lately. As 
you likely all know, I'm quite the stickler when it comes to 
dietary adherence. The compliance charts you fill out are 
typically anywhere from 35-42 meals per week depending on the 
individual.

So, the number you'll often here me throwing around is 90%; 
meaning that 90% is generally the lowest acceptable level of 
dietary adherence that doesn't lead to much in the way of 
compromised results. The more you fall below this 90% figure, 
the greater the liklihood that your progress will stall or simply be non-existent. 

So on a 42 meals-per-week plan, that basically means 38 of the 
42 meals have to be perfect. On a 35 meals-per-week plan, it's
about 32 meals. That seems easy enough doesn't it?

Now that's not to say you're smart to have 3 or 4 free/cheat
meals per week of course. 

However, what about the size of these 'off plan' meals? What if
your free meals are on the order of say 1500 calories? It's 
really not that hard to do. And let's say you have two of them a 
week. Well, I think it's pretty easy to see that causing a 
problem even though technically on a 42 meals-per-week plan, 
that'd still be 95% adherence to your plan. 

Do you see where I'm going with this yet?

Instead of looking at this from a 'meals position', let's look 
at it from a 'calories position'. Let's say your total weekly 
calories consumed is 11200 (1600 calories x 7 days). 
Technically, a 10% deviation (resulting in 90% adherence in terms
of caloric intake - which is really what matters for progress), is 
only 1120 calories. 

So, you'd basically have a maximum of 1120 calories to 'screw up' 
with, and still remain at 90% adherence. That's it. That might
be two meals that add up to 1120 or perhaps just one bigger meal. 
And the lower your calories (sorry to those of you who are 
smaller/lighter) the smaller the free meals need to be. 

I'm still fleshing out this idea, but I feel that this is definitely more important 

when we're looking at dietary adherence. 

If this person who has 11200 calories per week to consume, has two
1300 calorie free meals (very easy to do), that's 2600 calories of 
off-plan eating. That equates to only 76.8% adherence and that is 
unfortunately much too low. 

In the past my guidelines for free meals, if you choose to take 
them, has been a rather general and vague 'be mindful of portions'.
I think for many, this really doesn't mean much and provides 
little to no guidelines for what is and is not acceptable. 

So, now we have something a little more concrete. When we know our
weekly caloric intake, we can see what 10% deviation equates to 
and set that as a top limit. Again, that's not to say that one
has to take all those calories, as 95% is better than 90% and 100%
is better than 95%. 

Don't see this as something set in stone - all it does it provide some kind of 

frame work or 'limit' to cheat meals. 

Does it take a little fun out of the free meals? Maybe. But they
were never meant to be free-for-alls anyway. 

Food for thought ... 

Happy dieting,
Erik 

Related posts:

1. That Little Extra Focus …
2. Holiday Eating
3. 5 Weeks, No Cheats

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 18th, 2007 at 12:12 pm and is filed under Nutrition, Off Topic . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.