Datum Pretiosum: A First Principle for Nutritional Planning
Changes don’t need to be drastic to be effective. They just need to be sustainable long enough to produce the desired change. Sustainability is achieved by small changes, because small changes are less disruptive. This approach is not only necessary for a person to produce a change in the first place, it can be critical for having the change instill a lasting effect in the person’s life. In the case of someone who is overweight, the most important thing is for them to be clear about what the change they want to make actually is. I have often worked with people who, when asked that question, respond with something like, “I want to be healthy.” I then ask them, “Are you unhealthy?” They usually respond with, “Well, I’m not unhealthy, I just know I need to get more exercise.” Then I ask them “Why do you think you need to get more exercise?” At which point they say “I don’t know.”
If a training goal is not clarified from the start, it has the potential to get increasingly more difficult to achieve in the future. This is because the work will get hard, and when it inevitably does, there are only two things that will maintain order and continue progress, incremental as it might be. One is the necessity for a person to care what their coach thinks. In other words, trust. None of this works without a person relinquishing control, to some degree, to the person they have asked to help them. In the case that a person is on their own, without the aid of a coach or nutritionist, there must still be trust in the information they are being guided by.
The second thing is having a clear and attainable goal. The goal is important, because when the training, the diet, the schedule, and life in general get tough, there will be many times when you won’t give a fuck what your coach thinks. If you’re on your own, you may start to doubt the validity of your information. This conflict is sometimes unavoidable, because people have emotions, and emotions are what got you poking around in the gym and feeling the need to lose weight in the first place. But The Goal itself is not affected by emotions, which is why it needs to be clearly established. The two questions that inevitably arise are “what is considered clear?” and “how do I know what is attainable?”
Figure 1-1. A damn fine bowl of nutrients.
Define behavior before a result
A clear goal is one that is measurable. If a person wants to lose weight, and they have stated such to a trainer, the easiest question is, “How much weight do you want to lose?” The person states a number, which is often arbitrary, and tends to round off to the nearest five or ten. The trainer then usually explains that a pound of fat is equivalent to 3,500 calories and so a 500 calorie daily deficit equates to a pound of weight loss a week. They might then recommend macronutrient ratio to support this, which typically involves reducing carbohydrates, raising protein and cutting fat as low as possible.
Stating objectively in pounds the desired amount of weight one wants to lose is indeed a textbook example of a clear and measurable goal. It is certainly measurable; the client has vocalized it, and the trainer has established trust and expertise by displaying their vast and comprehensive nutritional knowledge that took all of ten seconds of internet research to find. However, the failure of this adopting this approach as the absolute starting point is that a rate of result has been established with a mathematical equation that is essentially arbitrary, not on the phenomenology of the actual person involved. Losing one pound a week is certainly a reasonable rate of weight loss, the generally range being anywhere from half a pound a week to three; but so is eight, if a person has been splitting a bottle of wine with their spouse at dinner every night for nine years and then cuts that down to none ever. Conversely, not losing any weight for an entire month is also a reasonable result, if the 500 calories the person cut from their daily intake failed to put them into a caloric deficit in the first place.
Setting expectations is important. Expectation helps to create habits, and habits are the basis of a routine. Routine promotes adherence, which is critical to achieving long-standing results. However, the expectations of the first week should be behavioral at first, not theoretical. The setting of expectations should include the intention to acquire starting data, from which an applicable routine can then be derived.
Attainable means reasonable
For most people, “reasonable” usually means “possible within a given time frame.” The time frame for losing a determined amount of weight is not something that is achieved simply because it is wished. The correct approach is to collect preliminary nutritional data from which caloric and macronutrient averages can be adjusted, in order to promote a result. A week is usually sufficient to get this initial data, as long as the week is representative of the person’s life. A week on vacation eating everyday at Disneyland is as relevant as attempting to fast for a week. Neither scenario is reflective of the person’s typical behavior, which is what they are ultimately trying to affect. Don’t do something different when you are trying to find out what you do normally. Different is what you do after you’ve determined what’s going on. Regardless of what the weight loss number might be, whether it has been stated aloud or remains internally wrestled with, the critical component of bodyweight and composition manipulation starts with accurately tracking nutritional intake. This is not a negotiable thing.
I’ve often worked with people who say they hate tracking, that the practice brings them more anxiety and frustration than they are able to reconcile against the potential benefit of doing it. These are the people who fail to achieve their weight loss goal. Knowing the data is critical to the act of manipulating it.
Weight loss is produced by a caloric reduction into a deficit state. A caloric deficit can be sustained through modifying the ratio of the macronutrients: Protein, carbohydrate and fat. How can one effectively manipulate data if one has no data? The answer is one cannot. While there are certainly individuals that possess an intuitive sense when it comes to nutritional planning and training, those people have likely garnered that ability because they have learned it through an objective process previously. The problem is not that they are lying about possessing this ability. The problem is that they profess that they do, and that other people presume this is in any way relevant to them. The more intuitive a person claims to be when it comes to working within quantifiable systems, the less relevant their perspective is to the general population, because they have all but admitted they have nothing to teach. The savant is, by definition, unhelpful.
Your data is your business
The internet is not yet plugged directly into your nervous system. You are not submitting blood samples into your phone. Humanity may have this technological ability one day, and I hope I am long dead before it is a requirement to live, so for right now we will start with the most readily available form of information: User reported data. For the typical person, it’s still the best method we have for collecting nutritional information on a daily basis, but even more importantly, it is information that is relevant to you, because it is derived from you. This concept can also be viewed in the context of a protein recommendation. A person may ask, “How much protein should I be getting every day?” Rather than instruct this person with the generally accepted recommendation of “one gram of protein per pound you weigh,” I simply ask them, “How much are you getting now?” They usually tell me they have no idea.
Get the hell out of my house and get the hell out of my life, and come back to me in seven days with the answer to my question. There is no point in making a nutritional recommendation to a person who has not yet demonstrated that they are even capable of verifying that the recommendation is actually being followed. A week of tracking also gives a person practice at forming a new daily habit, as well as making them more aware of what they are eating throughout the week. If a nutritional coach is assisting, it gives that advisor the opportunity to verify that the person is tracking accurately and a general overview of what their meals and eating schedule consists of. What if, after a week of tracking food, a person discovers they are actually getting the recommended daily amount of protein already? What then? Exactly. Nothing then. Because it was the wrong question to ask.
When I first started in the training industry, working in a commercial gym, I gave a presentation to a person who insisted he was consuming well over 300 grams of protein every day. When I expressed surprise at his claim, he continued on by assuring me it was true, and not only was he able to do it easily, he was achieving this without supplementation of any kind. I found this to be highly unlikely. There was no way this guy was eating what he said he was eating, but he was absolutely convinced of his data’s accuracy and said he could prove it. He opened a note app on his phone where he had logged his daily intake, as he was not using a nutrition tracking app to do so. He handed me the phone and I reviewed his log. Clearly, this person was under the impression that, because 3 ounces is equivalent to 84 grams when the unit conversion is calculated, the 3 ounces of chicken in his salad was providing him with 84 grams of protein. The error is understandable, as the thought process of the person was obviously, “Chicken is protein, and I ate 84 grams of it. Therefore I ate 84 grams of protein.” This kind of mistake may make for a humorous anecdote, as actual protein content of chicken is usually around 7-8 grams per ounce (depending on the type of chicken and the informational source). Misplaced trust and wasted effort, however, is not funny when it drives people to abandon their goals, especially when they weren’t informed by reliable information initially.
Figure 1-2. A damn fine nutritional log.
Tread the trend
I once worked with a person who outright refused to track their food, and insisted on weighing in no more than once a month. This position was grounded on their belief that the experience of monitoring calories produced eating disorders, and that looking at the scale on a daily basis and seeing a number representative of their enduring and unchanging weight brought them psychological discomfort too terrible to bear. When I asked them “Does doing these things cause more discomfort than looking in the mirror?” Their response was simply, “I don’t have to look in a mirror.” Indeed you do not. However, it is unlikely you will succeed until you do.
They weigh in on day one. They now have one point of data. They aim to improve their diet and start training regularly, but then in a fit of impatience and against their initial declaration, they actually do weigh themselves again the following day, only to discover that there had been no significant change. Discouraged and disappointed that no noticeable reduction of body fat had occurred in twenty-four hours, their resistance to getting on the scale has been doubly affirmed, and they return to their once a month convictions. Since they feel right about not weighing themselves, they feel equally justified in not tracking their food as well. After a couple of weeks they start to lose connection with their meals and the increased mindfulness when it comes to eating. This bleeds into the area of exercise, and they start to lack motivation to train. They skip one of their training days, which turns into skipping two, which turns into not going to the gym for a week. Their stress level and general sense of dissatisfaction has increased as a result of all of this, and they inevitably lose sight of their goal. They may even forget specifically what it was, despite starting out the month focused and with good intentions.
A month goes by. Begrudgingly, they weigh themselves again, as they agreed to, and on this one particular day, they get on the scale and discover that they are two pounds heavier than they were thirty days earlier. This person is now completely convinced that the process of weighing in and tracking food, which was never performed consistently in the first place, is clearly useless, because the desire to weigh less never lost high standing in their mind. They mistake this intensity of desire as an application of effort. Dedication has been mistaken for discipline.
It might have been that it was the activities of the most recent week that are responsible for the person’s weight gain, not the actions of the entire month. It might even just result from the sodium content of their dinner the night before. They might have actually been two pounds lighter after the first week, five pounds lighter by day fourteen, six or seven by day twenty, but because they only have data representative of the start and end of an entire month, the person concludes that everything they have done day to day was for nothing. The unfortunate thing is that they never granted themself the opportunity to observe the trend when the positive effect might have been occurring. The positive trend would have functioned to not only motivate them, but to verify what has been working. This is how one builds the habit of building a habit. If a person never engages in the daily practice of tracking data, they deny themself the daily reminder of The Goal. The correlation of effort to a measurable result is one of the most powerful tools to call upon when attempting to formulate new behavioral mechanisms. It is vastly more powerful than external encouragement.
Track your foods and weigh your body. Daily. We must have daily data, because we need to observe a trend. If you know the trend of a thing, you can manipulate its variables to either produce a different trend, or encourage the same trend to continue. If you weigh yourself one time and track your food for one day, you have provided yourself one data point. You essentially act in ignorance in the space between data points, so if you provide yourself with them more often, you are ignorant with less frequency. Only upon viewing what has already happened does one gain the ability to project what will likely happen next. The ability to predict with increasing accuracy is based on the information you observe in a trend. Trends reinforce habits, and habits form routines. Collecting data is not drastic. What you do with it is.