Flexible Dieting and What it Looks Like for Me

A little over 7 months ago, I was fed up.  I'd been trying to lose weight using a strict calorie restriction, and nothing was happening.  I was eating about 1300 calories per day, and working out for about 45 minutes at least 3-4 times per week (usually that looked like 30 minutes of cardio, and 15-20 minutes of some form of strength training or toning, usually Pilates because I prefer it).   I was eating what I thought was the ultimate diet - almost purely vegan, with very few exceptions (mostly eggs from our own chickens, and some cheese, like feta on my salads).

And I was gaining weight.

I tried intermittent fasting instead, thinking that maybe I was stressing too much about it, and having only a few days per week of calorie counting would help relieve some of that stress.

Still gaining weight.

So, I started reading.   I looked into the old "standbys", like Weight Watchers (I'd lost weight with them before).  I looked into keto, Whole 30, and paleo.  And then, a friend mentioned that she'd been "watching her macros" unofficially, on the Lose It app, and how eye-opening that had been for her.

October 24, 2017  vs April 11, 2018

I started reading everything I could get my hands on about this whole macro thing.  I learned that a lot of what I thought I knew about weight loss might be a myth:  namely, calories in vs calories out was a gross oversimplification of how our body metabolized food.   I started paying attention to what I was eating and watching the little macro pie chart on My Fitness Pal, the app I'd been using for years and was comfortable with.

What I noticed completely blew my mind.   I was easily eating 200+ grams of carbohydrates per day, while barely breaking 50 grams of fat or protein.   I guess I hadn't realized just how tipped in one direction my diet really was.   I was eating *good carbs* (mostly whole fruits and legumes), but still....that was a drastically unbalanced diet if this macro thing really was valid.

October 24, 2017 vs April 11, 2018

I reached out to a Facebook friend of mine, and fellow adoptive mom, who I knew did this macro thing, in the form of "flexible dieting", and asked for her help.  I knew she coached people on their weight loss journeys, and I thought she might be able to guide me, too.

Without exaggeration, and without the intention of being overly dramatic....that decision was probably the best one I've made in the last year.   Kristy jumped right in to helping me figure out what my goals should be like, with regard to macros and calories, and checked in with me regularly to see if my body was responding the way I wanted it to.   Her support, added accountability, and her experience helped me troubleshoot and problem solve any hurdles that came up (and they did come up).

2017 macros - so unbalanced!

2018 macros - notice the difference?!

I was shocked, and still am.   My initial calorie goal was almost 500 calories more than I'd been eating, and my protein and fat goals were waaayyyy higher than I had been hitting with my diet at the time.   I was positive I wasn't going to lose any weight, just based on the calorie goal alone.




Well...I was wrong.



I'm now 7 months in, and still have a calorie goal that is almost 300 calories more than what MFP originally had me at with their algorithm, and I'm still losing weight.   I'm down right around 41 lbs, and even managed to maintain it while on a beach vacation that involved beach butlers with drinks and poolside dining, and quite a few dinners out at restaurants.   This doesn't even include the 6 days of travel to get from home to vacation and back.    I gained 1/2 a lb on vacation.   HALF A POUND.  Guys, that's unheard of for me.


My mindset towards this whole "calories in vs calories out" thing has been completely changed.   In my experience, what kind of calories you are eating matters just as much, if not more, than your calorie count each day.   Yes, overeating in the form of too many calories will lead to weight gain.   I am not disputing that.   What I didn't realize before, though, was that what my body did with each of those calories was very different, based on what that food was comprised of.   Would I have gotten to this point with calorie counting alone?  I don't know.  Maybe.   What I do know is that counting macros got me there with much less heartache, less stress, and more quickly.....and I have a hunch that it got me there in a much healthier manner.

I still have a lot of weight to lose - I'm only a little more than halfway to my goal - but I have confidence that flexible dieting will get me there, and with my sanity intact.    I thought I'd take a minute to give you an idea of what flexible dieting looks like in my life today....

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The biggest challenge for me has been finding a way to get the 105 grams of protein that I'm aiming for each day, without relying on meat.  I'm not philosophically opposed to animal proteins (I'm an omnivore, that's for sure), but I do firmly believe, based on my own lab numbers and health experiences, that the more plant based foods I can eat, the better.    I try hard to make sure that the bulk of my macros are coming from plant-based foods, preferably whole fruits and vegetables.    This is tricky, because the bulk of those are great with protein vs calorie ratio....but it still doesn't add up to enough grams of protein in a day for me, as I'm trying to build muscle and tone up.   I have worked some animal protein back into my diet (eggs have always been a part of it, so that hasn't changed, and I've added back in Greek yogurt), and rely on a smoothie a day made with Sun Warrior protein powder, typically after my workout.   If I use the protein powder and greek yogurt, I can easily get 40-50 grams of protein, and that's a huge chunk of my daily goal.  Getting the rest with eggs, veggies, hummus, legumes, nuts, and maybe some more cheese is usually not an issue for me.

Typical meals for me include:

Breakfast:  veggie omelet, eggs and toast, Kashi Go Lean cereal and almond milk (I love love love the peanut butter one), or a smoothie if I'm on the way out of the door for an early practice.  I've just recently discovered Kodiak cakes, which has helped me bridge the gap between a food I love (pancakes) and not overeating on simple carbs.   My current favorite breakfast is scrambled eggs, a half cup or so of smashed black beans, cooked with cumin, a little cheese, and salsa.

Lunch:  I almost always have a big salad of some sort.   Like, big ol' dinner plate sized salad.   I top it with beans, lots of veggies (almost always broccoli, cakes, carrots....often whatever else I have in the fridge), maybe some more cheese if I need the fat grams, and a dressing from Bolthouse Farms.  Those are yogurt-based, so it's a little bit more of an animal product, but they're delicious and super macro-friendly.   My favorite topping for salad is falafel, and I often will have that kind of salad for days in a row (haha).  I do usually throw a couple of chicken breasts into the crockpot at some point of the week, and cook them up with no added salt or seasonings.   I simply shred them and keep them in the fridge to add to salads or sandwiches all week.   (Mike needs quite a bit more protein than I do, and he struggles to get there without adding this in to his diet once a day).  It's a nice treat for the rest of us, too, to have every so often.

Dinner:  I blogged about our favorite veggie dinners here, but I do also tend to use dinner to add meat into our day, if we're going to do it at all.   One thing I always struggled with when eating veggie was our busy schedule - there weren't very many veggie based crock pot meals that weren't soup (I'm not a big soup fan, personally).   On our days where we are super busy, I do tend to fall back on an easy crockpot meat based meal and side salad, like a knock off chipotle burrito bar with chicken, or French dip sandwiches.

Snacking has been the hardest thing to work around with macros.   My go-to snack in the past was always a piece of fruit.  Again, while fruit is *good* for you, too much of it is still a heck of a lot of carbs.   I started trying to snack on veggies instead, or nuts (or nut butter).    I've fallen in love with Sargento's Balanced Breaks for my super busy days.  But, really, my go-to snack has become veggies that I prep earlier in the week, so they're just easier to pull out of the fridge and go with.   Hummus gets me the fat grams that I often find myself needing (fat grams are surprisingly hard to get with a plant-based diet!), and you can often find me eating peanut butter with a spoon, or with a sliced up apple.    When first starting to count macros, I would gravitate toward cottage cheese as a snack, to help with that protein count until I figured it out, but I don't find myself doing that as much anymore.

Some questions that I often get when talking about flexible dieting come from the idea of restricting my carb intake - I'm now easily eating 75-100 carbs less per day than I used to.   While most of that drop has come in the form of not eating as much fresh fruit (eating more veggies instead), I have dropped how much I'm eating in the form of rice and legumes.   We ate a lot of lentils, beans, and rice before.  Again, while these are mostly *good carbs*, they didn't necessarily provide my body with the energy it needed for the the goal I was trying to accomplish (lose weight, build muscle, and tone up). I'm still eating those, but in moderation.   I love rice, so it has taken a bit of a mental shift to eat one serving instead of 3 and be happy with it.   Now, rice is a side to my meal, and I focus on bringing lots of fun flavours to the dish and not relying on the rice for bulk.  (read:  lots of veggie filled curries).   Bread isn't so much my downfall (except for toast!), so again, I've tried to change how I eat it and enjoy it.  Instead of just sandwiches and buttered toast, I'm trying to eat things with nut butters, or treat myself to fun, flavored bread with sandwiches.   I used to laugh at the whole idea of avocado toast, but guys...then I tried it.   New favorite snack, I'm telling you!   Instead of removing those things from my diet....I made them the star of a meal:  the "fun" part of the meal, with the bulk of the sustenance coming from the rest of the dish.  It's made it feel like I'm still splurging, without actually overeating it.

Those of you who know me know that I love to cook and create in the kitchen.....I love to try new things and new recipes.   This was originally something that I worried about with tracking macros - how the heck would I keep track of all of that?    Enter in My Fitness Pal's app:  it is incredibly easy to enter in a recipe, and I basically do it for every meal we eat.   Once you are in the program (mobile app), you can open the "more" tab, and choose Meals, Recipes, and Foods.   That will give you the option to search for or create a recipe.   I've found that I can often find recipes that I've found online already entered into MFP - but that won't take into account any adjustments that I make, or necessarily line up perfectly with my own ingredients.    Typically, most of the time, I create it myself.   You can add using the URL of the website you're getting the recipe from, or you can enter each item individually.  I tend to enter each item individually, because I can scan the barcode and use the exact item I'm cooking with, but that's really up to each person's preference.   I play with the amounts I'm using, and then adjust the number of servings to fit how we eat it (I usually get more servings out of a recipe than what it originally calls for, because we bulk up our meals with so much salad).

What I love about MFP's recipe creator is that once I save a recipe that I've entered, I can use that same recipe to create a new one.  As someone who hates eating leftovers as just reheated versions of the original meal, this is *huge* for me.  

As an example, the above picture is a recipe added from the web - a budget bytes recipe that I've used on those busy gymnastics nights.   We eat it as tacos usually, but it makes a TON of food for us.   I needed to use up those leftovers somehow, and for this trip, I used them to create burritos to take with us on the road.   I entered each item into the recipe creator individually, as I created the burritos, using that first recipe as one of the ingredients for the meal.   Super easy, super friendly for counting macros.




Now, whenever we eat this meal, I can just choose it from my list of recipes saved in my profile, and log it.  No having to recreate something I've already made, no having to log each item individually each time I eat it (hello, cumbersome!), and an added bonus?  I can share the recipe via iMessage with Mike and anyone else who's eating it or wants to see how I make it.   Super flexible dieting friendly.

In the long run, I think flexible dieting is going to be the route I go for continued weight loss and then sustaining it.   I love the fact that I can eat real foods, the same as everyone else in my family, and not have to ask anyone to accommodate my diet any time we eat out or eat at someone else's house.   If we're at a barbecue or picnic or potluck, it's no problem - I can usually find anything I need in MFP's archives, and eat accordingly.   I don't feel like I'm being deprived of anything, and that's huge for me.   We eat our favorite foods.  

As I lose weight, I'm noticing other benefits - ones that I'd hoped for back in October and I'm starting to see on a regular basis.   Things like being able to hike up sand dunes with my super healthy kids and not feel incredibly winded and unable to move.   I'm snow shoeing again.   I can fit into regular clothes at a regular store again.

But the benefit I didn't expect is the one I cherish the most:  I no longer feel stressed and anxious about what I'm going to eat and how I'm going to manage to "stay on plan" when life throws me a curveball.   When the kids are sick and I don't have time to cook, I don't panic about my diet....I know two things are true, even in those situations:   one, I can eat food from anywhere, so if I have to order in dinner because I don't have a chance to cook, no big deal.  I can eat that, without guilt.  And two?   It's just one day.  *One day will not lead to failure*.  If I don't hit my macro goals that day?  No big deal.  I get right back at it the next day, and I know that it won't derail my whole mindset and/or journey.   This relaxation about food, this disappearance of anxiety around my weight and weight loss journey, has been the biggest benefit of flexible dieting for me, without a doubt.    I was not expecting to find something that made my brain calm down and relax, while still losing weight.   I expected to have the same thing happen that always did before:   obsessive responses to food and needing to be in control of each meal,  completely.   Is it easier when I can control everything that happens with regard to my diet in a day?  Yes.  But that's not life.  We get stuck in traffic, we get invited out for impromptu gatherings or meals, we go to other people's houses, we go out to celebrate life events, kids and people get sick, weather causes us to not get to grocery shop....in short, life happens.

Flexible dieting can handle that.

Thanks to flexible dieting.....I can handle it now, too.


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Coming soon - I'll post our favorite recipes in the "kitchen" tab of this blog.   I just need to move them from my Copy Me That app to this blog!

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Also, if you need help finding recipes for your own family, or help with creating a meal plan, let me know.  I love this kind of stuff, and would be happy to help!  You can email me here.