In this post, I want to shed some light on the truth about flexible dieting and If It Fits Your Macros (IIFYM). Now, at its core, flexible dieting is a nutrition strategy that allows you the freedom to eat foods you enjoy.
Essentially, nothing is off limits! As long as you hit your calories and macros, you can enjoy the foods you want! Naturally, this has put IIFYM and flexible dieting under intense scrutiny.
Many people hate on flexible dieting, because they think it is going to result in eating incredibly unhealthy. But in actuality, I often see flexible dieting resulting in an entirely different phenomenon.
Why Flexible Dieting and IIFYM Is Incredible
Flexible dieting gets your brain to work. It teaches you how to find the foods and meals that fill you up incredibly well. Just because you are able to eat cookies and pop tarts and cake in your diet, doesn’t mean you’re going to eat those foods.
Ultimately, flexible dieting and IIFYM is all about finding the most enjoyable way to hit your calories and macros. This means emphasizing the foods and meals that keep you the most satisfied.
So you very well may find that you enjoy your diet more by sticking to mostly natural, healthy foods which is great and you should do that. But on the other hand, you may find yourself as the type of person that likes to add ice cream or even chocolate in at the end of your day to help you stick to your diet, then amazing, do that instead!
For me, it’s eating filling, delicious meals like this:
Funny enough, just by having the freedom to know that you can eat whatever you want often reduces the desire to eat junk food. People that try to eat 100% clean, usually have intense cravings, and binge eat on junk all the time.
If they were to do flexible dieting, they’d get way better results and they’d enjoy their diet way more!
Intermittent Fasting + Flexible Dieting is Amazing
One of the reasons I’ve had such amazing success with flexible dieting is because I combine it with intermittent fasting. Instead of eating 4-6 small meals per day, I eat about 1-2 big meals and a snack or dessert.
This means I have a ton of room to fit in the foods that I love, making flexible dieting, combined with intermittent fasting, amazing.
But here’s the other interesting point, ‘natural foods’ don’t necessarily keep you the most full.
For example, brown rice and nuts are considered very healthy by a lot of people. Yet, for the most part, they are not very filling. On the contrary, low fat cheese, high quality chocolate, potatoes, and pop chips are very, very filling.
So when you start tracking your calories and macros, work on finding the foods that satisfy you to the highest degree possible, which will make getting lean effortless.
Final Comments!
To me, this is what flexible dieting and IIFYM is all about. It’s about making building muscle or dropping fat, downright enjoyable! Also, it’s getting you to focus on the main drivers of fat loss / muscle growth.
You can try to stick to some crazy diet rules and only eat certain foods, but that doesn’t mean that you will drop fat or build muscle. To get lean, you must eat at a calorie deficit.
So, flexible dieting and If It Fits Your Macros really gets you to hone your attention on what matters, in the most enjoyable way possible! All of my courses utilize intermittent fasting and flexible dieting.
It really is incredibly effective!
