Food without the faff

No meal plans. No banned foods. No weighing your lettuce on a set of scales you bought specially. Just a few simple rules that work.

The food that doesn't count

"I barely eat anything" is usually true of meals. It's the bits between meals that do the damage, because none of them count. The corner of a sandwich doesn't count. The kids' leftover fish fingers don't count, they were going in the bin, you were practically recycling. The biscuit that came free with the coffee doesn't count, because it was free. The handful of crisps from the bag you were "just putting away" doesn't count. The cheese you eat standing up with the fridge door open at 11pm, lit like a man in a painting, definitely doesn't count, because nobody saw. None of it counts. All of it adds up.

This isn't about guilt. Have the biscuit. Just count the biscuit.

The plate

The NHS Eatwell Guide splits a day's food roughly like this: just over a third fruit and veg, just over a third starchy foods like potatoes, bread, rice and pasta (wholegrain where you can), then smaller amounts of protein, dairy or alternatives, and a little unsaturated oil. Aim for at least five portions of fruit and veg a day.¹

You don't need to measure anything. Just look at your plate and ask whether it looks roughly like that, or like a beige crime scene.

Protein: the builders

Think of training as knocking down a wall so the builders can put up a stronger one. Protein is the builders. No builders, no new wall, just a hole and a skip. Too many builders and they stand about drinking tea and listening to the radio, and you pay for that too.

The UK's standard recommendation for adults is 0.75g of protein per kilo of body weight a day.² That's set for the general population, not for people training. Sports nutrition guidance suggests more if you exercise regularly, from around 1.2g per kilo upwards,^3,4 and one large review found the extra benefit for muscle levelled off at about 1.6g per kilo.⁵ So for most beginners, 1.2 to 1.6g per kilo is a sensible target.

The palm method. If numbers make your eyes glaze over, use your hand. A palm-sized portion of meat, fish, tofu or eggs is roughly 20 to 30g of protein. It's a rough rule of thumb, not a lab measurement, and that's fine. Your palm comes with you everywhere, which is more than you can say for the calculator.

Good protein foods: chicken, fish, eggs, lean mince, Greek yoghurt, cottage cheese, milk, beans, lentils, tofu. Protein powder is just food in a tub. More on that in chapter 13.

Eat slowly. Again.

It was in chapter 1, and it's back because it's that good. Eating more slowly tends to mean eating a bit less, without trying.⁶

Treats, not cheats

Nearly every diet fails for the same reason: it ends. So don't build one that ends. Build one you can live with, and that means treats.

A planned treat meal is fine. Fish and chips on a Friday. Cake at a birthday. A curry with friends. Enjoy it properly, without guilt, and then carry on.

What doesn't work is the cheat day that becomes a cheat weekend that becomes a cheat week. You order one large pizza on the Friday, as a treat. On the Saturday you order two, because one's a treat and two is basically the same treat, again. By Wednesday the pizza place has started sending a different driver, the old one having asked to be moved, and you've eaten 27 large pizzas in a dressing gown while watching a documentary about people climbing the Matterhorn, pausing occasionally to say "I could do that". That isn't a treat. That's a heist, and you robbed yourself.

There's research behind this. People with a flexible approach to eating, where nothing is completely banned, tend to have fewer problems with overeating than people with rigid all-or-nothing rules.⁷ All-or-nothing usually ends up as nothing, with a pizza on top.

Breaks and holidays are fine too. A week in Spain eating everything that isn't nailed down won't undo months of work. Enjoy it, come home, and pick up where you left off.

All 18 chapters of Basic Training