My work covers the following subtopics:
1. Disputes over the best approach…
2. Three main directions in organizing diet and nutrition…
3. There is no universal diet that suits everyone…
4. The main causes of excess weight…
5. Insulin sensitivity…
6. Principles to follow when determining nutrient proportions…
7. What should we understand by balanced nutrition?
8. Characteristics of a functional and flexible diet…
9. Examples of meals and eating patterns during a diet…
10. It is best to start with a moderate approach (in terms of nutrient proportions)…
11. You can’t buy health in capsules, results don’t come overnight, you need patience and flexibility in the face of change…
12. People are eating themselves sick…
13. Specifics matter: the more extreme the dieter’s individual characteristics, the more extreme and flexible the approaches have to be…
14. Elite athletes and dedicated amateurs are a category of their own…
15. Conclusions and closing words…
16. References…
7. What should we understand by balanced nutrition?
Janar Rückenberg:
Ideally, nutrient balance within total calories should mean that we get each nutrient more or less in line with what the body actually needs. First, a functional diet should contain all the important micronutrients and macronutrients, above all the essential ones. Second, when people talk about balanced nutrition, they should really be talking about a balanced approach built around each person’s individual characteristics, lifestyle, circumstances, physical activity, metabolic quirks, age and sex. A sedentary office worker and a warehouse worker lifting crates all day certainly can’t have identical carbohydrate needs. In my view, things in nutrition start to go wrong as soon as people talk about “balanced” nutrition as if it were, or should be, universal for everyone. What is balanced nutrition, what would be the recommended balanced split of nutrients in a menu, what is the gold standard that should be the basis for everything and everyone? We (even the average person) vary so much in our physical activity and in the other factors that influence energy expenditure that it is very hard to define such a universal approach. The traditional recommendation for a balanced split is that 50 – 60% of energy should come from carbohydrates, 10 – 15% from protein and 25 – 30% from fat. So if I’m a chemistry teacher in my fifties, seriously prone to obesity, whose daily activity may be limited to walking a couple of hundred meters home from school, do I really still need 50 – 60% carbohydrates of my total calories? In other words, does that chemistry teacher need the same proportion of carbohydrates as a building-site laborer who spends all day wrestling with mortar buckets? And does a doctor need the same proportion of carbohydrates as an active teenage student? A pregnant woman, a professional volleyball player, a shop assistant, a forestry worker, a hairdresser, a long-distance runner and an aerobics instructor – surely one and the same split of nutrients in the menu can’t suit all of them. Or does the same thing suit everyone, say 40% carbohydrates, 30% protein and 30% fat? It is clear that what matters most is still total calories, that is, the difference between energy out and energy in. If we want to get our body weight under control, we first have to get total calories, and their relationship to expenditure, under control. The next important aspect is the ratios between nutrients, which in themselves don’t actually determine whether we gain weight, maintain it or lose it. The proportional split of nutrients dictates rather how much, what, how often and at what times we are able to eat. Here I again agree with McDonald: once protein is sorted in the menu and you manage to eat within your expenditure, then for the average person (the average person is not very physically active) it makes little difference whether the day’s energy comes from carbohydrates or from fat. Of course, the body has its own minimum requirement for every nutrient, but broadly speaking, once the minimum needs are met and you expend more than you eat, or the same amount, there are no problems with body weight. This holds regardless of whether the energy comes from fat or from carbohydrates. So let’s start by getting calories sorted.
And yet problems do arise, people keep gaining weight, so something must be wrong. The causes are many: carelessness, lack of knowledge, habits, laziness and so on. The very first question is again whether people simply overeat or not. This has to be understood, acknowledged, sensed and properly assessed. Do you expend more than you eat, or not? Everything starts there. Once people are aware of the importance of the balance between energy in and energy out, and understand its primary role in regulating body weight, the next important question is the proportions of nutrients in the menu. When we hear how some group got on with this diet, or how some circle of people got results with that approach, in many cases these things may well have worked, but that doesn’t make them universal. What we are shown is an example of how one group discovered a solution that works for its own particular characteristics. And even then we can’t be sure it chose the best option for itself, because you can reach the result (a drop in body weight) with pretty much any approach, as long as you are in a calorie deficit. But how suitable it really was, how quickly the weight came off, how much extra expenditure had to be added, whether and how much hunger and food cravings people felt – none of that gets talked about.
8. Characteristics of a functional and flexible diet (nutrition)
Janar Rückenberg:
The big, glaring flaw of many (weight-loss) diets is that they ignore from the outset one fundamental fact – there is no universal diet, no single approach that suits everyone equally. We are all different. What might a functional diet mean? Unless the goal is set to be the opposite, a functional diet either maintains our body weight or lowers it at the expense of fat, depending on what our specific goal is.
Effectively organized nutrition (whether it secures good health or drives weight loss) means the following:
Physical energy expenditure and the energy you take in from food are in balance (under control). In general, to avoid gaining weight in the form of fat, you need to expend as much energy as you consume from food, or more.
Your daily food choices should include all the micro- and macronutrients that matter to the body, especially those our organism cannot synthesize itself (omega-3 fatty acids, essential amino acids, etc.). The key principle here is to eat what your body needs, not what YOU crave.
Food choices and meal timing should be arranged so that your energy supply stays stable and reasonably even throughout the day, and the feeling of fullness or satiety from your meals lasts long enough.
Adherence to the diet, or how well it can be applied over time. This point actually combines several factors. A diet is sustainable, or can be carried out for the long term, if you are flexible and can organize your nutrition around your own particularities as fully as possible (lifestyle, physical activity, its volume and nature, age, sex, metabolic particularities, health status, hobbies, etc.).
In sum, the hallmark of a functioning diet (nutrition) is an organized symbiosis in which the first three points are flexibly combined according to the person’s individual needs.
How to achieve healthy, body weight–reducing or weight-maintaining nutrition?
1. Calorie intake. When it comes to controlling body weight, this factor is the most important of all, which is why it comes first. There is no magic here. I am not saying you absolutely must start counting your calories. It is certainly possible to regulate body weight and food energy intake without weighing food or calculating calories. But there is one important BUT – it requires a very good understanding of yourself and your body’s signals, as well as knowledge of foods and the principles of healthy eating. People usually lack this knowledge, as well as a good understanding of their own organism. That is why I do recommend that anyone who has set serious weight-loss goals, or who simply wants to eat healthily, start by mapping out what they do through calorie counting, at least at the beginning. First, at the start you most likely have not the slightest idea of how much energy you actually get from food over the course of a day. Second, when changes eventually need to be made, you won’t know what to base them on. If you currently believe you consume perhaps 2000 kcal a day but your weight isn’t dropping, and then you read “somewhere in a women’s magazine” that, given your activity level and metabolism, you should actually eat 1600 kcal to lose weight, how do you know how much that 2000 kcal is, or how much that 1600 kcal is? These things are not easy to pin down by gut feeling or opinion alone. This is, once again, where things start to go wrong, and fairly early on. As a rule, people tend to overestimate the volume and level of their daily physical activity and underestimate the calories they eat. So, personally, I do recommend that if you have even a little time and opportunity, you weigh your food and add up the calories, so that you reach your goals as quickly as possible.
I don’t intend to analyze different diet strategies in depth; rather, I want to give simple guidelines on which principles to follow when building a meal if your goal is to keep your body weight under control or bring it down. During a contest diet, I approach my own meals with the following principles in mind, and I dare to recommend this approach to others as well. I recommend you TRY it. Finding out whether it suits you takes patience and time.
There are three nuances that the average, still “unspoiled” dieter (weight loser), or simply someone who wants to eat healthily, could keep in mind when building a meal (the “Three-in-one principle”):
1. The meal should contain enough protein.
2. The menu should contain essential fatty acids.
3. The meal could contain low-calorie, fiber-rich complex carbohydrates.
With these aspects in mind, the typical average meal in my recent contest diets has turned out to be the one presented below. Of course, this is just one example among very many: 25 grams of oat flakes (“Nordic” with wheat bran), 50 grams of wheat bran, 15 – 20 grams of full-fat peanut butter and 200 grams of lean, fat-free quark.
Calories: 90 + 133 + 125 + 170 = 453 kcal
Fat: 2 g + 3 g + 11 g + 1 g = 17 g (rounded 35%)
Protein: 4 g + 5 g + 5 g + 32 g = 46 g (rounded 40%)
Carbohydrates: 12 g + 10 g + 3 g + 4 g = 29 g (rounded 25%)
Naturally, the calories and gram amounts of nutrients in the individual components of the meal above can vary. In fact, regardless of which nutrient split you favor, the three principles presented earlier can be kept in mind and applied with any type of diet. These are the measures that let us regulate and keep our blood insulin level under control. It is simply that if a higher-protein, higher-fat diet suits you better, then the share of those nutrients in the meal is proportionally larger. If you are more of a devotee of high-carbohydrate diets, then the share of protein and fat is smaller, while the proportion of fiber-rich carbohydrates is larger. However you go about it, applying these three aspects helps you avoid sharp spikes and drops in insulin, ensures a feeling of fullness over a longer period, and should also supply you with all the important nutrient groups.
With the macronutrient split of this meal, I make no claim to the title of final truth. There are as many different approaches as there are bodybuilders, weight losers or people getting into contest shape. I am presenting how I have built my own condition and approached things. Depending on the situation and the day, the gram amounts in a given meal will certainly fluctuate. They have to fluctuate! It makes no sense at all to go into a heavy leg workout with a nutrient split in which there are practically no carbohydrates, only protein and fat. The amounts of the meal’s components are also dictated directly by the individual’s body weight. Clearly, a 55 kg bikini fitness competitor who is getting into contest shape cannot apply the same amounts (as given in the sample menu) across 5 – 6 meals a day.
Once again, I want to stress that I don’t mean you should eat only meals like this, built from these components, for the whole prep period. There are many different versions. In my own case, I’m describing a meal that shows up very often during a diet phase. Of course, I don’t eat only nut butter, oat flakes, wheat bran and quark through the entire diet. I combine meals in other ways too, but let’s be honest: these foods still make up a large part of what I eat, and this example of my so-called universal diet meal is the ABC of all my diets so far.
As for which foods I use, the choice honestly isn’t very big. The foods I eat during a diet can be counted on the fingers of two hands.
9. Examples of meals during a diet
Janar Rückenberg:
1. Quark (fat-free) 200 g; nut butter 20 g; sour cream (20%) 20 g;
2. Cottage cheese (6%) 300 g; wheat bran 30 – 40 g (mix into the cottage cheese);
3. Tuna (chunks in water) 130 g; canned beans (red, white) 50 – 60 g; sour cream (20%) 50 g;
4. Wheat bran (Veski Mati) 50 g; instant oat flakes 25 – 50 g; quark (fat-free) 200 g;
5. Wheat bran (Veski Mati) 30 g; instant oat flakes with wheat bran 30 g; nut butter 30 g; quark (fat-free) 200 g;
6. Barley flakes (Nordic) 50 g; wheat bran 25 g; cottage cheese (4%) 200 g;
7. Oat flakes with wheat bran (Nordic); wheat bran 25 – 50 g; 1 – 3 boiled eggs (50 – 150 g);
8. Oat flakes 50 g; wheat bran 25 – 50 g; tuna or hake fillet 100 – 200 g;9. Beans 400 g (long, green, frozen); cottage cheese with yogurt (1.5%); nut butter 20g;
10. Instant oat flakes 40 g; wheat bran 40 g; nut butter 10 g; protein (Hera 80) 10 g; 2 eggs (boiled);
11. Tuna 130 – 150 g; nut butter 20 g; apple 150 – 200 g (2 – 3 small/medium ones);
12. Braised cabbage 300 – 400 g; quark 200 g; nut butter 20 g; apple 100 g;
13. Quark spread (unflavored, 3%) 200 g; tuna 120 – 150 g; apple 100 g;
14. Quark spread (5%) 200 g; apple 150 – 200 g; instant oat flakes 50 g;
15. Wheat bran 50 g; instant oat flakes 30 g; cheese 30 g (20 – 30%); quark (fat-free) 100 – 200 g;
16. Smoked silver hake 150 g; sour cream (20%) 30 – 50 g; apple 100 – 150 g;
17. Beans (long, frozen, green) 200 g; cabbage (braised) 200 – 300 g; quark (fat-free) 200 g; nut butter 20 g;
18. Cooked buckwheat (rice) 50 g; quark (5%) 200 g; apple 100 g; egg 50 g (boiled);
19. Tuna or silver hake 175 g; nuts 40 – 50 g;
20. Cottage cheese (4%) 300 g; multigrain toasted roll 70 g (Fazer);
Author: Janar Rückenberg
Come and train! ArtGym
