What is a balanced diet?
Is it a perfectly even split between protein, carbs and fat? Is it the idea of 80/20 so eating healthfully 80% of the time and reaching for treats 20% of the time or is it eating everything in moderation?
What does ‘balance’ mean? It’s super vague…
First of all, if you’re stoked on how you’re looking, feeling and performing and your current lifestyle (food included) is working for you, congrats, you’ve found balance at least for the time being…so just keep it rollin’ because if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!
On the other hand…
If you’re not feeling, looking and performing the way that you’d like to, you see room for improvement and your lifestyle is leaving you with more to be desired, some thing or things are unbalanced and so the question becomes, how do you attain balance from where you are right now!?
Think about yourself on a balance beam…so let’s say that you’re walking across a beam and you lose your footing just a little and you begin to tip to one side, what do you do?
You compensate, it’s automatic, so if you’re tipping to your right all of a sudden your left arm and your left leg extend out to your side in order to re-establish your center gravity…your body is doing its best to balance itself on the beam.
Attaining dietary and lifestyle balance is no different, for example…
If you’re 20 pounds heavier than you’d like to be, you are tipping off the beam and in order to regain balance, you need to compensate for that 20 lbs, ya gotta kick your left arm and leg out and save yourself from falling off, meaning…
Sometimes you need to get what appears to be ‘unbalanced’ in order to find balance, appropriate compensation needs to occur, for example…
If you’ve overspent and gotten yourself into some debt that you’d like to get out of, you need to put a budget and saving plan together in order to get yourself back to baseline financially.
Is saving by definition balance?
In a vacuum, no, because you’re saving more than you’re spending, but…in order to get yourself out of debt, you’ve gotta save some cash and balance out your previous spending habits, so you need to get quote unquote ‘unbalanced’ in order to find balance!
If you’re in debt and you stop spending more than you’re currently making and begin to break even i.e. you spend what you make…so you make 5k a month and you spend 5k a month, you will never dig yourself out of that financial hole because you’re already in it and spending exactly what you’re making just keeps you there…
You might be thinking…how is this relevant to a balanced diet?
Many folks are in metaphorical debt in terms of their body’s and they often have an expectation that in order to get themselves out of said debt, they can stop overspending and start spending exactly what they’re making…they can’t, they need to go over and above and actually save in order to get themselves out of the hole, so…
In order to get the body that you want, sometimes you need to do things that don’t appear ‘balanced’ in every way, shape or form at that time, but you’re paying off prior debt, you’re rebalancing yourself on the beam and in order to do that, appropriate compensation is required, for example…
If you have 20 lbs to lose, you can’t eat at your caloric maintenance because eating what you’re burning is the same as spending what you’re making and so it’s a great way to maintain your weight, however it’s a terrible way to lose fat!
You have to create a calorie deficit in order to chip away at that excess 20 lbs, this is exactly what I coach my clients through.
So let’s say that your goal is fat loss and you have 3 dinners out this week planned and you go to these dinners and you stay mindful of what and how much you’re eating, as well as how much you’re drinking and one of your friends says…
‘Oh come on, just order the pizza or have another drink with me, live a little, balance right!?’
This is no different than being in debt at a shopping mall with the same friend and you’re looking at an expensive item that doesn’t fit with your current budget and your friend is like, ‘Oh come on, just buy it, you deserve it, live a little.’
That snapshot from your friends perspective or maybe even your own may not appear like quote unquote balance, but if you’ve got 20 lbs to lose that compensation needs to come from somewhere.
If your goal is to get out of debt, you’re going to need to opt out of buying that expensive item at least sometimes and in the context of losing 20 lbs, you simply can’t afford all the pizza and all the booze all the time.
Think about it like this, if someone looked at your life on a Tuesday morning from 9 am – 1 pm and you worked for 3 hours and you took a 1 hour lunch break…is that balanced? Clearly not, but, if you zoom out and look at your week as a whole, you likely work for about 40 hours and you sleep for hopefully 50 hours or more and you have the rest of your time free…
When things are looked at in isolation, they essentially always appear ‘unbalanced’ but they’re often not, because when you zoom out you realize that sometimes in those isolated moments, you’re just kicking your left leg and left arm out to position yourself more comfortably on the beam.
So, let’s go through this in steps, how do you find dietary balance for yourself i.e. you’re stoked on how you’re looking, feeling and performing within the context of your lifestyle and your priorities.
Step 1, determine your goal…now like I mentioned before if you’re already where you want to be, you’re good to go and unless your goals change you can keep riding that wave, but if not, get super clear about what it is that you want!
After you’ve set out your goal, step 2 is to determine what’s required in order to achieve it, so if it’s to lose 20 lbs, you’ll need to structure your nutrition accordingly…which means you have to be in a calorie deficit. I’d recommend favouring single ingredient whole foods for the vast majority of your intake because they’re the most nutrient dense, the most filling and the most digestion friendly.
Step number 3 is to simply monitor your progress and make the necessary adjustments along the way in order to continue to lose fat. I do this via progress photos and detailed weekly questions with my coaching clients.
Now, if you want to progress faster, you can take a more aggressive approach and if you’re in no rush at all, you can take a slower approach.
Once you reach your goal, you can then increase your calorie intake to maintenance i.e. spending what you’re making because you’re balanced, you’re no longer paying off prior debt!
In terms of maintaining your progress, I use a traffic light system with my clients, for example…
Let’s say that they’re stoked on their lifestyle as well as how they’re looking, feeling and performing at 130 lbs…
Our green light zone could be from 128 – 132 meaning, as long as we’re in that zone it’s a ‘keep doing what you’re doing because we’re right on track’ dealio.
Our yellow light zone could be from 133 – 135 and that means that ‘ya might want to start to reel things in a little bit’ nutrition and lifestyle wise before they start to slip too much.
Our red light zone would be 136 and up, as soon as we hit 136 it’s like, ‘stop what you’re doing and get back on track’ because things are clearly beginning to get out of a hand.
The lighter you are, the smaller I’d recommend that your traffic light zones be and if you’re bigger, you can afford to have a little bit larger zones because it’s relative. For example, 1 lb to someone who is 100 lbs is equivalent to 2 lbs for someone who is 200 lbs.
If you honour this system, you literally can’t ever get too far off track and in my opinion it’s the best way to maintain progress as well as balance. It’s not overly rigid, it’s got some flexibility but at the same time it does have clear landlines that keep ya on track long term.
The real take home point here is, there are just under 8 billion balanced diets because everyone has to determine what balance is for them. The only person that knows what your priorities truly are is you and there is no right or wrong definition of balance…but rather what fits for you as an individual given your current lifestyle preferences, goals, priorities etc. and truth be told…
These things are always shifting and changing as we develop as humans and so a balanced diet really is a moving target, as opposed to this hyper rigid and fixed thing.
For some folks that might be bad news because they have the mentality that ‘oh I just need to get in shape and then I’m done’ and unfortunately that’s not the way that it works because that’s like saying…
‘I just need to get into a relationship and then I’m good to go’…it takes effort and awareness to maintain a healthful relationship, just like it does a healthful lifestyle.
If you lose that 20 lbs, balance yourself out and then go right back to what you were doing prior to said fat loss, you’re going to put that weight back on…
The same habits that had you gain balance, are the same habits that are going to support you to maintain balance and if you slip up…no sweat we all do…
You’re only ever one meal away from being right back on track!
