This is a huge one. Strap in.

Nutrition can seem scary when coming in blind.

A lot of factors to get right. How do I know what my own body type and metabolism needs? What if I’m doing things wrong?

But if you want to maximise progress with your muscle gain and fat loss, you don’t have to be a nutritionist. It all basically comes down to two simple factors. Get them right, and you’ll be doing 99% of what you can with your diet to support your body’s improvement in response to your strength training.

What are those two factors? 

Calories.

And protein.

Calories are simply the unit we use to measure the energy you’re taking in through your diet to fuel yourself. Depending on your size and activity level, you’ll need more or less per day to maintain your weight. Whatever that amount is, we call your “maintenance calories”.

Eat more than your maintenance consistently (called a calorie surplus), and you’ll gain weight. Eat less, and you’ll lose weight (a calorie deficit).

Simple, right?

Okay, so you can get these calories from three energy sources, the “macronutrients”: protein, carbohydrates, and fat.

Of these three, the one worth getting right is protein. 

Hitting adequate protein allows your body to maximise muscle growth (in response to proper strength training), especially when you’re gaining weight (calorie surplus), and helps it hold onto that muscle mass when you’re losing weight (calorie deficit)—thus allowing you to lose body fat and get lean.

After that, how you get the remainder of your energy doesn’t really matter. It’s just about getting the overall amount of energy right.

So the way I eat to get big and lean year-round is simple: 

1. I hit my protein every day, all year. 
2. Most of the time, I’ll eat in a slight calorie surplus, basically following my appetite, and gaining strength.
3. Then occasionally, for less than 12 weeks total per year, when I reach the upper end of my comfortable body fat range, I’ll adjust my calories down to a moderate deficit to lose some fat, until I get to the lower end of my comfortable body fat range. I might do this once a year, or spread over a few short 4-6 week bursts.

Then I go back to gaining, and repeat the process. 

So, using this model, at any given time all you need to be doing with your diet to get as big and lean as possible is to be hitting

a) a protein target, and 

b) a calorie target for your current primary goal (strength gain or fat loss).

Here’s how I simplify that process to make it fall into the background of my life and get bigger and leaner year-after-year with ease.

How I Eat to Get Big and Lean – The Whole Process

Step 1 – Simplify Your Protein Intake

The one thing we want consistent in our diet, regardless of the current focus (gains or fat loss), is protein.

The target I aim for is 1.8g protein per kg bodyweight, every day. This seems to be plenty to maximise the benefits of protein in natural lifters. So for me, at around 80kg, that’s looked like 140g protein per day for the past 8 years.

When and how you consume this protein each day does not matter. So I’ve learned that there is no point making it harder than it needs to be.

My routine strategy for hitting this target every day is dirt simple: Get 100g protein at lunch. Then it’s easy to get the other 40g at dinner or in another snack.

500g meat equates to 100g protein, and about 700 calories. So that’s where I start.

I’ll pre-cook this meat (500g for each day) at the start of the week (generally Sunday afternoon) so that I have my week’s lunchtime protein ready to go in a minute’s prep.

This main protein source is generally beef or lamb (the most nutritious meats to base your diet on). It can be as simple as cheap ground beef rolled into patties and grilled with sea salt, or if I’m feeling fancy I might slow-cook a leg of lamb in some stock and spices. It doesn’t have to be complicated, and the less time and effort I spend on this, the better it tastes. 

So I end up with a container for each day of the week in my fridge, with 500g meat ready to go for that day’s lunch.*

The day’s remaining 40g of protein for the day can simply come from 200g of meat, fish, chicken, or pork at dinner, or I might eat some eggs or dairy as a snack to make it up.

Done.

*Note that meat loses weight when cooked. I always refer to raw weights when talking about these things.

Step 2 – Define Your Calorie Target

Once protein is sorted, the next step is to define your overall energy target.

For that, we need to know our baseline needs. If you don’t know your maintenance calories yet, you can get a quick estimate by multiplying your bodyweight in kg x 33.

e.g. 80kg x 33 = 2600 calories (rounded) per day

If you’re aiming to gain weight, then add 100-300 calories to this.

e.g. 2600 + 200 = 2800 calories per day (indefinitely)

Or, if you’re aiming to lose body fat, take 400-500 off.

e.g. 2600 – 400 = 2200 calories per day (for the next 4-12 weeks)

Step 3 – Fill The Rest of Your Calories With Carbs & Fats

Once you’ve sorted your protein, it really doesn’t matter how you hit your remaining calories. Just that you hit them.

You want to aim for a balance of carbs and fats that tastes the best, because that is generally an indicator that it’s what your body wants. Fats are essential to hormone production and a host of bodily functions, and carbohydrates fuel your training, boost your mood and help you sleep. So generally speaking, you want plenty of both.

Again, how you get these carbs and fats does not have to be complicated.

I get the bulk of my daily carbs from some fruit and either potatoes or rice. That’s it.

900g of potatoes or 200g (1 cup) rice is 700 calories*. Fruit you can look up on the USDA website.

In terms of fats, I get these largely from the meat I’m eating, plus any dairy or eggs, and these calories are already factored in when I account for those foods. Any butter or oil I use in my cooking will bolster this, and (like with dairy and eggs) you can simply look the calories up on the packaging. (For reference, a teaspoon of oil is about 50 calories).

I get all my students, at the start of their first fat loss phase, to run the numbers and design a full day of eating that will hit their calorie and protein targets. Starting with protein (meat), adding in some fats (dairy/eggs/oil), then filling the rest of their calories with carbs (starches/fruit). Doing that, you have a framework to follow that you know will work, and you can simply adjust it based on what suits you in real life when you go and put it to the test.

For example:

That’s as complex as it gets. Once you can see how simple it is to hit your targets every day, there’s no reason not to do it.

Note: In terms of vegetables, these are generally so low in calories that it’s not worth worrying about them. Unless you’re eating huge amounts of sugary vegetables (pumpkin, carrots, onions, beets, etc), they shouldn’t have much of an effect on your overall calorie target. It’s better to keep your focus where it counts, like not accidentally over-eating fats and consuming 100s of calories more than you intended without realising it.

*Again, speaking about raw weights and volumes here.

Step 4 – Calibrate Based On Appetite

Cutting fat or gaining size, you won’t get your calorie estimates perfect off the bat. The human body’s too complex to fit into a simple formula. 

The estimates above will give you a start, but from there you’re going to have to do something crazy:

Listen to your body. 

If I’m aiming to gain size, I’ll use my gains calorie target to get into a rhythm and hit a consistent amount of energy. If I’m feeling hungry after a week or two, I’ll bump my calories up and eat more, as desired, until I’m consistently feeling great and making steady progress in my training.

If I’m aiming to lose fat, I’ll start hitting that cutting target, and again see how I go. If it’s easy but I’m getting nowhere, I can bump my calories down until I start to make steady progress at the rate I’m aiming for. If I start feeling like shit, I know I’m in too much of a deficit, and will bump my target up until the process is easy, then stay there until I reach the level of body fat I’m happy with.

Step 5 – Track Progress In Two Ways

Finally, there are two things you want to be tracking to ensure you’re making progress in the right direction, regardless of your current focus.

1. Strength
2. Bodyweight

This is essential, as these are both objective metrics, and therefore allow you to step back and know your process is working without ambiguity or emotion.

When you’re gaining, you should be making consistent incremental progress on your movements week to week. You should also see your bodyweight slowly increasing as a result of the associated muscle gain—somewhere around 1kg a month is a pretty solid indicator that something’s happening. (This might be slower a few years down the road, but it’s very reasonable to expect early on.) If these two things are happening, there’s no doubt you’re getting stronger (and gaining muscle mass as a result).

When you’re losing fat, you may not be making as much muscle gain progress (at least as you get more advanced), but if you’re using bodyweight training, your relative strength should be improving quite quickly. That is, your strength to weight ratio goes up as you lose “dead weight” body fat, and you should make quite fast progress on your movements because of this. Crucially, you should see your bodyweight trending down each week, ideally ~0.5kg per week. If these two things are happening, you know you’re staying strong and getting leaner.

Starting From The Ground Up

This has been a dense post, apologies for the length. But realise that this is everything I do diet-wise to maximise strength gains in response to my training, and cut body fat as desired to stay lean year round.

If you can:

• Simplify hitting a daily protein and calorie target
• Calibrate that calorie target based on how you feel, and 
• Track your strength and bodyweight to ensure the desired results are happening,

then you have everything in place with your diet to get as big and lean as possible over the coming years.

Realise that this is a skill (or rather, a set of skills) which will take time to learn. But the cool thing is that, aside from training, this is all you need to learn to reach whatever goals you have for your strength and physique.

If you’re completely new, here’s how I’d go about building this skill set, step by step:

1. If you’re not already, start training and pushing for weekly strength gains
2. Start tracking your bodyweight daily, recording it into a spreadsheet
3. Start hitting a protein target. Figure out what you need to eat daily to achieve this, and build it into your routine in as easy a way as possible
4. When you’re ready, figure out your current calorie target, design a diet that hits this (as well as your protein), and start using it!

It will take time, testing, and iteration to figure these things out, get them in place, and make them automatic. But once you do, it is literally just a matter of time before you get as big and lean as you want to get.