The diet that works when you stop tracking every meal

Most restrictive diets fail because they require constant daily adherence, leaving no room for flexibility or error. This video presents a two-part model for achieving and maintaining leanness without constant struggle. Rather than striving for perfection in every meal, the barbell approach focuses on hitting precise nutrition targets in one or two high-quality meals per day, while allowing complete dietary freedom for all other meals. What matters is weekly caloric and nutritional averages, not individual meal perfection. By prioritising protein sources, nutrient-dense foods, and vegetables in prepared meals while leaving ample caloric budget for flexibility, this strategy eliminates the feast-famine diet cycle that causes most people to fail. The result is sustainable body composition management that accommodates travel, dining out, and social eating without sacrificing results.

Most diets are designed to fail you. If yours is restrictive, requires constant effort or stops you from eating out and enjoying yourself, it’s not that you lack willpower or discipline. You’re using a broken system. The only reason that I’ve maintained a six pack for years is because I found a completely different approach, one that I’ve stuck to while travelling, drinking, and eating out almost daily. In this video, I’m going to give you the exact two part model that I use so that staying lean stops feeling like something that you have to fight for. The problem with most diets is that they require constant adherence. We all have that person we know who’s in a phase where they’re trying to lose weight, be healthy, and so they’re always on. They’re always eating well, taking a healthy option, not indulging. And their whole diet and life looks pretty unenjoyable.
Then you’ve got the person you know who is shredded and seems to eat ungodly amounts of food and whatever they want, greasy stuff, they drink alcohol, yet they stay lean. And it’s the same in paradox. Is it because the lean person has a faster metabolism? No. Here’s the thing people who have never gotten really lean don’t realise. Let’s focus purely on calorie intake for a second and say that this is my week, these are my meals, this is my total energy intake. Let’s say that to maintain my weight, my average calorie intake needs to be at this line. If I want to be losing weight, it’d be down here anywhere above the line I’m going to be gaining weight. And so let’s say I’m trying to lose weight. I could be hitting bang on my calorie targets every single meal like this all week adhering perfectly to the most perfect boring plan ever.
If I then have a blowout on the weekend, then all of that just undoes the work I’ve done here and it’s enough to actually put me over my average. So now for almost all week I’ve been perfect hitting my calorie target, eating exactly my planned meals that I intended to. And in one move I’ve managed to not only undo all that, but go over and gain weight. And so a lot of the people I work with who have trouble with fat loss and their diet are looking for a problem in these individual meals when it actually doesn’t exist. The problem cannot be found in this level because this level isn’t what determines your weight or your body composition. It’s the overall, it’s your weekly averages summed together week after week. And so I’m going to get to how this relates to the diet strategy in a second, but the point to understand here is that what matters is the overall, not your individual meals in isolation.
And so when you’re designing your diet, whatever elements of that you’re trying to hit, protein targets, calorie targets, the whole lot. Most people set their diet up to be a full-time daily job, but would you rather work all day every day including weekends or would you rather work a more normal work week, but just make sure that in that time you got done what you needed to? Because these are the two options you have when deciding how to eat to heat your physique goals. And so the diet strategy that I use to get as lean as I want, keep my six pack year round, build muscle, rather than trying to sit in this constant middle of every single meal, every single time I eat trying to be perfect is instead one of extremes. It’s a barbell approach. I would rather, when I’m preparing my own meals, which is usually once a day anyway, just get done what I need to get done in terms of nutrition targets and then leave everything else for my other meals because that way I have utter flexibility in what I eat when I want to go out, when I want to have a meal with friends, when I want to have a dessert or treat myself to something for the sake of enjoying it.
The story that made me aware of how I did this in the first place, I was staying at this co-living recently and sat down with my lunch and the guy next to me looked over and said, “Oh, you carnivore?” And I said, “No.” And I pointed to the huge bowl of pineapple sitting next to my pound of beef and I said, “No, look at the fruit.” And he’s like, “Oh, you don’t eat carbs like potatoes or rice or noodles or anything else?” And I was like, “Yeah, I’ve been eating out local food every single day the last two months. I haven’t skipped my evening ice cream in nearly a week now. I eat everything, but I realised that this hadn’t become so ingrained to me that when I am preparing my own food, I’m not going to waste time and energy and those calories on filling myself up with junk.
I’m just going to nail the food that matters for my day, hit my protein target, get high quality nutrient dense foods in so that then for the rest of the day, I have utter flexibility to do whatever I want because the average here ends up being the same as what most people are trying to hit every single meal and running into this problem of them when they want the flexibility, there’s no buffer room. Now they’re moving up into territory of, oh, I’m not hitting my target anymore.” And you end up with this weekly cycle of failing the diet because from the start it was designed to fail. There’s no margin for error. If you take the barbell approach of extremes, then you have nothing but margin and you give yourself as much freedom with your diet as possible. So I’ll show you exactly what this looks like in practise in a second in terms of how I hit these nutrition targets.
If you want to see how this fits into a full system for building your dream body, training, nutrition, everything, I put together a free in depth training that walks you through all of that links in the description. Okay. So this is going to make nutrition extremely simple for you from now on. Whenever you’re preparing your own meal, you just have priorities that you’re aiming to hit. And I just have a really simple list of foods that I will eat. It ends up satisfying me, hitting my protein target, making me feel great and I have loads of room left to go and indulge after on literally anything. It makes it easy to stay within my calorie targets, whether I’m maintaining and gaining muscle or whether I’m in a fat loss phase getting lean. If you hit your nutrition targets, you minimise hunger, maximise muscle gain and maintenance, especially when you’re in a cup and you just feel much better.
And the way I do this, I find that this part of my is actually the most satiating, enjoyable part of everything I eat. Once you do this properly, junk food actually loses a lot of its allure, which makes it even easier to minimise this and keep it within your goals. So what these look like for me, I landed where I’m staying here in Mexico a few weeks ago, went straight to the market and basically got a full haul of everything I live off for this, let’s say, quality side of the equation. So first I think in terms of protein sources. So for me, that looks like red meat as my main source of protein each day. With all of this, I’m looking at what’s locally available, good value, as high quality and fresh as possible. So in Mexico, that’s beef. In Australia, I eat a lot of lamb because we have that accessible to us.
Then other protein sources, I’m on the coast here in Mexico, so we’ve got access to a lot of great seafood and fish. So I’ve been eating that and then whatever else, chicken, pork, other meats. So I go back to numbers here in a second, but just in terms of ingredients, we’ve got animal protein. Then eggs, I try and eat as many of these as I can daily and then dairy. So cheese, yoghourt, if you’re a vegetarian, then low no fat Greek yoghourt is an amazing source of protein. For me, it’s just great as a dessert with honey. Milk, usually that’s just for coffees. And so that’s protein sources. And so in terms of numbers, I’m just making sure I have enough each day to hit more or less my protein target knowing that I can always top up to get the rest or I’ll get it out if I go get dinner or something.
So you might have seen this before. The way I do it is meat get 500 grammes or a pound each day and that’s basically a hundred grammes of protein. And some combination of this, I will struggle not to get another 20 to 40 grammes and my daily target is 140. So by the time I’ve eaten this and then some of this, I’ve more or less hit my target. And so if I’m not quite there, I can either top up with some yoghourt or some eggs or just go get dinner anywhere and that will have 20, 30 grammes of protein in it. So that’s first priority. You can be as basic as you want. It does work to just get beef mints, sear it in patties on a pan and that’s your essential nutrition done for your day. If you’re a bit more of a cook, it’s not that hard to combine a few flavours.
So anything you want to add to this to make it taste better, go to town. So I get veggies, onions, tomatoes, peppers, again, whatever’s in season that I can be bothered preparing. In Mexico, I spend a lot of Mexican forward stuff. Literally just combining things to make your food taste as good as possible is generally the best way to do things. Herbs, spices, some sort of acid, salt. And then I love things like pickles, fermented food like sour craut, kimchi. And anything that’s going to make this more enjoyable, hot sauce. And then the final category here on our market hall is carb sauces. Now how I approach carbs, they’re very easy to attain eating anything. So over here we’re going to be able to easily get fats and carbohydrates by going out and eating anything, junk food, restaurant meals, snacks. And so I don’t prioritise carbohydrates at all when I’m heating my nutrition targets over here.
And that’s certainly not to say that carbs are bad or they’re not useful, but again, if I’m focusing on this end of the barbell, I want to get things that aren’t going to just be over here as well. And so for carbs, I go for nutrient and sauces, literally just fruit and I’ll eat this as snacks in the morning or aside alongside my lunch. I’ll definitely prioritise this pre-workout. If I need more carbs, I’ll usually go for something like some honey with yoghourt and salt that’s become my favourite pre-workout snack for me. But I’ve never found it a problem to get enough carbs just from a few servings of fruit, some honey, if I’m eating anything from this side of the equation at any point in the day. And so that’s it. If I’m going and shopping for myself, I’m literally getting my protein sauces, high quality that I can find and afford.
I’m getting veggies and condiments for flavour. I’m getting a bunch of fruit to give me carbs and then that is it. That’s all I’m prioritising on this side of the equation. Now this can be literally one meal a day. I’ll usually eat fruit in the morning, I’ll cook myself or have pre-prepared one meal where I’m getting this hundred grammes of protein and then that’s it. In one meal, you can have all your nutrition sorted for the day. You’ve eaten more quality food here than most people eat in a week and then you’ve got your body nourished in your system humming.You’ve hit your protein target, you’ve massively satiated your appetite for a low amount of calories, like that huge meal and morning fruit for the day might come in at something like 1200 calories. And this is when I’m in maintenance, it’s very easy to make that lower, something more like 900 if I’m in a cutting phase.
So that means I still have over half my day’s energy to literally get from whatever I want. Now, yes, I’ll probably have some more from over here because these foods are good and as I said, they taste good because they’re highly nutritious. But the point is I still have half my day to generally eat whatever I want and I don’t think I need to give you a tutorial on this. The point is what we’ve done here is that rather than trying to stay perfect all the time like most people do, is instead we’ve just struggled this and had meals where we have other freedom anyway be really, really high quality and then the rest of the time we’re literally free to live our lives like that jacked guy who seems to consume more than everyone else at every meal but is way leaner. This is how you do that rather than sitting here all the time being restricted from having the fun that you want, but also never getting the results you want because your weekly averages just don’t get you where you need to be.
That’s it. That’s how I do it. Two categories, one good meal, everything else, enjoy yourself. Link for the full trainings below if you want to speak soon.