Is IIFYM Legit? 27/84

If you have been playing attention to the nutrition world in the past few years you've probably heard of the If It Fits Your Macros (or IIFYM) approach to eating. This diet plan basically tells you that it doesn't matter what foods you eat, as long as you end up with the correct amount of carbs, fat, and protein in your system at the end of the day. According to these people, you can be slamming double cheese burgers and pop tarts all day as long as your number end up correct. I'm not even exaggerating, those are the kinds of foods people were posting day in and day out when this became very popular a few years ago.

This approach, as crazy as it sounds, can actually elicit some decent results from a fat loss perspective. This makes sense when you look at the pieces of nutrition that have the greatest impact on body composition. Most people will probably think that what food you eat and when you eat it will have a major impact on how much fat you lose or gain, but when we look at the research, that's not very true at all. The biggest player overall is obviously calories (outside of being consistent, that's the real #1), you need to be eating the correct total amount of food if you want any results. The second biggest is macronutrients, which is, again, the correct amount of carbs, protein, and fat you eat each day. These two things together represent somewhere around 80% of total success when it comes to fat loss or gain. Given this information, you can see why it's possible to be successful on an IIFYM style diet, because you have the two biggest components covered already. It works well enough that the nutrition plan that I give to my clients is all based on macros, BUT we spend a lot of time talking about food selection as well. That being said, there are still a few problems with the approach in my mind.

The first issue I have is that, personally, I'm not content with just 80% of the results. If your goal was top deadlift 500 pounds but you only got up to 400 would you be happy with that? I sure wouldn't. Although a 400 pound deadlift would be great for most people, your goal was still 5. This is pretty much what you're getting with IIFYM, you get some results, and they can be good results, but chances are you left some progress out there that you could have made if you just ate real food instead.

The second issue is that, although your waistline may be determined by calories and macros, your body still likes it when you eat nutrient dense, micronutrient dense foods (micronutrients are things like vitamins and minerals you get from food, supplements, and nature). Yes, you can lose weight just following macros but that doesn't mean your body is happy about it. When we look past eating to lose weight and start talking about eating be healthy, then food selection becomes a way larger portion of success. Eating crap food is still going to cause tons of problems like inflammation, digestive issues, and nutrient deficiencies. Now, I know what you might be thinking and yes you could probably just pop a couple multivitamins from the local drug store to get you vitamins in (probably not minerals though), and sure, you could load up on fish oil to help with the inflammation, and yes you can take a few antacids to help with those digestive issues. But if you NEED to resort to all of that just to justify your inability to control yourself instead of just eating real food that grows on the earth, then don't you see a problem? If you're required to take a bunch of supplements to make sure that you're body works the way it should then there is a problem with your diet. Obviously I'm not saying that supplements are bad and you should stop taking fish oil, but you need to make sure you're getting as much of those macro and micronutrients from real food as possible, that's how humans are supposed to work.

If your goal is to just lose a few pounds without having to limit yourself and eat like an adult then IIFYM can absolutely work for you. But if you want to actually be healthy and fuel your body the way that is wants to be fueled then you need to eat some vegetables, like every day. Finally, My Free Fat Loss and Free Muscle Gaining Tips are almost done! And I have to say that they're looking pretty awesome. Those will be free to anyone who subscribes here. Right now you'll also get a free copy of the Nutrition Template that I use for myself and my clients. Subscribing will also let you join the private Facebook group that I just opened (I fixed the link). This group will allow for much more engagement with each other than my Facebook page so I can make sure you guys are getting all of the info you need.

See you tomorrow!

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