If you are a fitness nerd, then you may be familiar with the joint by joint approach popularized by Gray Cook and Mike Boyle. It is a way to look at the human body, each of it’s joints, and their respective needs. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, it is certainly worth a look, and helps us better understand how we can program our exercise to be most effective. The joint by joint approach and meal by meal approach are similar in name only, but the concept will be helpful, as I think it’s a good template that can help us change the way we eat.
When we are attempting to make behavior changes based on the way we eat, it makes sense to change one part of one meal at a time instead of large dramatic changes. We typically have a far smaller chance of succeeding when we make large scale change than we do when we make small consistent changes. The meal by meal approach implies that we will make these small changes by focusing on one meal at a time. Start by making a few small changes to your breakfast, then move on to making changes to lunch, then dinner, and even snacks, depending on how you structure your meals.
By applying the meal by meal approach to each meal, over the course of a few weeks you can dramatically change the way you eat. Considering that breakfast is the first meal of the day, it just makes sense to start there. When designing your breakfast, a lot of times we may need to step back and put our meals in the context of our goals. If our goal is fat loss and we’ve determined 1800 calories puts us in a deficit, then we can figure out how many calories we need to eat per meal by simply dividing by that number of meals.
If you want to eat 4 times a day divide 1800 by 4 and you come up with 450 calories per meal. Obviously you can change that number as much as you want by adding or subtracting calories to each meal as long as the total calories consumed at the end of the day is 1800. If that goal is met, you should achieve your goal of fat loss.
Now adding and subtracting calories is no exact science and there are a ton of ways that may throw you off. Oddly enough our nutrition labels lie to us sometimes too and there can in fact be more calories in the food, or maybe less. You might also be thinking “well I can eyeball my portions I’m pretty good at that”. Pretty consistently we will under estimate the total number of calories in our portions, it just seems to be human nature to think we ate less than we actually did. If you need any more convincing on this then check out Brian Wansink’s work on mindless eating.
Tracking calories is really one of the only ways to know how much we are eating and even then as you can see that can be pretty flawed at times. The point being, don’t rely just on eyeballing your portions or trying to judge them by feel.
The take home message when it comes to results is, “If we are not achieving the results we want, we may need to be more diligent with the way we are measuring our food intake”. If you are in a calorie deficit then you will lose body fat, but if your results have stalled or never started then you more than likely will not loose that fat.
Getting back to breakfast, if we are typically someone who consumes things like pop tarts, bagels, or cereal then it may be time to consider some more options. These options are highly processed and really provide little in the way of real nutrition. Ideally each of our meals should have a fruit or veggie, a healthy protein, and a healthy fat. You can add a starchy carbohydrate if you want as well, but I’d make sure the other requirements are met first.
So instead of the pop tart, try an egg with some spinach and cheese which would meet that criteria. You might also try oatmeal with some berries and a scoop of protein powder, none of that instant maple and brown sugar crap either. Really the possibilities are endless, but the point being find a few options that you like and can eat regularly and then cycle them in and out. However, remember if you really dig a poptart from time to time, don’t completely eliminate them from your plan. Eat them as often as you need to in order to feel satisfied, but not so much that they sabotage your goals.
As you embark on the meal by meal approach not only can it support your goals of fat loss, but you will probably start to feel better and have more energy.
Once you have a few options that you can use for breakfast then move on to lunch and do the same thing, then move on to dinner. So remember to slowly over the course of a few weeks make some small changes meal by meal and you will reach your ultimate goal!!