How to Use the Evening Hunger Templates.docx

How to use the Evening Hunger Templates

When you receive your diet, you’ll get one Excel document along with some ancillary materials to help you on your way. The excel sheet is split up for 3 different kinds of diet options, for each of the main classes of training volume:

Hard, Moderate, Light and Non-Weight Training Days

The GENERAL recommendations for diet use are as follows:

-Hard Day Diet for BIG workouts like high volume leg training, multiple sets of 10+reps, multiple exercises, and most types of high-workload training sessions that last longer than two hours and leave you broken and sweating puddles. High-level Crossfitters, we’re looking at you here.

-Moderate Day Diet for tough workouts that have you lifting heavy (5-10 reps, usually), but don’t last much longer than about 1.5 hours and don’t completely wear you out. Chest, shoulders, arms, back, and most strength phase powerlifting sessions.

-Light Day Diet (same diet as non-weight training days) are for easier training sessions that either last 45 minutes or less, or are primarily composed of heavy lifts for few total sets and reps (less than 5 reps per set on average). This diet day should also be used for most types of deloads, recovery sessions, and Crossfit MetCons.

-Non-Weight Training Day Diet (same diet as light days) same should be used for days on which no weight training is done. If you do cardio on this day to lose fat, that’s just fine and no adjustments are needed. If you do cardio to enhance endurance performance (see below), use the light, moderate, or hard day diets for this instead.

Choosing Low-Palatability Foods

A very surprising yet well-supported concept in the nutritional science literature is the Food Palatability-Reward Hypothesis (FPRH). To skip all the technical jargon, the big idea of the concept is that if you eat very tasty food on a hypocaloric diet (during a fat loss phase), you’re going to want MUCH more of it than if you eat bland food that you’re not so excited about. If you crave cheeseburgers and eat those while making sure to still hit your daily macros and calories for your fat loss goals, you won’t gain fat and you can actually lose fat just fine. The problem is that the next day, later that very day, or even right after that meal of cheeseburgers, your cravings for MORE cheeseburgers and other tasty foods will shoot up. However, if you stay entirely away from the burgers and had chicken and oatmeal instead, you’d probably not get nearly as excited about eating more, be it more chicken and oatmeal or much of anything else.

This concept gives us a powerful tool during fat loss dieting. By eating foods that are not the tastiest we can have, we can actually lower our hunger cravings and make the dieting process much easier. Does this mean you have to eat the same thing every day or eat cat food or something? No. You should still have variety and your food doesn’t have to taste terrible. But if you ease up on the spices, flavorings, saturated fats (such as whole eggs and cheeses), sugars, and exotic cooking methods (that are all normally awesome features of great-tasting foods), your cravings will usually decline noticeably and make your diet that much easier.

The deeper you go into a cut (from cut 1 to 2 to 3 or with each month of the diet), the more we recommend sticking to the FPRH guidelines for blander food. When you just start your diet, you can eat some pretty good stuff for a meal here and there, especially at night. But as the diet progresses and you need more power to keep the cravings at bay, the more we recommend making bland food choices. When your food is so unappealing that you’re not even excited to eat it, that is a VERY good sign of lowered hunger cravings. Now all you have to do is stick to the plan and your diet success is much more probable!

When you get into the Maintenance phases and then to your New Base, you can start to liven up the cuisine as your food volumes go up and your hunger cravings subside. We recommend doing this slowly to ease the transition.

Maintaining Weight

When you open up your diet, you’ll notice that there are 9 total tabs at the bottom of each sheet. The tabs are:

Quick Tips, Serving Sizes (w Pictures), Base, Cut 1, Cut 2, Cut 3, Maintenance 1, Maintenance 2, New Base,

If your goals include stabilizing your diet at your current weight, stick to the Base plan the entire time.

The Base plan is calculated on an AVERAGE metabolism, so you may need more or less calories. For all plans, we recommend weighing yourself two or three times a week and taking the average of that weight per week. All weigh-ins should be in the morning FIRST THING on an empty stomach. If week-to-week you’re losing weight on it and don’t want to, increase your fat intake. If you’re gaining weight on it and don’t want to, decrease your fat intake. You can add fats in any meal you like, but for controlling evening hunger purposes, we recommend adding more of them later in the day. For those weighing less than 200lbs, adding or subtracting 1 serving of fat per day for each week they are too heavy or too light (off by more than 5lbs from their normal weight) is a good approach. For those weighing more than 200lbs, adding or subtracting 2 servings of fat at a time (per day) is best. After several weeks, you should have a good diet that fits your calorie needs and results in a stable weight. A stable weight is one which doesn’t deviate by weekly average more than about 1-3lbs (1 for those weighing closer to 100lbs, 3 for those closer to 300lbs). Keeping an Excel log may help a lot during the weight tracking process.

Cutting

When you first start your cutting plan, we recommend you start with at least one week on the Base diet, just to get used to the approach. If your Base diet is making you gain weight, adjust it down as described above. If it’s making you lose weight, keep on it until the weight loss is no longer fast enough. After this, you can begin your cutting phase by starting the Cut 1 diet. For those who weigh less than 200lbs, the goal is to lose between 0.5lbs and 1.5lbs per week. For those who weigh over 200lbs, the goal is to lose between 1.0lbs and 2.0lbs per week. If weight loss is SLOWER than those guidelines after 2 weeks of measuring (twice a week bodyweights are best practice, and the first week should be ignored as body water shifts can be largely responsible for weight changes), switch to the Cut 2 diet tab. If the rate of weight loss is FASTER than those guidelines, or WITHIN THEM, please keep the Cut 1 diet running. As soon as the weight loss rate slows to below those guidelines, switch to the Cut 2 diet tab. As soon as it drops below again, switch to the Cut 3 guidelines. If you still want to lose more weight after Cut 3 runs its course (no longer drops your weight within the guidelines), we’d love to help you with a more advanced, one-on-one consulting approach.

This table might be of some assistance in visualizing the process:

If you’re UNDER 200lbs:

If you’re OVER 200lbs:

How long to diet?

From a health, sustainability, long term progress, and psychological perspective, we don’t recommend losing weight for any longer than 3 months at a time.  After 3 months of weight loss or gain, at least two months of stable weight conditions are highly recommended.

After the Diet

After you’ve lost the weight you wanted or the diet timeline has expired (anything much over 3 months is highly recommended), you’ll need to get your body and mind re-adjusted to your new weight so that you can maintain your results and let your body recognize its new self as its own.

Right after Cut 3 (or however far you had to go, be it Cut 3, 2, or even 1 if you’re super lucky!), begin the “Maintenance 1” plan. Follow that for 2 weeks. Your bodyweight will fluctuate a bit, and it might drift up or down, which is not a concern at this point. After two weeks, move onto “Maintenance 2.” Run Maintenance 2 for 2 weeks as well and monitor your bodyweight twice a week. If your weight is trending up by more than 3lbs total after two weeks, go back to Maintenance 1 and run that until your weight stabilizes (in which case keep running it as long as you like, or for at least 2 months total before your next cutting diet) or begins to fall again (in which case you go back to Maintenance 2). If after 2 weeks of Maintenance 2 your bodyweight is stable, keep on it for as long as you like or at least 2 months before your next cutting diet. If you weight starts to fall again on Maintenance 2, switch to “New Base.” Use the New Base diet for as long as you like, as it’s our best guess as to where you’ll be settling down under stable conditions. If you choose to diet again, please stay with the New Base for at least 2 months before dieting down again. NOTICE; if you’ve lost more than 25lbs over the course of using the same templates, you’ll likely need to purchase additional templates for lighter individuals by inputting your new bodyweight. If you’d like to begin a performance diet after this diet and maintenance is over (instead of one optimized to reduce hunger, such as this one), that’s just fine and we’d be glad to help you find one at RP.

A quick summary table of the above:

Contacts and Questions

We wish you well on your fat loss goals. We’d love to be able to answer direct questions about the templates, but simply don’t have the resources to do so. If you’d like direct diet coaching from one of our expert diet coaches, shoot us an email and let us know!