5-step guide: Look aesthetic without tracking your diet!

Getting or keeping a lean and/or muscular physique can be great, but eating like a robot all day to do so is not that great.

The fact that we don't have to eat rice, chicken, and broccoli all day to look this way is clear to almost everyone by now, but even the precise tracking of calories and macronutrients can be quite annoying and, above all, socially awkward in situations where there is a large selection of food.

Taking a food scale with you to the restaurant is not really cool. However, staying at home because you can eat there in a "controlled" way is definitely not cool either.

So you either go to the restaurant with your friends and have a guilty conscience because you can't track your food accurately, or you don't go and have a guilty conscience because you isolate yourself socially. This is actually a dilemma that many ambitious strength athletes find themselves in.

The advantages of accurate tracking are of course quite obvious: If you adhere to your wisely chosen(!) macronutrient targets every day, you will achieve or maintain your desired body fat percentage 100%. You will have the maximum level of security.

That's a nice feeling - especially for people who always like to play it safe in life.

The disadvantages are, as already partly described, that you feel like you're in a prison, completely ignore your hunger signals, spend a lot of time tracking, possibly develop an eating disorder, isolate yourself socially, and feel bad if you don't reach the exact macro targets even once.

This article is about how you can move from precise tracking to a much more relaxed approach WITHOUT having to abandon your physique goals. We categorize the nutritional approaches into different levels according to their strictness. Level 1 is the strictest and Level 5 is the most relaxed.

While we're mostly just going over the calories and macronutrients today, of course you shouldn't forget that vitamins, minerals, fiber, and phytochemicals are also super important.

So, let's start with Level 1.

Level 1

When you are at this level, you weigh all ingredients very precisely and also strictly adhere to very precise macro guidelines. For example, you eat exactly 200g of protein, 70g of fat, and 180g of carbohydrates per day.

However, this is for most people - even for very ambitious strength athletes - completely overkill.

This is only recommended for a bodybuilder shortly before a competition. There it is really important that the fat loss is perfectly timed until the deadline, the athlete is nice and dry, and they are neither over- nor underloaded with carbohydrates. For everyone else, Level 2, which we'll get to now, is definitely enough in terms of accuracy,

Level 2

You weigh all ingredients exactly and stick to macro guidelines within certain ranges. For example, you eat so that you get 180-220g of protein, 60-80g of fat and 160-200g of carbohydrates per day.

You aim for the middle of each of these ranges. Where exactly you end up, however, depends on what ingredients are available to you and what you have an appetite for. That's much easier than trying to meet a set of exact macro requirements.

This method is recommended for most people who start strength training and are really serious about it. Sure, it's time-consuming at first to weigh everything and enter it into a nutrition app, but you'll learn an enormous amount.

You learn what the foods you eat every day are made of - or in other words, you learn what you are feeding your body. This is important. After all, at the gas station, you also have to know whether you are filling up with diesel or gasoline.

The longer you track, the easier it becomes over time. In almost all nutrition apps, you can save meals. So if you have certain meals that you eat often, you don't have to enter all the ingredients individually each time, but simply call up the saved meal.

Assuming you eat four times a day and two of those meals - e.g. breakfast and the pre-workout meal - are always identical, you only need to track the ingredients of the other two meals that vary day to day.

After a few weeks, however, you'll notice that even these two other meals repeat themselves from time to time, and you won't have to weigh and track the ingredients all over again - provided you have those meals stored in your nutrition app already.

Of course, if you really eat different meals every day, then tracking is relatively time-consuming, but hardly anyone does that.

Nonetheless, weighing ingredients and maintaining specific macro ranges is relatively time-consuming. Most of us should not remain at Level 2 all our lives.

Level 3

Therefore, let's move on to Level 3. At this level, you only roughly estimate the calories and protein and try to reach your target ranges.

This is not to say that it doesn't matter how you distribute your fats and carbohydrates. It's just that it's not as important as the calories and protein, and by the time you're eating at Level 3, you should already have a good sense of how much fat and carbs you're eating.

So, for example, if you think that your last meal was relatively fatty, then let your next meal be a little more carbohydrate-rich and less fatty.

Because by this point you've tracked your diet for a long time, you can estimate quite well what the macros of the meals look like. In the restaurant, you estimate your meal, for example, at 1200 cal and 50g protein.

Of course, your estimate will never be perfect - especially in a restaurant, where this is even more difficult. But the estimate doesn't have to be perfect. For some meals you overestimate and for some meals you underestimate the calories and/or protein. On average, this balances out to some extent.

The more tracking experience you have, the better you become at estimating. So your average estimate will get closer and closer to the actual average calories and protein of the meals as you gain tracking experience.

If you are still unsure whether or not you can estimate the nutritional values of meals well, then it is best to first go back a level and track your food for a while or do a few estimation tests every now and then and learn from them.

What is meant by "estimation tests"? For example, pour oatmeal into a bowl and estimate how many calories are in the bowl. Then weigh the oatmeal and calculate how many calories it actually contains.

If you are good at this, you can do estimation tests with whole meals. Put together a meal and estimate how many calories it contains. Then weigh the individual ingredients, calculate how many calories are contained, and learn from this.

If it is a meal whose ingredients you can no longer isolate without a huge mess (such as soup) let someone else weigh the ingredients when preparing the meal. Then you estimate the calories of the meal, calculate the actual calories, and learn from your estimation error, if you have misjudged.

Over time you will get better at estimating. or "eyeballing" as many people call it.

Once you are comfortable with Level 3, you can move on to Level 4.

Level 4

At Level 4, you only roughly estimate the calories in your head and make sure that they roughly correspond to your calorie target range. You don't have to actively think about the macronutrient distribution anymore, because you have already developed a very good feel for it by going through the previous stages.

So you know, for example, how big the piece of meat or tofu on the plate should be in order to get enough protein in the meal, and you also know, for example, what ratio of whole egg to egg white you should choose when preparing your scrambled rice so that the meal is not too greasy.

Since you have already internalized this, you only have to specifically estimate the amount of calories.

This is the level that most ambitious strength athletes should reach in the long run (unless there is a bodybuilding competition or something similar coming up).

This is a healthy balance of a diet that is goal-oriented, but at the same time doesn't drive you nuts with too many rules to the point where you feel like you're in a prison.

Level 5

You have reached the 5th and final stage when you eat according to hunger and focus mainly on foods that are typically seen as "healthy" or nutritious. You could call this strategy "intuitive eating."

However, it is unlikely that with completely free food choices, one can intuitively eat and simultaneously achieve or maintain a body composition that would typically be considered aesthetic.

That might have worked a few hundred years ago, when there weren't as many super delicious foods like you find in every supermarket today.

In most cases, intuitive eating is only compatible with achieving an aesthetic body if you buckle down and limit your food choices to traditional "healthy" foods. These are mostly foods that have a relatively high volume and not too many calories - i.e. vegetables, fruits, low-fat meats, whole grain products, etc.

A diet using a Level 5 mindset works best if you have already reached your ideal body fat level, if that level is not unhealthily low, and if your last diet was at least a few months ago and you want to maintain your current level of body fat going forward.

If you are dieting at the moment or specifically want to gain weight, then eating according to hunger usually doesn't work. The body is very resistant to change and would prefer to remain in homeostasis. It signals this to you by feeling very hungry when you are dieting and by feeling very full when you are gaining weight.

(Small side note: Of course, for most people, the increase in the feeling of satiety while gaining weight is not as high as the increase in the feeling of hunger while dieting. Therefore, most people find it easier to gain weight than to lose it).

So if you want to diet or gain weight, you'd better watch your calories specifically and go back at least one level.

No matter what level you are at, you should definitely weigh yourself regularly if you are focused on achieving or gaining a particular body composition. This is especially important if you are on the higher levels and eat a lot or even eat only according to hunger. The number on the scale will show you whether your chosen nutritional approach is working or not for your particular goals.

So if you see, for example, that the weight on the scale goes up on a weekly average, although you actually want to maintain your weight, then you need to eat a little less.

So, for example, adjust your macro ranges downward (if you track your macros) or reduce your calorie intake (if you track only your calories) or stop eating even when you are not 100% satiated (if you eat according to your feelings of hunger).

This doesn't sound very pleasant, but most of the time a solution can be found to minimize your discomfort.

For example, instead of eating less at every meal, it helps many people to simply skip breakfast or snacking in the evening, or - the classic - to simply eat even higher-volume foods with a relatively low calorie density.

Theoretically, it would be enough if you weigh yourself 2-3 times a week and then compare the weekly average of your weight. However, it is best to weigh yourself daily.

For one thing, the result will be more accurate and for another - and this is much more important - it will be easier not to forget something you do every day instead of just 2-3x a week.