Jim Katsoulis explains an eating blueprint: a personalized diet built around your preferences. He breaks it into three parts: customizing to fit you, structuring eating like five clean days plus two planned imperfect ones, and using high-volume low-calorie foods to stay satisfied while reducing calories.
Chapters
What is an eating blueprint? I recently made a video where I said, follow an eating blueprint to live at your goal weight. And this is a core idea of my program. Yourself then systems. I want to go a little more in depth with what I was talking about. So the first part's the philosophy of it. You know, so often with weight loss, we've been conditioned to think, okay, I want to lose weight. Give me the eating plan, and I'll follow it. That's the wrong approach, because that plan is not made for you. It's not based on your likes, your preferences, your lifestyle. And so it's kind of like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. And you can do it for a little while, but doesn't last. So the first part is to customize an eating plan around you so that it fits like a glove. Now, I'll be the first to admit that this takes more work, right? It's easier just to say, oh, give me the plan, I'll follow it. But that doesn't last. This one here, you dedicate some time to it and customize the plan, and you've got it forever. The second piece is structuring your eating. Again, this can customize to what you want to do, but what I do is I do five days of perfect eating, two days of planned imperfection. Now, when I say perfect eating, I don't actually eat perfect, but that's the goal. That's my ideal. But having the variety of having clean days and days where I can eat what I want, I find to be crucial for my motivation. Because a lot of times I'm in that five days, I'm looking forward to the weekend, and it gets me through the clean eating time. I find having both of them is really, really important. One other side benefit of that is that every Monday when I go back to eating clean, I'm always practicing getting back on track. And the third part of this blueprint is to create eating strategies that reduce your calories while keeping you satisfied. You don't have to eat less food to lose weight. You have to consume less calories. And so the secret to this is calorie density. This is basically eating foods that don't have a lot of calories in them, but take up a lot of space, which, in other words, is natural foods. Vegetables, fruits, greens, things like this. They take up a lot of space in your stomach and make you feel satisfied, but they don't have a lot of calories in them. And so you start to structure your eating in a way that you feel good and you know what to eat. You know, if I eat this in the breakfast, I'm going to be satisfied until lunch. If I eat this at lunch, I'm going to be satisfied till dinner. If I eat this at dinner, I'm satisfied until I go to bed. And that's what you're working towards. Again, I'm not saying this is the easiest thing in the world, but it's a real plan. And no one ever talks about this when it comes to weight loss. We just want the quick fixes. But when you actually have an eating blueprint like I have now, like a lot of my clients have, you can follow it forever in and it feels good because you built it around you. And so it always works. And so you still get off track sometimes. But getting on track is so much easier and it gets you some of the best results you could possibly get because not only are you reducing calories, but you feel satisfied the whole time. So I hope this helps clarify it a bit. Again, this is a big subject, but for right now, I just want to give you kind of an overview of it so you can use this in your own life to start approaching how you eat in a different way so that you're building it around who you are as opposed to just expecting someone to give you a magic plan, because that doesn't exist. And if you have any questions about it, please ask, ask me in the comments.
