This article is part of a series of articles. Make sure to read the complete series to completely understand the content.
The first step is normally to find out what you are currently eating. You can monitor your eating habits for a week or a few weeks by writing down exactly what you eat and in which quantities. By using the labels on the packaging of the product you eat you can easily find out how many grams of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates the products you eat contain. For products that do not have labels with nutritional values you can do a google search to find estimates of the nutritional values. The average amounts of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates you eat on a day can be compared with the amounts you are supposed to eat. With this information you can begin tweaking your diet by limiting the macronutrients you currently eat too much of and increasing the macronutrients you lack. At the same time you can start cleaning up your diet by trying to get most of your proteins from sources with mostly essential amino acids instead of from non-essential amino acids, your fats from unsaturated fats instead of saturated fats, and your carbohydrates from complex carbohydrates containing fibers instead of simple carbohydrates like sugars.
The next step is to spread your meals optimally over the day. Having several smaller meals, instead of a few large meals, will result in feeling more energetic during the day and a more optimal use of the macronutrients you eat on a day. One meal every 2.5-3 hours is often seen as optimal. This will easily result in about 6 meals per day meaning you can divide your total daily need for macronutrients by 6 to come to a general guide what your meals should contain.
Finally you want to slightly adjust the ratios of macronutrients during the day. Meals in the morning can contain relatively more carbohydrates than meals later on the day or in the evening. The amounts of protein in each meal can best be spread over the day as much as possible while the intake of fats can be relatively low in the morning and higher later in the day or in the evening. Also here it is important to experiment with the exact amounts to see how your body reacts on different amounts of macronutrients spreads over your meals.
From here on it will depend on you and how much time and effort you are willing to put in building your perfect diet. You can always search for diets that other people created but by simply copying what someone else did you will not automatically reach the same results. In most cases it pays off to invest time in building your own, personalized, diet plan and understanding why you should prefer certain food items over others. It will require time and effort, but the result will be long-lasting!
This is the final article in our series on how to create a diet for most people. There is one more part that applies specially to athletes. From here on we will be posting additional articles which explain certain parts of what was written here in more details and tips and tricks will be available also.
This article is part of a series of articles:
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