Stages of Nutrition
February 18, 2009 | 13 Comments
“Should I eat 30% or 40% of calories from protein?”
“My weight loss has slowed should I start cycling my carbs?”
“If I eat 6% of my fat in the form of coconut oil is that okay?”
These are some questions that I have been asked over the past couple weeks regarding nutrition. But in some cases these people don’t have the right to ask these questions because they don’t know what stage they are at in their nutrition. They are trying to tweak the specifics but haven’t mastered the basics.
What am I talking about? See the picture below.

This graph represents what I call the Stages of Nutrition. Your diet (like many things) consists of a progression and you need to master one step before you move to the next. I’m going to steal my buddy Alwyn Cosgrove’s martial arts metaphor to illustrate my point.
If you want to learn Karate you can’t start out training with Jet Li. You need to know how a certain number of basic moves, master those, and progress from there to more advance tactics.
Your diet is no different. If you can’t master certain basic components then you have now business progressing to more complicated nutritional approaches.
The Stages of Nutrition:
- Nutritional Freestyling: You eat whatever you want whenever you want.
- Proper Food Choices Varying Compliance: You try to eat the right stuff but you just don’t do it consistently.
- Proper Food Choices 90% Compliance: You eat the right stuff and you rarely falter (this is the target stage for most people).
- Calorie/Portion Counting, Proper Food Choices 90% Compliance: You need to fine tune your diet more for a specific purpose (weight loss, health, performance) so you start counting calories or portions and you stay on your plan just about all the time.
If you are currently nutritional freestyling then you can’t jump straight to counting calories. That is just a recipe for failure as if you aren’t currently making consistent proper food choices (in line with the 6 Pillars of Nutrition) then what makes you think that you will be able to consistently eat portioned, weighted, and calculated meals?
Making proper food choices and sticking to your plan requires a discipline and behavioral skill set that will be mastered as you progress through the Stages of Nutrition. Jumping ahead to a more ‘advanced’ stage will not get you better results faster. Instead it will lead to a pattern of brief results, diet relapse, and frustration.
My Question to You
What stage are you in?
What do you need to do to move to the next stage?
Be honest with yourself – do what is needed to move to the next stage and you will be rewarded with consistent and long term weight loss success.
A couple months ago a gave an entire presentation on the Stages of Nutrition, how to move from one stage to the next, and how to identify the best stage for your goals. The entire presentation is free to watch and download for members of the Faster Fat Loss Zone. If you’re not a member you can join today for only $19.95 and you’ll get the Stages of Nutrition presentation plus access to another 100+ fat loss workouts, articles, and videos.
Have a good one,
Mike
P.S. Thanks to all the Warp Speed Fat Loss and Faster Fat Loss Zone members that join Alwyn, Bill, and Myself on the fat loss teleconference last night – I had a great time.

13 Responses to “Stages of Nutrition”
Got something to say?


















This is a great post to put nutrition into perspective. I teach this to my clients all the time but the way you explained it here just gave me a really good and simple step-by-step learning system.
Thank you!!!
Donovan “DFitnessguy” Owens
Hutto Fitness Boot Camp
Busy Womens Fitness Blog
Great stuff Mike. I agree with Donovan people need to know this concept before trying more advanced approaches. I will definitely use this with my boot campers. Thanks.
Doug Parra
Mike, this is a great visual to understand the journey. I shared it on my blog this morning. It was humbling for me to see it too – compliance is such a critical issue. Thanks for putting it in perspective. I was on the call last night too for WSFL and found it very helpful. I didn’t think of any questions on the spot, perhaps folks can submit questions beforehand next time? Thanks for being a great resource. Kelley
Just because I believe the intention is to reach the goals on the right, would it not be a more positive graph if the arrow rose to the goals? Just a visual comment. Good info though.
Nancy
I wish I had a greater drive to eat healthier, but I think my high metabolism is keeping me from doing so :/
-Jack
Hi Mike,
Awesome stuff. This info will immediately help me with some of my more challenging clients. Just goes to show that nutrition is such a vital component to any physical changing program. Keep up the great work.
Great post. And great way to explain the 4 stages, very matter of fact. I like the term “nutritional freestyling” I will have to use that term with clients in explaining how most people eat.
Mike,
I like the way you’ve put this 4 part flow together; it makes for some assurance for those who aspire to improve, without the layer of “all or nothing” or the perfectionism that is so rampant.
Thanks, I’ll probably refer to this for my clients!
Lani Muelrath
Hey Mike, I’ve stolen your graph and put it on my blog!! As of next week in NZ, from doing that I could have my internet connection taken down without trial.
So I thought I would let you know
I’m taking the pi#$ of our new law, however I have “borrowed” your graph with your name blog etc.. so I hope you don’t mind.
It fits perfect with a email I sent to a subscriber.
Take care brother and keep up the primo nutrition work.
As long as you put a link back to the site (I saw you did), then it is no problem.
Hi Ben,
How’s VT? Glad you found this useful.
-Mike
Kelley,
Glad you found that call useful. I’ll be doing more calls (live video?) and I will get questions ahead of time.
-Mike
Great content…Thanks for sharing…
Rahz Slaughter
NYC