Question of Time

Hello everyone. For two years now, I have trained using simple diet modifications like eating 2-3 MRP’s per day and avoiding junk. I have always shyed away from anything beyond that because of the amount of time involved in planning all that out, and was curious as to how long does it take to plan out a diet assuming you’re doing it like a pro. I mean: Exactly what food to eat at exact times right down to calculating the amount of grams of macronutrients per meal, then figuring out the cost of all the items necessary over a weeks timespan, a month, etc.

The same goes for the training aspect. Most just follow a routing of listing the excercises with the rep ranges and number of sets. But how much time does it take you people to write out a plan varying your tempo’s, rest intervals, planned variation in exercise selection based on what you’re adapting too, etc. like a Poliquin workout or an advance Ian King workout.

How long do these things take you to do typically if you really went balls to the wall? Am I wrong in that I’m just a slow thinker? Or maybe you believe that it’s something you just have to put up with, it takes a lot of time to get the details down. I’ve tried it recently, shit, it took me hours to make a diet. I had a calculator and I had boxes of brown rice and buckets of protein scatter all over constantly flipping them looking at the nutrition facts as to where I can fit them in my meals without going over/under the # of grams for protein or carb or fat per meal. Is this time-consuming a normal thing if you want to do it the right way? Is this one reason so few people actually use this method? The amount of time it takes to set a new one up and the periodic maintanance? Like I said, I’ve had this same issue with workouts. When you want to do a really advanced one, shit you really gotta do your planning. Any info helps. Thank you.

Matt: yes, these activities are very time-consuming… at first. But the longer you do them, the more they’ll become second-nature. For example, I now know the nutritional values per serving of all the foods I eat; I also have a database of many different meal combinations that are appropriate for various diet phases. These things greatly simplify my life and allow me to maintain a great degree of control with little effort. Believe me, really squaring away your diet and workouts is worth it; putting in the time now will pay off in spades later.