I’d suggest not, at this time, locking into any precise plan for exact ratios, etc. The fact that you’re already fairly good at eating healthy, had the motivation and discipline to do the V-Diet and now have the effect of that working for you, means to me that I’d rather see strategy towards even better lifestyle eating and getting thaty going rather than aiming for exact ratios and numbers.
What you’re saying about too many options applies actually to many aspects about lifestyle better diet.
Part of the reason I think why there are so many plans, and success with so many plans, is that pretty much all plans share a key quality: they restrict choice. They disallow certain mistakes, or many mistakes. Not having the option to do various wrong things easily prevents doing them, whereas leaving everything open and asking to apply judgment and restraint tends to result in a lot of problems.
For example, if living alone and having a rule to, say, not buy potato chips at all or not more than once per month or per week, or if there are other people buying them having a rule to not eat them at all or not more than once per month or per week, or having a rule to not eat anything with added “vegetable oil” and potato chips of course fall into this category, it becomes essentially automatic that potato chips will not contribute towards making you fat.
Whereas, having more options available, such as “Potato chips themselves are okay, the problem is excess calories, excess carbs, or excess fat, so have potato chips but keep consumption within the rules” in practice usually doesn’t work so well.
Better to have had less options during the day. Potato chips not an option, etc. Better.
Another example would be John Berardi’s program where meals are generally either lowfat P+C, or lowcarb P+F. Aside from its own benefits, this program automatically takes out a lot of bad options. It’s very easy for caloric intake to stay moderate, instead of having to deliberately decide to leave food behind, etc, which is harder to do.
A lot of advantages result from reduced options, but the question is, what reduction of options will work best for you? That’s individual. But some things carry over very well for a lot of people and are just generally really useful methods. Here are some:
If you make your carb intake more principally foods such as brown rice, rye berries, quinoa, barley, buckwheat, or slow-cooked oatmeal (plus for workouts, your workout nutrition) then it’s actually going to be somewhat difficult for you to go too far wrong on carbs, if at all. A cup of brown rice or oatmeal for example is only about 30-40 g carbs. You want your daily intake to be at least 100 g/day, quite likely more like 200 g/day, or if you are very active perhaps 300 g. This is likely to self-regulate well if choosing foods such as this and having some basic idea of carb content, rather than strict counting.
(For example, having the basic idea, you’d know that one or two cups of the above foods per day for example should not be your sole carb source on an ongoing basis: too low!)
On fruits, strongly favor the fruits themselves over juices, and avoid going overboard on fruits. Chronically high fructose intake has adverse metabolic consequences, while for example (there is no precise yes/no number) 25 g/day, which will come from about 50 g carbs from fruit, is okay. This amount is provided from for example two apples, two bananas, or four oranges per day, or one cup of berries.
Also avoid added sugar. Dried fruits are perfectly okay if keeping account of carb content, but the thing is, what seems like and is experienced like a fairly trivial amount of food, is actually a huge amount of sugar with dried fruits. They’re very deceptive and so real care should be taken.
On vegetable oils, for the most part I really suggest being strict. There’s an enormous amount to be said for just saying no to products containing “vegetable oil,” soybean oil, safflower oil, sunflower oil, peanut oil, or canola oil. If adding oil to foods yourself for cooking, best choices are macadamia, coconut, and olive (extra virgin if not cooking to high temperature, extra light for high temperature.)
Don’t fear beef fat or dairy fat, so long as amounts are reasonable. Reasonable means about 30-40% of daily calories from fat.
Chicken fat or pork fat would be healthful if the animals were not soy-fed, but almost all of them are, even when sold as “free-range” or “pastured.”
The entire balance of caloric intake is, necessarily, protein. (If not carbs or fat, that’s all that’s left.)
Lastly, I really recommend ending eating within 12 or at most 14 hours after arising. One of the reasons this can make a major difference, aside from adding some natural caloric restriction, is that actually there is not just one circadian cycle in the body, but “clocks” in each of the organs, which can become desynchronized or entirely disrupted, which is associated with development of metabolic disorder, diabetes, and obesity. Dividing food intake into active period and rest period is effective in helping to maintain integerated circadian rhythm throughout the body; failing to do so is disruptive to it.
