[dillytl]

Something to think about when looking at the "90% rule" for diet compliance.....

The "rule" is that 90% is generally the lowest acceptable level of dietary adherence that you can get away with without compromising your hard work for the week. The more you fall below this 90% figure, the greater the liklihood that your progress will stall or simply be non-existent.

So on a 42 meals-per-week plan, that basically means 38 of the 42 meals have to be perfect. On a 35 meals-per-week plan, it’s about 32 meals. That seems easy enough doesn’t it? However, what about the size of these ‘off plan’ meals? What if your free meals are on the order of say 1500 calories? It’s really not that hard to do. And let’s say you have two of them a week. Well, I think it’s pretty easy to see that causing a problem even though technically on a 42 meals-per-week plan, that’d still be 95% adherence to your plan.

Instead of looking at this from a ‘meals position’, let’s look at it from a ‘calories position’. Let’s say your total weekly calories consumed is 11200 (1600 calories x 7 days). Technically, a 10% deviation (resulting in 90% adherence in terms of caloric intake - which is really what matters for progress), is only 1120 calories.

So, you’d basically have a maximum of 1120 calories to ’screw up’ with, and still remain at 90% adherence. That’s it. That might be two meals that add up to 1120 or perhaps just one bigger meal. And the lower your calories the smaller the free meals need to be. If this person who has 11200 calories per week to consume, has two 1300 calorie free meals (very easy to do), that’s 2600 calories of off-plan eating. That equates to only 76.8% adherence and that is unfortunately much too low.

When we know our weekly caloric intake, we can see what 10% deviation equates to and set that as a top limit. Again, that’s not to say that one has to take all those calories, as 95% is better than 90% and 100% is better than 95%.