You now have the following information:

1. the nutritional characteristics of the initial diet (also applicable to the stabilisation phase of the results);
2. the objectives of diets;
3. the nutritional characteristics of transitional diets;
4. the nutritional characteristics of the calorie blocks, where required.

All that remains is to select and organise the food to meet the previously established parameters (hopefully also taking into account one’s own dietary tastes).

The choice of foods

  The first thing to do is to identify the most suitable foods to include in the diet. These must have the following characteristics:

1. variety. Being as varied as the type of diet one has to follow allows (taking into account, of course, any ethical restrictions). More specifically, the limit of variety is essentially the amount of a given macronutrient one should consume in the diet compared to that contained in the food. If, for example, one has to follow a low-carbohydrate diet, it will not be possible to include a large variety of carbohydrate-rich foods (such as pasta, bread, legumes and various cereals…) in the diet. At most, one can select one or two and consume only them. Variety is also important for two reasons: the first is related to micronutrient requirements. As has already been amply illustrated, it is not at all necessary to meticulously set the quantity of food to be consumed in order to consume a specific, precise amount of each micronutrient. In fact, honouring the principle of food variety discussed here will certainly be a more than sufficient precaution to prevent deficiencies. The second reason is related to toxic substances contained in food: without being unnecessarily alarmist, it is well known that (almost) all foods contain toxic substances in minute quantities. These substances are sometimes due to the particular conditions under which livestock is reared and the land cultivated, while at other times they are intrinsically present in food. These substances, in many foods, are however in such low quantities that they are completely harmless. It may be assumed, however, that in the long term a diet excessively unbalanced in favour of a particular food or group of foods could lead to the intake of an amount of a particular toxic substance that is incompatible with maintaining the best state of health. Varying one’s diet therefore proves to be a valid expedient for ‘intoxicating oneself with everything, but just a little’, rather than taking an excessive and therefore potentially dangerous dose of a single poisonous substance.
2. healthiness. Most foods, it has been said, contain toxic substances, but that these substances are represented in such small quantities that they do not pose a real health risk. Nevertheless, there are some foods that have an intrinsic health hazard even when consumed in relatively small quantities. For example, the carcinogenic effect of processed meat and foods containing preservatives is well known, as is the deleterious effect on the efficiency of the cardiovascular system that foods high in saturated fat have.

Ideal characteristics of foods to be selected

  During the process of selecting foods that will play the role of supplying nutrients to the diet, one must ensure that they meet particular requirements. A list is given below:

1. Caloric density: a food with a low caloric density can never be used as a source of macronutrients because in order to achieve the required intake one would have to consume an unacceptable amount from both a digestive and psychological point of view. Instead, they can be powerful allies when one wishes to enrich the diet with micronutrients without significantly altering the balance between macronutrients and total caloric intake.
2. Macronutrient repartitioning: foods with one macronutrient prevailing over the others (or, perhaps, containing only one), can be used to correct an overall disproportion in the diet being produced. For example, if there is too much protein and too much fat, but too few carbohydrates and too few calories, then a food rich in carbohydrates and poor in the other two macronutrients (such as honey, fresh fruit or maltodextrins) may be added. If, in addition to being unbalanced by the parameters established a priori, the diet is richer in calories than it should be, then the addition of the food to correct the macronutrient imbalance must be combined with a reduction in foods rich in those excess nutrients.
3. Glycaemic index: depending on the timing of the meal (e.g. inside or outside the anabolic window), as well as on the purpose of the diet (anabolism, metabolic restoration or catabolism), the glycaemic index of foods should be higher or lower.
4. Biological value of nutrients: as we discussed earlier, the fact that a food contains a certain amount of such a nutrient does not necessarily imply that it is biologically available. Proteins with a bad amino acid profile or foods rich in non-heme iron, for example, will not be a good choice.
5. Lipid saturation: foods high in saturated fats should be avoided and those high in unsaturated fats preferred.

To facilitate the selection process, a table is given below in which the foods are classified by the most salient characteristics in relation to the given purposes. Let it be clear, however, that although in the drafting of this table preference has been given to streamlining, agility and ease of reference, some of the scientific rigour has nevertheless been sacrificed out of necessity. The information contained therein, in fact, refers to most of the foods in each category among those most consumed in the Bel Paese, but, for details, please refer to the nutritional values of each food in particular. Finally, for those who wish to delve more deeply into the subject of foods, an appendix dedicated to them can be found at the end of the work.

*For all readers unfamiliar with this exotic food, it is a type of noodle originating in Japan produced from a tuber known as konjac. Essentially, it is pure glucomannan (a special dietary fibre) with almost no calories. A significant flaw of this food is that it has no flavour, so the only way to make it palatable is to season it with a good, tasty sauce. So, while shirataki is an excellent source of fibre, the sauce with which it is seasoned may be such that it ruins the diet. The warning to be careful about the seasoning one chooses for this exceptional food is therefore particularly important.

Incorporating food into the diet

  Finally, the final operation: the insertion of the foods into the diet in the most appropriate quantities. As the reader will easily guess, manually calculating all the quantities of each food is an extremely laborious process that can easily be automated. In fact, there are online tools that can shorten and make this task much easier. You will need, in particular, two types of tools:

1. an encyclopaedia of foods, in which the nutritional characteristics of each one are listed in detail;
2. an automatic calorie calculator.

As far as the encyclopaedia is concerned, the Internet is replete with websites that have this function. A few of them are highlighted here:

• https://www.fatsecret.co.uk/calories-nutrition/
• Nutritionvalue.org
• Myfooddata.com

As far as the calorie calculator is concerned, my favourite tool is eatthismuch.com. In its free version, it allows all the functions needed to plan a highly customised diet. More specifically:

• customizable food database: the tool already contains a large number of foods in the default database, but the nutritional values ​​refer to foods available in the United States. Now, presumably due to the different methods of land cultivation and livestock breeding, the same foods, when marketed in another country, could have significantly different nutritional values ​​from those entered in the database. The ability provided by the tool to manually enter foods with the correct nutritional characteristics for your country is therefore particularly valuable.
• Customisable recipe database: again, there is a database with many recipes, but, for the same reason as the pre-entered foods (with which the recipes should be prepared), they rarely have realistic nutritional values. Moreover, some ingredients may not be readily available in all Countries. The tool does, however, allow you to manually enter the recipes you like best. It is particularly important, when doing this, to make sure that the nutritional values refer to 100g of dish. If, therefore, you are used to preparing a recipe in which the sum of the quantity of all the ingredients is different from 100, you will have to perform a mathematical proportion to calculate the quantity of each of them per 100g of serving. Trivially, for each ingredient:

Where “QI 100g” is the quantity of the ingredient per 100g serving, “QIRO” is the quantity of the ingredient in the original recipe and “QTIRO” is the total quantity of the ingredients in the original recipe. Example: Suppose you want to enter the following recipe into the database:

• name: chickpea and chard soup
  • ingredients:
    • Chickpeas: 87g
    • Swiss chard: 115g
    • Onion: 36g
    • Extra virgin olive oil: 2g

As can easily be calculated, the sum of all ingredients is 240g. When entering the recipe into the database, you must therefore calculate the amount of each food per 100g serving as follows:

Here, then, with some trivial, quick calculations, we obtain the total amount present in 100g of dish for each ingredient.

• Semi-automatic calculation of calories and nutrients: you can access the database of foods and recipes by clicking on a button and dragging and dropping the chosen food into a special area, where everything that needs to be included in the diet for a specific meal is entered. You can then change the quantity to your liking. The tool will automatically calculate the total calories of the meal, the percentage of macronutrients (which can be consulted immediately thanks to the pie chart) and the quantity of each of them. I would advise against entering the quantity of each micronutrient for each food. This would be, in fact, on the one hand, a very cumbersome and time-consuming task, and, on the other hand, an unnecessary effort, since, as has already been said many times, it is not at all necessary to keep meticulous track of the amount of vitamins and minerals taken in, as long as the diet includes foods that are good sources of them in fair quantities.

As mentioned, the work done by the calculator is semi-automatic, or, more precisely, what it does is calculate calories and nutrients entered, but, the input work remains manual. It is therefore necessary to proceed by trial and error in this practice, attempting to adjust the quantities of foods inserted into the diet so that calories and percentage of macronutrients are those established a priori. Perhaps the reader, if he or she is a beginner, may be discouraged by this, but once familiarised, it will become a job that is not excessively demanding, quick (two or three hours at most for a weekly diet) and perhaps even enjoyable. I would in any case discourage the use of fully automatic calculators as they leave too little control. In the past, the writer has had extremely frustrating experiences with this type of calculator because, in order to respect the pre-entered parameters, in terms of caloric quantity and nutrient breakdown, he did not hesitate to create diets that did not take into account digestive habits, tastes and needs. In particular, I recall with regret diets in which large T-bone steaks were included for breakfast or multiple kilos of salad for lunch. Such experiences, however, date back several years, when technology was not yet at the current level of development, so it is plausible that something has changed in the meantime. If, therefore, one wishes to venture into the mysterious and obscure territory of automatic calculators in order to verify their current effectiveness, I recommend, at the very least, to do so with some caution. In this regard, I would like to point out that the eatthismuch.com tool also has a premium version which, so the developers say, can calculate the quantities of food to be included in diets fully automatically.