The 3×3 Method to Confident Nutrition Blueprint Execution

Ep 214 - WordPress


If you’ve ever received a nutrition plan or set of macros and felt overwhelmed, know that you’re not alone.

However, know that there is a right and wrong approach to take when it comes to beginning to feel comfortable and confident putting that plan into action.

In this case, trying to build meals that meet your plan’s prescription as you go simply will not cut it. This approach causes daily bouts of stress, overwhelm, anxiety, and feeling like this task – and therefore, your goal – is impossible.

Instead, I am going to detail the right approach and share with you the same 3×3 Formula we use in The 5% Community that has consistently helped those with zero macro counting or food logging background quickly feel both comfortable and confident implementing their plan!

If you want me to email you a video version of this episode that includes me sharing my screen and walking you through this exercise in real-time, simply DM me “3×3” on Instagram and I’ll send it your way.

And remember that for just $500, I will build you an individualized nutrition plan and not only send you all of our tools and resources to help you quickly understand and implement it with ease, but also provide you with a 30-minute coaching call and 30 days of nutrition plan-specific support.

Click here to get yours now.

Episode Key Highlights:

  • Hear why Paul is back to co-hosting the show and what Micheala is up to now.
  • Discover why your past approach to trying to learn your nutrition plan has not served you well.
  • Learn why Paul recommends a front-load approach of very-hard work when trying to learn how to follow a nutrition plan and what exactly that means!
  • Wrap your brain around the simplicity of Paul’s 3×3 Formula and learn how to apply it to following your own nutrition plan! 

How I Can Help You:

  1. Hire me to build you an Individualized Nutrition Blueprint (Plan) – Learn More.
  2. Discover how high-achieving women in their 30s and 40s (and 50s) are developing massive amounts of confidence, self-love, and self-worth…  while simultaneously losing 20+ pounds and keeping it off FOR GOOD with my 5% Inside-Out Formula for Sustainable Weight Loss – Learn More.
  3. Hire A Registered Dietitian and Results-Driven Coach to Help You Develop Massive Amounts of Self-Confidence and Self-Love While Dropping 20+ Pounds for Good so That You Can Feel, Look, and Be the Best You – Learn More.
  4. Find Food Freedom Forever: Free yourself from BS food rules and the accompanying guilt, anxiety, and regret that comes with them so that you can feel excited, calm, and in control of food again – Learn More.
  5. Connect with Paul on Instagram – Say hi!

Transcript

Paul Salter:

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of The 5% Way Podcast with your host, myself, Paul Salter, registered dietician, founder of the 5% Community, and sadly yet excitedly no longer joined by my wonderful co-host of the past nearly 50 episodes, Micheala Barsotti. Micheala and I came to the conclusion and she ultimately made the decision that it was time for her after giving me a year and a half of incredible hard work in the 5% community for her to spread her own wings and step into the next chapter of her life, which is really going all-in on her fantastic Made to Move workout app, which you can absolutely find all over her Instagram, and I’ll put a link in the show notes below, as well as just really looking to build her own brand, carve out her own way, path, and niche within this entirely gigantic, wonderful industry of simply helping other people feel, look, and be their best. I am incredibly grateful for all of the fantastic work, time, energy, and emotion Micheala specifically poured into this podcast. It was such a treat watching her grow.

I remember when I first mentioned the idea of her coming on as my co-host. She was absolutely terrified and the first few episodes nervous as can be, probably couldn’t tell, but now, to where she is almost a year later from where we started, it just simply a night-and-day difference. Her confidence, her energy, and her enthusiasm, her ability to story tell and articulate her points is dramatically improved and it contributed so much to the quality and the growth of this show. Micheala will no longer be with me. Make sure you still stay in touch with her, connect with her on Instagram.

But I plan to keep bringing the fire every single Thursday here on The 5% Way Podcast and to continue providing you with great content storytelling, teaching new content, 5% transformational stories, and conversations, behind-the-scenes looks at some of what we’re talking about and diving deep into on our weekly live coaching calls within the 5% community, and I’m also looking to begin bringing back some wonderful guests so that I can selfishly continue learning as well and sharing that newfound knowledge with you, the beloved listener. If you do happen to have anybody that you would love to see as a guest on the show, don’t hesitate to connect with me on Instagram at Paul Salter coaching and send me a name, a couple of recommendations, so list whoever you have in mind, really looking to expand the variety of who we have on this show heading into the new year, and I’m all ears in terms of learning who it is you would like to hear from.

Now, with that said, today’s episode is a good one. Well, I’m biased, I think they all are. But today, we’re really diving into a widespread problem I have seen for the last really 10 years that I have been fortunate enough to be in this position, and unfortunately, in these 10 years, the problem hasn’t gotten much better. Solutions haven’t changed. Remember, you can’t change unless you change. If you want to change your reality, your identity, your results, you’ve got to be willing to look inward and make the changes there. Where I want to direct our focus in today’s short action-packed episode is a simple three-step process to help you accelerate feelings of comfortability and confidence in both understanding and executing your specific nutrition plan because what I have observed to be the most common approach when receiving a brand new nutrition plan is an incredibly counterproductive approach that ultimately leads to feelings of failure, overwhelm, further anxiety and frustration, and ultimately, a throwing in of the towel, or waving of the white flag.

The approach that I have observed so many people take when they receive or are starting a new nutrition plan is as follows. They simply try to build meals and understand their nutrition pan plan as they go. Now, let me be very clear, and this will look a little bit different depending on how far into or how much experience you have with nutrition, diet plans, et cetera, but when you receive a new plan that is from a new coach, company, or a new way of doing things, and hopefully have been provided with adequate educational material, and resources to make your life easier, it’s still very normal to feel overwhelmed just by the pure volume of information and the novelty of this new approach, so these feelings of overwhelm are quite normal. Most people I have engaged with and spoken with about this will say yes, they still put in a little time upfront to gloss over or skim the resources, but more often than not, they take the approach of learning, and implementing on the go.

I can’t recommend doing the opposite of this enough because here’s what happens when you try to implement this brand new plan that’s telling you how many grams of protein, carbohydrates, and fats to have at this time of day and this time of day versus training at this time and eating and eating at this time and you have all these different nuances and your daily schedule that’s you’re trying to align these new nutrition plan goals to, and you decide to take it one meal or one day at a time when it comes to learning, what you ultimately set yourself up for is a position in which you feel incredibly frustrated, overwhelmed, anxious. You are draining an incalculable amount of both mental and emotional energy trying to learn little by little as you go because every opportunity where you’re stopping to slow down, get out this cheat sheet, look at this resource, do this calculation, number one, it’s taken you a hell of a lot more time than you have in the moment.

If you’re like me, or 99% of others, you want your meals to be effortless, well-thought-out and able to be put together in as little time as possible so you can get back to whatever it is you’re doing throughout the day. If you have not taken the time to adequately immerse yourself in how to operate and execute your nutrition plan, you’re going to push yourself in a position where it may necessitate 10 to 20 minutes every time you eat to get things calculated, measured, triple-checked, whatever it may be, and that is downright exhausting, so I propose and invite you to consider an alternative approach that, to be truthful and candid, might feel more overwhelming and even more challenging for a very finite period of time, but will inevitably result in limitless amounts of comfort and confidence, understanding, and executing said new nutrition plan.

That approach that I am recommending is that you truly do all of the grunt work, the heavy lifting, and the meticulous planning all upfront, batching it out as a priority before you measure your very first macro so that you put yourself in a position in which heading into the day or the week, you already know what your portion goals are, but you specifically also know how much of some of your favorite foods you need to satisfy those new portion prescriptions so that building a meal in alignment with your nutrition blueprint is borderline effortless, easy, quick, second nature, and it doesn’t require you to expend an incalculable amount of mental and emotional energy and 20 minutes in the kitchen every time you want to eat.

This approach is going to require maybe 60, maybe 90, maybe even 120 minutes of dedicated, focused quiet time with the goal being to begin understanding and mapping out your nutrition plan execution success. The approach that I have taught all of our 5% community members that has ultimately helped women with zero background in macronutrients or food logging or calorie counting feel both comfortable and confident executing their nutrition plan in a matter of weeks so that they are then able to get into such a strong groove of comfort and consistency following their nutrition plan they vastly open up their mind and hearts with a not limitless but near limitless amount of emotional and mental energy to then redirect to doing some of the deeper work that is required to help them achieve the transformational change they are after.

What I plan to do in the next few minutes is walk you through this simple 3×3 Method. I will be clear, I have a video of this that details everything I’m going to share, but with me screen sharing and walking you through with visual examples and relatable examples, and that is something you’re interested in because you are more of a visual learner, I am more than happy to send you that video absolutely free. Just send me a DM on Instagram, a direct message to at @PaulSalterCoaching with the word, or I guess it’s the number-symbol combo of 3×3, the number 3, x, the number 3, so I know what it is you’re looking for. I’ll collect your email address and send that video your way.

But here is the 3×3 Method. It is incredibly simple. Don’t let it fool you because it’s also incredibly powerful. Now, this approach is specific and unique to how we build individualized nutrition blueprints, but it also has a lot of transferability to other plans and approaches out there because in most of these instances, there is an element of portion control that focuses on the three macronutrients, protein, carbs, and fats, and managing the portion of those. This approach, whether you count just straight up if it fits your macros, or you take an approach similar to what we do, the 3×3 Method is applicable to both.

Step number one is you need to identify three premium fuel sources that you actually enjoy and will eat for each of those three major categories. Three protein options, three carbohydrate options, three healthy fat options. If I were going through step one, I would choose chicken breast, ground turkey, and salmon. For carbs, I would choose oats, white rice, sweet potatoes, and for fats I would choose peanut butter, peanut butter, and peanut butter. I’m not kidding, but if I have to follow my rule of variety, I would throw in there olive oil and almonds as well. The reason that we are doing this is right away we want to know multiple different options that we have for each of those three nutrients and begin to take the next step of learning how much we need to measure out to hit our specific portion goal, which we’ll do in a second.

But the beautiful thing here is it gives you an abundance of different meal combinations that you can build out with the appropriate portion sizes right off the bat to quickly provide yourself with variety and to avoid monotony. What I mean is I could technically pair chicken breasts, white rice, and olive oil. I could have a meal with ground turkey, olive oil, and oats on the side, a meal with salmon roasted sweet potatoes, and a big ole spoonful of peanut butter. You could even do the same thing by choosing three additional vegetables that you enjoy as well, or maybe choose six different vegetables because we need to get our vegetables in, but that’s a topic for discussion on a different day. What we’re doing here is we’re getting very familiar and clear with the sources and options of foods we would eat each respective categories so we can begin building out a variety of preset, pre-measured, pre-portioned options to help us navigate our days and weeks with more efficiency and effectiveness.

Step number two, we’re going to focus our attention on carbohydrates, and what we are going to do for the three carbohydrate options, we chose oats, white rice, and sweet potatoes in my example, is we are going to look up the nutrition information and learn the exact portion size we need to measure of each carbohydrate option to yield 10 grams of carbohydrates. The reason I choose 10 is because most nutrition plans, if they are written with specific portion prescriptions on a per-meal basis, I find it a hell of a lot easier when I’m building plans if I make those recommendations in increments of 10, so I’m not going to ever have, oh, 13 grams of carbohydrates at this meal, and 27 at this meal, no, it’s going to be 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, and so forth, keeping it simple because everything we do is filtered through the lens of simplicity.

What that looks like is utilizing the USDA database of verified third-party nutrition information tool. Or honestly, I like to go to Google specifically for Whole Foods and say “banana nutrition,” “avocado nutrition,” and Google is really fucking cool, and they pull up a nutrition fax panel on the right-hand side of the screen and give you an option to toggle with different serving sizes to ultimately find that yield of 10 gram of carbohydrates that we’re looking for.

What I have found are the following, I know this from years of practice, so I already know for example that 80 grams of oats yields 50 grams of carbs, 200 grams of white rice yields 50 grams of white rice, and 250 grams of sweet potatoes yields 50 grams of carbohydrates. Now, let me be very clear, you’re going to find discrepancies and slightly different numbers between different databases. Don’t sweat it, just focus on being consistent. Use the same conversions or the same measurements over and over. Don’t overthink it or give it anymore thought.

For me, I would just simply cut those numbers and divide them by five, and I would know that if I needed 10 grams of oats, I would measure out 16 grams of oats on my food scale, 40 grams of white rice on my food scale, or 50 grams of sweet potatoes on my food scale to yield 10 grams of carbohydrates. Then if my nutrition plan calls for 20 grams of carbs, I just simply double that number. If it calls for 30 grams of carbs, I just simply triple that number. Very easy to work with whole numbers. Working in sets of tens is very simplistic and it makes our life easier, and again, checks that box of simplicity.

Step number three, we’re going to go through this same process. This time, we’re going to focus on fats, however. When I build nutrition plans, I work in servings of fat, either a full serving or a half serving. When I make a recommendation or a prescription in somebody’s plan, one serving of fat is the equivalent of 15 grams of fat, therefore half serving is equivalent to seven-and-a-half grams of fat. Depending on your approach, your plan, your coach’s philosophy, you might have a prescription of five grams of fat here, 10 grams of fat here, whatever it may be.

I would recommend you find the specific amount of a portion needed for your fat choice with a commonality of how much you need for that particular food to yield 10 grams of fat simply for the reasons I just shared, working in simple numbers. But again, we use servings, so one serving is 15 grams of fat. So with my approach, what I would do is find the amount of peanut butter, olive oil, or almonds needed to yield 15 grams of fat, so that’s either 32 grams of scale weight with peanut butter, a tablespoon of olive oil, or one ounce or 28.5 grams on the scale of almonds to yield 15 grams, or one serving of fat.

Now, after completing these three steps, the final end product is I have the specific portion goals and nutrition information for nine of my favorite foods in each of the three big categories of protein, carbs, and fats. I can mix and match them in endless variety of ways to get different meal combinations and I know exactly how much to weigh out for those foods. If I’m not too picky about eating similar foods, this could carry me for the next three, four, five, six months, but any time I wanted more variety, I could go through this process again.

What happens is that you are putting in the grunt work upfront, you’re blocking out that additional 60 to 90 minutes to do all this work upfront so that during the day and the weeks and the months ahead, you have to do barely any work. You’ve already done all the math, the calculations, the data, and research, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You just have to heat, portion, and eat, or portion, heat, eat is probably the more appropriate order there, but you know what I mean. It’s simplistic, it’s efficient, and far more effective.

Hey, if you want me to make your life easier, and what I can do is send you our premium fuel cheat sheet that has already scoured the nutrient databases for some of the most commonly enjoyed foods and provides the amount you need to measure on a food scale for increments of 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, and so worth grams of carbohydrates. Just DM me on Instagram, either 3×3 or the word “cheat sheet” so I know what it is you are looking for.

Like I said at the beginning of this episode, if you’d like me to send you a video of what I just spoke about with real-time examples using our nutrition plans, just DM me on Instagram at @PaulSalterCoaching3x3, I will gladly send that to you via email. Hey, if you’re ready to just hire a dietician, hire me to take care of building your individualized nutrition plan for you, reach out to me on Instagram, or visit the link in the show notes where I will take care of building you an individualized nutrition blueprint that checks the boxes of unique to use, simplistic, and flexible, and it will be something that turns out to be a framework that will serve you for the rest of your life. I will do all of that. I will send you all of my educational resources and cheat sheets, throw in an additional 30-minute complimentary coaching call, and 30 days of nutrition-plan-specific support, all for the whopping price of just $500. You can sign up for that at the link in the show notes below.

Well, thank you so much for listening to this episode. I hope that you found it valuable. I hope that you will take me up on my invitation to take action applying this method because it freaking works and makes your life easier, and if you found this valuable, share it with a loved one, friend, gym buddy, or coworker who would also benefit from having a more effortless approach to following a nutrition plan, and if you haven’t done so already, I would greatly appreciate it if you leave a genuine rating and review on Apple Podcasts, or wherever it is you are listening to this episode. Thank you again for joining me today. Have a wonderful rest of your day and I’ll catch you next week in another episode.

Share this post

Paul Salter

Paul Salter is a Registered Dietitian and Founder of The 5% Way. Since 2013, Paul has worked one-on-one with nearly 1,500 men and women, helping them to collectively lose tens of thousands of pounds of body fat and keep it off for good. He’s also published nearly 1,000 articles, two books, and 175 podcast episodes (and counting) on all things related to our five core elements of sustainable weight loss.

MICHEALA-1

Micheala

Micheala is a Transformation and Community Success Coach. She specializes in bringing out the absolute best in you and helping you see that you already have everything you need to achieve the transformational results you desire. Micheala will be an incredible asset for you on your journey since she went through the process herself and has seen long lasting results.
the-maintain-my-weight-loss

The Maintain My Weight Loss After A Diet Blueprint

Leave a Comment