1. Eat a meat and nut breakfast. The first thing you put in your mouth sets the stage for the day. Food is medicine and has a whole cascade effect hormonally and chemically in your body. You want to increase dopamine and acetyl-choline with your first meal of the day. Those are two neurotransmitters that are responsible for brain speed and brain power. That means you’ll be more focused and have more energy to get work done. (I learned this from Charles Poliquin, Dr. Eric Braverman, and Dr. Daniel Amen)
2. Eat breakfast like a King, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper. I really can’t tell you why this works for sure but I’d speculate is has something to do with you being more active earlier in the day. I can tell you from personal experience it works. (I learned this tip from Dr. Jonny Bowden).
3. Eat three main meals with two to three snacks. 
You need to keep your metabolism revved up and maintain stable blood sugar. Here’s a good analogy: Think of food as a log and your metabolism as a fire place. You throw a fresh log on the fire and the fire goes up. Once the fire burns the log down the fire dwindles down a bit. Now throw another log on the fire and back up it goes. What I’m currently doing is eating three main meals with two to three shakes in-between. The protein that I like is Designs For Health’s Whey Cool. It comes from grass fed cattle, there’s no artificial sweeteners in it that are neuro-toxic, and it’s produced at low heat so the protein is not denatured.
4. Eliminate gluten from your diet. Humans aren’t meant to eat grains. At this time there are over 55 associated diseases that can be linked to gluten. A good book to read on this is “The Paleo Solution” by Robb Wolf.
5. Eliminate plastics from your diet. BPA or Bisphenol-A is a chemical used to make plastic and it is very toxic. BPA can leach onto food and liquid and get into your body and do a lot of nasty things. For one thing it is very estrogenic and therefore disrupts hormone levels. You can forget about getting lean if estrogens are high.
6. Drink only water, unsweetened teas, or organic coffee (early in the day) period. No diet beverages and nothing with dyes in them. Most artificial sweeteners are neuro-toxic (bad for your brain) and they, along with dyes (such as red dye 40 and yellow dye 5), are carcinogens (they are attributed to cancer).
7. Eat a lot of vegetables. Vegetables are loaded with vitamins and fiber, but also make you more alkaline. The more alkaline you are the healthier you are. Plus being alkaline will improve your work capacity in the gym. If you have a hard time eating enough vegetables like I do, consider drinking them. I use and have my clients use PaleoGreens by Designs For Health.
8. When eating meat make it grass fed as often as possible, organic free range chicken, and only wild caught fish. Animals and fish that are grain-fed have an altered fatty acid profile. Grains increase omega 6 fats, which are pro-inflammatories. More omega 3 fats in your diet will get you lean fast.
9. Don’t count calories. Excerpt from Dr. Jonny Bowden: “Once upon a time- around 1890 actually- a scientist named Wilbur Atwater got the bright idea of putting food into a special machine, burning it and measuring the amount of heat it produced. The machine was called a calorimeter, and old Wilbur decided to call the energy produced by burning the food into ash “calories”. Thus he was able to figure how many calories were contained in just about any food you could think of. Shortly afterwards, scientists applied the same concept to exercise. Using a few calculations, they soon figured out how many calories were “burned” doing everything from sleeping to cross-country skiing. Within no time, an idea was born: weight gain happened when a person took in more calories than he burned up. The body, it was reasoned, behaves like a calorimeter. Put in calories (from food) use up calories (from living, exercising, digesting, etc) and look at your balance sheet. If more is coming in than going out, you gain weight. If more goes out than came in, you lose. Simple. Especially if the body behaved like a calorimeter. But it doesn’t.”
If you’re going to count something make it your protein intake. I’ve found that the closer you can get to eating 2grams of protein per pound of body weight the leaner and more muscular you will get.
10. 
Don’t be afraid to eat a lot of food. Believe it or not, most people don’t eat enough food, they just eat the wrong foods. I remember reading an article on “The Rock” in a Mens Health magazine several years ago. He was getting in shape for a movie and he was utterly surprised how much food he was told to eat and how lean he got in doing so. What shocked me about this was how surprised he was. I thought he would’ve known this considering he is an athlete and very jacked.
