At Fitness Plus when we go through Nutrition, we always incorporate "Lifestyle" into our clients programmes. Not everyone is a fitness machine, not everyone has all the time in the world to meal prep, not everyone can devote half of their life to their goals. So what we have to do is we have to adapt our strategy to get a client where they want to be.

For most clients we run off an 80-20 rule. This means 80% of their diet must come through single ingredient whole foods. The other 20% can come through whatever the hell they like (depending on where they are at on their journey towards their goal, obviously the more you diet down the more strict you have to become). Single ingredient foods cause less inflammation and water retention, it is also more often than not less stressful on the gut and digestive system. There are obviously also more nutritional qualities through single ingredient whole foods.

- 
The reason we incorporate the 20% is so that when we start a client or member off on a diet (or nutritional routine as we like to call it) we want to enable and allow for social events, we don't expect our clients to shut themselves off from the outside world for 8/12/15/20 + weeks.

We have to tighten the belt the more the diet becomes effective however we find that once a client is enjoying their food more, they make better choices and smarter choices and more importantly... stick to it (adherence). There isn't a need for them to all of a sudden eat 5 meals a day out of tuppawear. We work on establishing basic portion and calorie control and then focus on getting the correct amount of nutrition and incorporating macros.
We would always stress about food intolerances and to restrict these foods for obvious health reasons and they still get results!

- 
If your starting a diet don't go all in too soon... find your feet first of all and make changes accordingly. Typically if you tell yourself your shutting off cake, crisps, sugar, chocolate, sweets etc. for a long period of time you cause a very unhealthy relationship with food and one day when the diet "gets tough" you cave in and buy half of the sweet isle in Tesco.