It’s Boring, But It Makes Fat Loss EASY Over 40

The strategy that makes fat loss simple for me and my clients over 40 is also a bit boring. It's not a supplement, punishing workout, or questionable fat loss hack. In this video, I'll show you what it is, why it works so well, and how it helps you lose fat without having to track calories or macros.

Why Simple, Repeatable Meals Make Fat Loss Easier

Most people make fat loss much harder than it needs to be. They jump around from diet to diet following different rules every month based on questionable non-scientific ideas. Sure, restricting yourself to nothing but meat or nothing but fruit can work, but not because there's anything magical about either of these food types. There's only so much meat most people can stomach. There's also only so much fruit that most people can eat.

Sensory-Specific Satiety and Food Variety

But, there's actually another reason eating a limited variety of foods can make it easier to stop eating. It has to do with how your brain responds to variety. Let's talk about the reward center of the brain.

Have you ever been completely full after dinner and somehow still had room for dessert?

My 12-year-old son says, "My healthy stomach is full."

There's actually a name for part of what you're experiencing, sensory-specific satiety, SSS. We tend to lose interest in a food as we continue eating it. But, introduce a new food with a completely different flavor, texture, or smell, and suddenly eating becomes interesting again. That's one reason you feel like your healthy stomach is full, but your dessert stomach somehow has plenty of room. And it's one of the reasons a buffet makes it so easy to eat more than you normally would. Every new food gives you something different to experience, so you're eating and eating and eating.

But, if on the other hand, you're eating one familiar meal, there's only so much excitement you're going to get from it. For fat loss, that can actually be useful. Sometimes, boring is a feature.

How to Use Food Variety Strategically for Fat Loss

And we can also flip this around and use variety strategically. Vegetables give you a lot of food volume for relatively few calories while also adding fiber and other important nutrients. Excellent for fat loss and your health, of course. If you want to eat more vegetables, instead of putting a giant pile of broccoli on your plate, try some broccoli, asparagus, and zucchini. The variety can make it easier to eat more of them.

And that's exactly where you want to use them. So, keep your higher-calorie foods relatively simple and predictable and use variety with foods you want to eat more of, like vegetables and fruit.

Don't worry, I'm going to tell you more about the foods I eat myself since I haven't really counted calories or tracked my macros for quite a few years. But before I show you how I do it, let's look at what happens when this strategy is taken to the extreme.

What Fitness Competitors Can Teach You About Meal Planning

If you've ever seen how fitness competitors eat when they're getting ready for a competition, you've probably noticed something. Their diets can be incredibly boring. Chicken breast, a sweet potato, and broccoli. A few hours later, maybe chicken breast, rice, and broccoli. Or a whitefish fillet with sweet potato and asparagus. Maybe some egg whites and oatmeal in the morning.

Obviously, that's a stereotype and many physique competitors now use more flexible dieting styles, like if it fits your macros. And you certainly don't need to eat like a bodybuilder to lose fat. I've competed in 12 physique competitions as a fitness model and bikini competitor and I don't think you need to carry containers of plain chicken and broccoli everywhere you go. It's not really practical.

But there's something these competitors figured out that makes getting extremely lean much easier for them. Their food becomes very predictable. They aren't waking up every morning wondering what they feel like having for breakfast. They're not scrolling through recipes trying to come up with an exciting new dinner. And they're not making dozens of decisions about food every day. It's always the same. Most of the time they have a relatively small number of meals and foods that they eat again and again.

Meal Planning for Busy People Over 40

For busy people over 40, this is a huge plus. You've already got tons of decisions to make every day for your work, for your family. Eating shouldn't be another source of stress. Keep it simple. Sexy.

You don't need to take this to bodybuilding extremes, but there's a big advantage to using a more moderate version of this approach when you're trying to lose fat. And that's what I want you to start doing.

Instead of constantly trying new recipes and eating something completely different for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day, you find a handful of meals that work for you and repeat them over and over. I mean, you probably don't need your Tuesday lunch to be an exciting culinary experience, right?

How to Build Repeatable Meals for Fat Loss

So, what should these repeatable meals actually look like? You need something you enjoy, that's easy to prepare, keeps you full, gives you enough protein and fiber, and helps you reach your fat loss goals. I use something called the food freedom list to put this together for my clients. You can find out how it works in my free Lean and Strong 40 Plus Plan, which you can get at the link in the description.

So, you start with lean protein, chicken breast, fish, eggs and egg whites, Greek yogurt, cottage cheese, tofu, tempeh, or lean meats.

Why lean protein?

Because it has more protein per calorie, so you're getting that muscle retention and building effect plus all the other benefits of protein, strengthening your bones, supporting your hair, skin, and nails, and your immune system, and managing your appetite, but without lots of extra calories that will stop you from getting into a calorie deficit, and that's what you need for fat loss.

You don't want to be getting all your protein from ribeye steaks or deep-fried chicken wings. It doesn't mean you can't have them, but keep the portion smaller and don't have them as your primary sources of protein every day. Fatty fish like salmon or sardines are totally fine and healthy to have in your nutrition plan even though they're not technically lean, but they have heart healthy and brain healthy omega-3 fats and they're not that easy to overeat. They really fill you up.

Once you've got your protein in place, you add vegetables and fruit, a quality carbohydrate like potatoes, sweet potatoes, oats, rice, beans or whole grains and then some healthy fats from olive oil or nuts.

You don't necessarily need all of those things at every meal, but I definitely recommend at least five servings of vegetables and fruit a day and preferably more. So, maybe a couple of servings of fruit in the morning, two servings of vegetables with lunch and two servings with dinner. That's a really simple pattern that works.

The goal is to create meals that are satisfying enough that you're not looking for something else to eat an hour later and they have to taste good to you because you're not going to repeat a meal 50 times if you hate eating it. So, build one to three simple meals for breakfast, build one to three simple meals for lunch, have one to three simple meals for dinner and coming up I'm going to share the simple meals that I use.

How Repeatable Meals Help You Lose Fat Without Tracking Calories

Now, obviously, you want to allow yourself a bit of flexibility if you're eating out at a restaurant or when you're traveling. But you can still bring that simple format of protein, vegetables, starch with a small amount of fat to many places and you'll probably find that it's easier to manage your appetite and keep your calories under control without having to track every calorie you eat.

Fat loss still requires you to consume fewer calories than your body uses over time. Repeating meals doesn't get around that. What it does is make your calorie intake much more predictable without requiring you to calculate anything. Imagine your usual lunch is chicken breast, potatoes, vegetables and olive oil.

If you prepare roughly the same portions each time, that meal is going to contain roughly the same number of calories each time. You don't actually need to know whether it's 487 calories or 535 calories. You just need to know whether your overall approach is producing the result you want.

If your weight and measurements are gradually moving in the right direction, keep doing it. If they're not, you can make a small adjustment to something you're already eating. Maybe you reduce the olive oil slightly. A lot of people just pour that on and a 120 calories per tablespoon, it can add up fast. Or, you can have a smaller portion of potatoes. That's much easier than trying to figure out what's going wrong when every day of your eating looks completely different. Then you have to look more carefully at what's putting on the extra calories.

My mom tends to eat fairly consistently with only a few meals and some desserts here and there. If she starts to put on weight, she just cuts back on her desserts and the weight comes back off again. Make your food predictable enough that you can adjust it based on your results. You don't need perfect numbers. You need enough consistency to know what's working and what's not.

My Simple Repeatable Meals for Fat Loss

And this is exactly how I eat myself. My meals aren't particularly exciting, but there are a few foods I can happily again and again.

My repeatable meals are incredibly simple. For breakfast these days, I just have some Greek yogurt with berries, mostly fresh blueberries right now because they're sweet and delicious. In the winter I might have a wider variety of frozen fruit. Then I add some nuts, sometimes macadamia nuts, almonds, or a sprinkle of sunflower seeds even.

I recently discovered some dry roasted pecans at my local grocery store that are very delicious, so I started adding those. I have a matcha latte on the side, which adds a bit more lean protein from the low-fat milk.

For lunch, I might have some canned salmon with some olives and other vegetables. Sometimes I'll have a whey protein shake and then have some avocado toast on whole grain bread or some leftover chicken breast from the night before with potatoes and vegetables. I eat a lot of potatoes. They've actually been found in research to be the most satiating food. Potatoes are one of the most satisfying foods for me and I've always loved them. When I was a kid, I would walk home from school for lunch, microwave some potatoes and then put so much butter and sour cream on top of them that they mixed together like a big creamy soup around my potatoes.

Um now obviously the butter and sour cream added a ton of extra calories and saturated fat, which is fine when you're 11 or 12. That's not something I want to eat every day now, especially as I get older and think more about my heart health. So now I usually put about a tablespoon of olive oil on my potato instead, sometimes two, and that feels really satisfying to me.

I'm not eating plain chicken breast and plain potatoes because I'm trying to suffer my way through a diet. These are foods I generally like. I know some of my clients like to do mixes of herbs and spices and sometimes low-calorie sauces that make the food more interesting for them. I tend to keep things pretty plain because it's easier on my sensitive digestion. Sometimes I'll have some honey mustard if the chicken is a bit dry.

And for dinner we often have chicken breast in various styles with potatoes or sweet potatoes. We do those with avocado oil in the air fryer or sometimes in the oven if we plan it early enough. Then broccoli, asparagus, zucchini, maybe some cherry tomatoes on the side, whatever we're in the mood for. Sometimes my husband will make omelets with eggs and some egg whites for extra protein and cheese, maybe mozzarella or feta. A little bit of extra fat there to make the meal more tasty.

Make Your Repeatable Meals Personal

Now you obviously don't need to be eating exactly like I do. Your repeatable meals should be personal to you. Some of my clients have sirloin steak or extra lean ground beef a couple of times a week for dinner. Others like tofu or tempeh. I tend to have tofu if we're ordering food delivery. If it's pad thai, then I usually have tofu and shrimp. So, those are my proteins.

If I'm eating sushi, I have the salmon and avocado rolls, uh seaweed salad, and edamame. So, you get a little bit of extra protein from the soybeans. Find foods you genuinely enjoy enough to eat them regularly and then build your simple meals around them.

Keep Fat Loss Simple After 40

Once you've built a few meals like this, fat loss requires a lot less thought. If you're over 40 and trying to lose fat, please don't overcomplicate things.

Get started by picking up the Lean and Strong 40+ Plan.

And to get more details about my fat loss system, watch the video HERE.

Ivana Chapman