Taking the piss with IIFYM

Forewarning: We are not advocating the approach described here as the paragon of 'healthy' eating. The experiment below was just what the title says: taking the piss to test the limits of an idea. This post is a guide to covering your nutritional bases while allowing yourself a huge degree of dietary freedom without hampering your body composition goals. Again, since a lot of commenters seem to be missing this point: this is NOT a dietary approach for optimum health, for diabetics or those with eating or metabolic disorders. It is also unlikely to be good for your dental health. 

What is 'clean' eating?

Clean eating is defined as eating exclusively 'healthy' foods, where 'healthy' is determined by purely subjective and imprecise criteria. Foods generally touted as clean include brown rice, brown pasta, sweet potato, fish, milk, broccoli and wholemeal bread, to name a few.Rather than addressing this ourselves, JC Deen and Alan Aragon have laid this out far more comprehensively than we could, explaining why 'clean' food is a nonsensical label in itself, and why we should abandon categorising foods in this way. 

The crux is this, to quote the Helm:

‘With regard to clean/dirty foods, I don’t give much credence to these terms. The truth is there is nothing inherently unhealthy about dirty foods, it’s rather that if they dominate your diet, you generate deficiencies as a result. The paleo community has attempted to convince us that we need to avoid entire food groups in order to be like the Palaeolithic man. In actuality we don’t really know how the Palaeolithic man ate, and there is nothing to suggest what they were doing was optimal.'‘I tell my clients that their diets should be inclusive rather than exclusive, meaning that provided you hit your macros, get sufficient fruits, vegetables and fibre, and you have some macros left over, then sure, have your snickers bar. In fact I’d hedge a guess to say that results on the diet will be better this way, as you’re less likely to fall off the wagon.’

The knee-jerk reaction to the clean eating movement has been 'IIFYM': If It Fits Your Macros, i.e. as long as you hit your protein/carb/fat numbers for the day, then you should not consider food choices. This simplifies dieting right down to three numbers, and affords a great degree of liberty for the reformed clean-eater.

However, such a reduction of a multifaceted approach towards nutrition into flat-out focus on 3 numbers throws a couple of babies out with the bathwater.

The fitness industry, like politics, vacillates between extremes where certain foods or ideas are demonised. Simple minds take a concept with no understanding of the underlying science to make a Frankenstein’s monster out of it.

The IIFYM movement is a step in the right direction, but along with it comes a false nutritional enlightenment, the thinking that because calories are the MOST important determinant of weight loss in a diet, dumbos will extrapolate that to it being the ONLY thing that matters in a diet. Chris Masterjohn says it best:

"Calories in calories out is absolutely true. But just because calories count doesn't mean nothing else counts. If you're going to build a plane, and you don't believe in gravity, then I'm not getting in your plane. You should be building your plane with the central understanding that you are interacting with gravity."

IIFYM - the downsides
The primary things that purist IIFYM doesn't account for are satiety and micronutrients.
A) Satiety
Compliance is THE biggest factor in a diet's success. It doesn't matter how physiologically optimal a diet is i...