Eat Like Jeff Cavaliere (RIPPED YEAR ROUND!)
If you ever wanted to eat like Jeff Cavaliere and be ripped year round, this video is going to show you how. I’m going to cover my most important method for how to eat to be lean, and the best part is that it will work even if you don’t desire the low body fat levels that I have right now.
What’s up, guys, Jeff Cavaliere, athleanx. com. So there’s one question that I have been asked more than any other over the last 10 years is, Jeff, how do you stay as lean as you do all year around? You literally never change. Well, I take that as a compliment, but honestly, it comes down to the way that I approach nutrition.
You see, there’s no deals with the devil. I didn’t promise my firstborn son. I don’t take TRT. I don’t take any drugs I never have in my entire life. There’s nothing that I do special except my special ability, I guess, to stay incredibly consistent with my nutrition.
Because quite frankly, I’ve talked about it in the past, I don’t even really do cardio. I do enough just to maintain some shape and to focus a little bit on my heart, but I don’t do nearly as much as I should, but it’s certainly not a factor in how I remain as lean as I do. It all comes through my nutrition. Now that being said, people say, Well, Jeff, I know that, and I’ve watched your full day of eating video, but maybe you can update that for us. You can make another one.
Well, guess what? It would be a pretty boring video because it’s going to be the same exact information that I gave you back then. As matter of fact, the same thing pretty much that I’m eating. And it’s the fact that I can have that consistency that I believe leads me to the levels of body fat that I demonstrate consistently. However, there is a system and the system that’s in place here is what is allowing me to do that all the time and to remain as lean as I do.
So I want to share that exact system with you here today so you can actually start to do the same. Now that being said, depending upon what your desired level of leanness is, it’s going to be either easier or more difficult to actually get to where I’m at. And that’s a good thing because not all of us want to be Jeff Cavaliere lean, it might not suit you or your purposes in life. As a matter of fact, a lot of us feel much more comfortable in the mid teen range and body fat levels, and they want to stay there. And the good news is you’re not going to have to be as consistent as what I’m showing you here, but the rules will still help you out to a great degree.
If you want to get even leaner than that somewhere in between, again, you’re just going to have to sort of up the ante on your consistency, but you’re not going to have to veer away from the rules. So no matter where you want to be in terms of your level of leanness, you’re going to be able to apply exactly what I show you here today. All right, so first up here I’d like to think is the cornerstone of how I do things, because if you can’t do this, it’s never going to work. And that is, you need to eat what you like. Notice I didn’t say eat whatever you like, because that’s not the way we play this game.
In order to get lean, you’re going to have to have smarter nutritional choices. You’re going to have to have foods that are a little bit lower in caloric density, but higher and nutrient value and my diet is filled with those selections. But it’s not perfect, as you’ll see again, if you watch that full day of eating video. However, you need to find the foods that are going to fit into that criteria that you still really, really like. Because if you’re forcing foods into your daily meal plan, you’re never going to be able to stick to that plan for the long term, so it’s never going to become a lifestyle.
For me, there’s not a single food that I put in my body every day that I don’t thoroughly enjoy. And I mean that. I thoroughly enjoy every food that I eat, if I didn’t, I couldn’t maintain that consistency. And there are so many food options out there that make this job so much easier. And not just foods, but the way that we put them together, the recipes, how we eat them, how we prepare them.
You can make any food incredibly enjoyable, you just have to experiment and take the time to find those foods that you like. Because when you do, the whole deprivation basis of a diet is no longer there. There’s no longer the period of being on the diet that ultimately ends off the diet. And that is where you start, because if you don’t like what you eat, you can’t eat what you’re eating. The next thing you have to do is pick an approach and stick with it.
And again, there are a lot of different approaches here, some that I agree with, some I don’t really agree with at all. However, if you’re able to take an approach and stick with it and have consistency for the long term, I’m talking year after year after year because that’s the only acceptable form for me, then by all means, continue to do that. I’m not a believer in keto. However, if you can eat that way and that has worked for you, then go ahead and eat that way. I’m not forcing you into my method, but since this video is about my methods, I’ll share with you what I did.
I went the low-fat approach, and the reason why I did that was for two reasons. Number one, I realized that the caloric density of fats on a gram per gram basis was more than twice as much as proteins and carbohydrates. Secondly, I realized that at the time I had a lot of fat in my diet. So what I did was make the easy cut. I always urge you guys to make the cut that you think might be the easiest to make.
But what I did was make a giant mistake here because I went to the extreme. I figured less fat is better than a lot of fat, and no fat is even better than some fat. And that was a big mistake because I went all the way down to pretty much the no fat level and my body paid for it. I wasn’t able to stay warm, even in the sunshine, I had problems with my vision. I talked about all these things before photosensitivity, I went to the extreme and I paid for it.
So what I did was what a smart person would do, I hope, is make some modifications back in the other direction. And I gradually added fat back in, but not to the levels I did before. And because again, the caloric density of the foods that I was replacing those fats with was less, I was able to create that caloric deficit needed to get to a leaner, body fat level. I urge you again to find the method that works for you, but again, if you’re looking for the one, that might be the easiest to do if your diet’s already high in fat, that’s the one I’m going to suggest you do. And so the next rule here is one that I believe is very important for my success, and it can do the same thing for you.
And that is I eat at specific times during the day. I eat around the clock or based upon the clock. And no, it has nothing to do with optimizing the anabolic window, which is another thing we learned a long time ago doesn’t really exist. However, what it does is it provides a level of consistency because I eat only during specific times, each and every day and not outside of those times. And the consistency comes because it prevents me from eating for any other reason other than it’s time to eat.
Now it just so happens that my body has built up to a point where I am hungry every time those windows of time open up and come around. However, I’m not eating because I’m hungry throughout the rest of the day. And oftentimes we just eat when we’re hungry, and that opens up a Pandora’s Box because we know when we just do that, we become grazers and grazers, become big calorie consumers and trying to get into a deficit is very difficult when you’re mindlessly grazing. Not to mention the fact that a lot of us confuse hunger for a lot of different things. Even thirst can make someone feel hungry and if you’re eating every