When it comes to fat loss, I'm a big fan of the saying 'calories always count, but you don't always have to count calories'. For busy dads, frequent travellers and anyone constantly eating on the move, weighing every ingredient and logging each mouthful can quickly become another full-time job.
That’s where functional bodybuilding coach Ben West’s ‘4x4 method’ for nutrition comes in.
West describes it as ‘a class way of crushing your nutrition’ for anyone ‘struggling to find a minute’, travelling too often for meal prep to be realistic, or simply looking to improve their diet without tracking every calorie.
It’s not magic – fat loss still requires you to consistently eat fewer calories than you burn – but the method gives you a simple framework for building balanced, filling meals without needing to reach for an app.
‘Four groups of food. Four types of food. That’s it,’ says West.
How the 4x4 Method Works
The premise is simple: across four meals each day, cycle between four types of foods from four basic categories.
What to read next
1. Protein
West suggests options including chicken, steak, fish, eggs, protein powder and yoghurt.
Building each meal around protein can help you maintain muscle while losing weight, while also making your meals more filling.
Picking four protein sources to rotate between leaves you with plenty of options, while still allowing you to plan and not get overwhelmed by food choices.
2. Fats
Choose from foods such as avocado, oil, butter, nuts or nut butters.
Fats are calorie-dense, so if fat loss is your goal, portions matter. You don’t need to remove them entirely, but a spoonful of nut butter can become several spoonfuls surprisingly quickly.
3. Carbohydrates
West’s examples include potatoes, rice, quinoa, oats and rice cakes. But you can pick any four you like.
Carbohydrates can absolutely remain part of a fat-loss diet. The key is choosing a sensible portion and adjusting it to match your activity and energy levels.
4. Fruit and Vegetables
Finally, add fruit or vegetables such as apples, bananas, blueberries, broccoli, carrots or beans.
These foods add volume, fibre and nutrients to your meals, helping you stay fuller without dramatically increasing the calorie count.
Then repeat the formula across four meals.
As West points out, there’s ‘no reason this can’t be done at a restaurant, buffet, your own kitchen and on the go’.
For fat loss, keep protein portions generous, pile on the fruit and vegetables, and be more measured with calorie-dense carbs and fats.
If your goal is performance or muscle gain rather than dropping body fat, the framework doesn’t need to change. Simply increase your portions of carbohydrates and fats to provide the additional energy required for harder training, recovery and growth, then just pay careful attention to the feedback your body is giving you.
It’s less precise than tracking every calorie, but for busy men who need something simple enough to follow consistently, that may be exactly the point.
With almost 18 years in the health and fitness space as a personal trainer, nutritionist, breath coach and writer, Andrew has spent nearly half of his life exploring how to help people improve their bodies and minds.
As our fitness editor he prides himself on keeping Men’s Health at the forefront of reliable, relatable and credible fitness information, whether that’s through writing and testing thousands of workouts each year, taking deep dives into the science behind muscle building and fat loss or exploring the psychology of performance and recovery.
Whilst constantly updating his knowledge base with seminars and courses, Andrew is a lover of the practical as much as the theory and regularly puts his training to the test tackling everything from Crossfit and strongman competitions, to ultra marathons, to multiple 24 hour workout stints and (extremely unofficial) world record attempts.
You can find Andrew on Instagram at @theandrew.tracey, or simply hold up a sign for ‘free pizza’ and wait for him to appear.
