"X" the Insanity diet.

So you are done with P90X and you want to give Shaun T's Insanity a try. Be sure to read this article by Steve Edwards so you know what to do with your diet.

How to 'X' the INSANITY™ Diet
By Steve Edwards, Director of Results

As a Coach, there's information you should know about our new INSANITY program that you won't find in the guidebook. The guidebook is written as though it's for first-time Beachbody® customers. For someone who has already completed one or more of our programs, especially P90X®, you're going to want to take a different approach, especially where the diet is concerned.

All of our entry-level programs' diets are written assuming weight loss is a primary concern. The P90X diet is not. Instead, its focus is on athletic performance, because the key to getting results with P90X is to improve your physical fitness as much as possible over the course of the program. While INSANITY is definitely a graduate program—meaning you need a fitness base prior to beginning—it is not structured periodizationally the way P90X is. It's shorter and more straightforward. Its results are based more on progressive overload than Muscle Confusion™. Similarly, the diet is based simply on eating clean and then ramping up the calories along with your workouts. Those coming off of the X will want to amend the INSANITY diet guidelines or ignore them totally.

The INSANITY diet is very restrictive calorically. It was designed for weight loss, since that's what most of our customers are primarily interested in. Anyone coming off of P90X or something similar should alter the diet to suit their needs because their body composition will be far more athletic at the beginning. We've left the "additional food" section of the INSANITY diet open-ended for just this reason. However, once someone has gone through rounds of X or an equivalent, they are generally at a point where they should do their own dietary calculations. As a Coach, this is what you should recommend.

When you look at the X diet, you see a plan that's designed to teach you how to eat for athletics. It varies over time, attempting to follow the changes in your body composition. Once you graduate the X, there should not be much need for outside diet plans, except for variety. You could use the INSANITY diet for this, but you'll want to alter your calories towards your own goals and using what you've already learned. It's almost a certainty that a post-X body will have a composition that requires more calories than what the INSANITY diet recommends.

Keep in mind that no matter what diet you choose, at the highest levels of performance you always have to do your own trial and error. There is no one diet right for everyone. Nowhere is this as apparent as during athletic endeavors. By making tweaks to our diet, we will always find individual differences in the ways certain foods affect us. No two athletes eat the same way, exactly. There are some large-scale brush strokes that are nutritionally similar, after which it becomes individual to what works best.

That's Part One of this topic. Next month we'll talk about how to cycle INSANITY into your Beachbody library. It's a two-month program that should not be repeated over and over without substantial breaks in between. So next time we'll talk about how to use INSANITY, along with P90X, so that they build on the fitness gains you make in each one symbiotically.

Click here for part 2 of "X" The Insanity Diet