Takeaway Points:

Clean Eating is a type of diet where you can eat as much as you want as long as the foods are “clean.” If It Fits Your Macros (IIFYM) is a diet where the specific foods don’t matter as long as you’re meeting certain calorie and macronutrient (carbs, fats, proteins) numbers.
Both of these approaches are incomplete or unsustainable over the long term. Clean eating needs to be more flexible in the types of food that people eat either because for ease or enjoyment, and IIFYM has to include a wide variety of foods to ensure proper fiber and micronutrients.
Any heavily restrictive diet can lead to stress, frustration, and potential disordered eating, so people who are interested in incorporating these into their lives would benefit from guidance from trusted professionals.

(This article is an updated version of an article originally published on 10/16/14. It has been overhauled to be more comprehensive, and to reflect some changes in terminology in the past 10 years.)

There are two commonly used, supposedly-opposite approaches when it comes to dieting. I’m going to argue today, that they’re actually just two facets of the same thing.

Clean Eating - Proponents of clean eating suggest that weight management is about eating the right kinds of foods, and the quantity of food (or the respective macros and calories of that food) doesn’t really matter. If you eat the right foods, you’ll get leaner and healthier, and perform better athletically. If you don’t, you’ll gain fat and become less healthy, and perform worse athletically.
If It Fits Your Macros (also known as IIFYM) - Proponents of IIFYM suggest that weight management is about the calorie and macro contents of your foods. In a complete reversal, IIFYM advocates suggest that health is NOT related to the kinds of foods that you eat, but rather about hitting the right calorie and macro targets. If you do this, you’ll get leaner and healthier and perform better, and if you don’t, the opposite will happen. IIFYM is also less commonly used nowadays, and the name CICO (calories in, calories out) is probably more commonly used.

Both of these philosophies are also subject to criticism from the other side, and can fall into potential traps.

Clean Eating
- This philosophy tends to create binary “good” and “bad” foods. Adherents often perceive themselves as inherently good or bad based on the foods they eat, and pathologize the desire to eat “bad” foods as associated with sin and excessive self-criticism.
- There’s also often a lack of consistency with what foods are labeled as good and bad - often, based on a partial understanding of nutrition science, this changes significantly from person to person, and a lot of arguments in communities dedicated to clean eating revolve around disputes about what foods are good and bad.
- Clean eating leaves little room for enjoying foods that you like, and tends to encourage eating a lot of veggies, fruits, and other low-calorie items that people generally don’t like to eat a ton of. This follows a typical ‘restrictive diet’ approach, and will often be hard to adhere to consistently over time.
- The idea of good/bad foods can feed into restrictive and disordered eating patterns over time.
If It Fits Your Macros/IIFYM/CICO
- Calorie counting is a very complicated system, and many people misunderstand a lot of the specifics about how calorie/macro counting works, which can cause confusion when they apply the wrong interventions and don’t get the desired results. By comparison, clean eating can seem a lot ‘easier’ in that you just need to know what to eat/not eat.
- The more ‘measured’ nature of calorie counting implies a greater level of precision with the underlying numbers than actually exists. Calories are messy, macros are messy, changes in your body are messy. People tend to think that if they’re using numbers to manage their calories, they must be able to make very fine-tuned adjustments to achieve the desired results over time, and get frustrated when the inherent messy-ness of this system rears its head and you find out that it’s actually not nearly as simple as all that (see the first point above).
- A common criticism is the ‘pop-tarts’ criticism - if all that matters is your proteins, fats, carbs, and calories, then what’s to stop you from eating nothing but pop tarts for your carbs, protein shakes for your protein, and drinking oil for your fats, and hitting all your targets perfectly? Intuitively, we don’t want to think that this is a healthy way to eat.
- Many people use this approach to pursue extremely low calorie diets, which can feed into restrictive and disordered eating patterns over time.

One important thing to note is that, over time, the research has validated the IIFYM approach, and demonstrated that it holds true while the clean eating approach falls flat. It’s become so common now that it’s often not even called IIFYM anymore, and is just called “calorie counting” or even just “dieting”. Clean eating is, functionally, an outdated philosophy, but it still holds sway in many communities which are less engaged with the most recent scientific research.

A Proper Diet

So how can these two, totally different and seemingly opposing dietary philosophies, be actually the same thing?

Fundamentally, the reality is that both clean eaters and IIFYM’ers know that their approach is not perfect in a vacuum, and make an effeort to improve on the inherent issues with their approach:

Clean Eating - Typically, adherents will admit that it’s NOT a good idea to eat super clean all the time, and suggest that you mostly rely on 80-90% of your diet being clean (veggies, lean proteins, minimal fats/carbs/junk foods), but you save some space for sweets, junk food, fast food, etc. when needed.
IIFYM - Typically, adherents will admit that the ‘pop-tarts’ approach is a bad one, in particular because you need a decent amount of fiber for optimal health. Adherents will also recognize that humans don’t actually enjoy eating nothing but junk food or getting all their protein from protein shakes, and that this approach is likely to lead to having a hard time meeting micronutrient needs, and thus potentially leading to malnutrition issues. They’ll also recognize that it’s not easy to hit macro targets without incorporating a lot of the typical ‘clean eating’ foods to help manage hunger and keep calories down.

You might be starting to understand now - the reality is that a ‘good’ clean eating diet, and a ‘good’ IIFYM diet basically just meet in the middle.

The fix for a bad clean eating approach is to be more flexible, eat more junk foods, and accept that you don’t need to eat clean all the time.

The fix for a bad IIFYM approach is to recognize that food ‘quality’ is a decent shorthand for focusing on the kinds of foods that are likely to help you achieve your desired macro targets, and accordingly incorporate more of those ‘clean’ foods to help you hit your targets most easily over time.

The reality is that both approaches are trying to get at something resembling an ‘ideal’ diet. An ideal diet will be mostly comprised of eating a sufficient amount of proteins and fiber sources as your main foods (typically, from meat/veggie mixed meals), a limited amount of excess carbs/fats (based on whether you want to gain, maintain, or lose weight), and to generally minimize intake of junk foods/fast food/sweets (while still leaving some space for flexibility and eating the foods you enjoy), which tend to make it hard to accomplish the above goals.

This represents a level of balance that is not always easy for people to accomplish. By hyper-focusing on counting calories (or eating clean foods) there is the inherent danger that any attempt to manage your diet, can lead to extreme levels of restriction or disordered eating patterns.

I tend to find that the more experienced people get with managing their diet, the easier they find it to avoid these issues, but at the same time, the only way to get more experienced, is to practice, starting out in a place where you know less and are more vulnerable. This can especially be a problem if you are attempting to figure it out yourself without the guidance of a good coach/trainer, or are running based off of the misinformation of a BAD coach/trainer, since there’s plenty of bad misinformation out there online. Likewise, some people are more vulnerable to establishing disordered eating patterns, especially if they have a history of disordered eating in the past.

The ultimate reality is that there is no ‘perfect’ approach, and either approach has their upsides and downsides. Both could ‘get you there’ in the end, if it results in you developing the right balance with your dietary approach. Both could also result in frustration with the entire diet experience, and ultimately lead to quitting dieting entirely, or developing disordered eating patterns.

As noted above, the IIFYM approach is the more ‘correct’ approach, in that it’s more grounded in the existing science, and has been more validated over time by further research. But this doesn’t mean that you couldn’t end up using a clean eating approach to end up with, functionally, the exact same diet. So, in many ways, the two can be very much the same, as opposed as they might seem at first.

About Adam Fisher

Adam is an experienced fitness coach and blogger who's been blogging and coaching since 2012, and lifting since 2006. He's written for numerous major health publications, including Personal Trainer Development Center, T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, Fitocracy, and Juggernaut Training Systems.

During that time he has coached thousands of individuals of all levels of fitness, including competitive powerlifters and older exercisers regaining the strength to walk up a flight of stairs. His own training revolves around bodybuilding and powerlifting, in which he’s competed.

Adam writes about fitness, health, science, philosophy, personal finance, self-improvement, productivity, the good life, and everything else that interests him. When he's not writing or lifting, he's usually hanging out with his cats or feeding his video game addiction.

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Clean Eating And IIFYM/CICO Are Actually The Same Thing

Takeaway Points:

A Proper Diet

About Adam Fisher

Enjoy this post? Share the gains!

Further Reading:

Clean Eating And IIFYM/CICO Are Actually The Same Thing

Takeaway Points:

A Proper Diet

About Adam Fisher

Enjoy this post? Share the gains!

Further Reading:

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