Food Hygiene

What is food hygiene? The definition in 20 seconds

Food hygiene is not a research term, it is our framework for everyday eating. It improves three things at once: the quality of your choices, how well you tolerate them and how stable your energy stays across the day. It does not work in a vacuum, it works inside your TDEE.

• Quality: nutrient dense, sensibly processed, easy to cook and easy to repeat.
• Tolerance: spot your triggers and dose them, instead of pushing through bloating and fatigue.
• For hardgainers this means: food hygiene sits next to energy density, not above it. Play quality against quantity and as a hardgainer you always lose the quantity.

The anchors in the system: clean bulk, lean surplus and Hard Nutrition.

What you control and what you don't

Food hygiene controls friction, not direction. Whether you gain is decided by your surplus. How easily you hit it week after week is decided by what you choose to eat.

• A framework, not perfection: Our practice rule is 80 to 90 percent solid, well tolerated meals, the rest stays flexible. That is a value from experience, not from research. Almost nobody holds a hundred percent in real life.
• A repeatable base: A small set of staple foods per category that you reliably tolerate. Fewer choices mean fewer decisions and fewer surprises in your gut.
• Think energy density: The same calories from vegetables, salad and lean fish fill your stomach far more than from oats, milk and nut butter. Both are clean. Only one of them is something you can manage every day.
• Be pragmatic about processing: Oats or a protein shake are processed and still highly useful for you. This is about control, not morality.
• Dose your fibre: tolerable rather than maximal, increased in small steps. Many notice that too much of it fills them up so much that the surplus never happens.

The trap to avoid: food hygiene must never become an excuse to drop below your maintenance calories.

Practice: the 14-day check

• Day 0, set your base: Pick staple foods per category that you reliably tolerate: protein, carbs, fats, vegetables, drinks. Set your calorie target as maintenance plus a surplus. Our deliberately cautious starting value is 150 to 250 kcal per day.
• Day 1 to 7, base only: fixed meal times, no experiments. One line a day: morning bodyweight, digestion on a scale of 1 to 3, energy after meals and steps as your measure for NEAT. How much your steps burn is shown by the NEAT Calculator.
• Day 7, review: If the symptoms are gone, it was your food choice, not your metabolism.
• Day 8 to 14, test on purpose: Bring back one suspect in a normal portion. If nothing returns, it is innocent. Check your weight trend too: if your rate of gain is flat, you are missing calories, not hygiene.

One variable per test. Three changes at once and you learn nothing. Severe or ongoing symptoms belong with a qualified professional, not in a logbook.

Common misconceptions

• “Food hygiene is the same as a clean bulk.” No. A clean bulk is a gaining strategy with a measured surplus, a dirty bulk mostly chases calorie volume. Food hygiene is the execution layer underneath, so the plan holds up in daily life.
• “Eating clean is enough.” Eating clean and landing below maintenance is not progress. It is standing still with a clear conscience.
• “Processed always means bad.” Heavily processed food has been shown to raise intake. That is a problem for people trying to lose weight. For you, what counts is whether a food is tolerated and fits your plan.
• “Low appetite means my body doesn't need more.” A weak hunger signal, partly driven by ghrelin, is not a measure of what you need. Your weight trend is.

Common questions