#flexbowl: do the food maths and lose weight the flexy way

How GCSE maths can help you to calculate your perfect diet plan
Bowled over: a colourful 'flex bowl' from social media

At school, your preferred, petulant refrain was to posit an existential question. “But when am I ever going to USE any of this?” you’d screech at your maths teacher, drawing a parabola on your graph paper and then throwing a balled-up page at your mate, on which you’d scrawled an obscene and poorly executed image of Mr Latimer on fire.

Who’s the real winner? You got a C in GCSE maths and can barely count, let alone add; Mr Latimer retired and — you see from Facebook — has a really nice dog now. Also, you realised that you need maths. Not at work — that’s what interns and computers are for — but in your social life: totting up drinks and restaurant bills, and if you’re following the latest iteration in diets and clean living, counting out your macros.

Plainly speaking, this means balancing the three main food groups your body requires: carbohydrates, protein and fat. The theory argues that if you get the balance right, you’ll lose weight, burn fat and gain lean muscle more efficiently. Your body uses 10 calories of fat in a different way to how it uses 10 calories of protein; eating thoughtfully means you don’t have to eat (too) restrictively.

Experts recommend working out your basal metabolic rate, then taking into account your activity level (ie how much exercise you do) to calibrate your macros — realistically, you can probably guestimate rather than calculate (though you still should have gone for gold at GCSE level). Then do some exercise — and finally the fun can begin.

For it is possible to cheat without cheating (unlike at school when you cheated by cheating): if you play it ascetic for much of the week, holding back on fat and carbs, come Friday you can rebalance by eating a bowl that overflows with sweet baubles and calorific gewgaws, fizzing with sugar and fun. It’s called a #flexbowl and has been tagged more than 45,000 times on Instagram — #flexbowlfridays has more than 8,000 tags.

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There are pictures of Reese’s Pieces embedded in creamy rivers of chocolate ice cream, topped with strands of caramel, ladles of peanut butter and a Cornetto sticking rudely out of the mix. There are bowls of Dolly Mixtures and bowls of biscuits covered in cream. Some people have thrown chocolate at fro-yo; one audacious fun-monkey has sliced a Terry’s choccie orange and used it as a garnish for their strawberry-banana-Ferrero Rocher-coconut-yoghurt megamix. It’s like the Butterfield diet.

Some sensible souls use #flexbowls to make up their allocations in good fats, a hunk of rye bread and a serving of smoked salmon. These are the people who will one day rule us all.

But if you’re careful for most of the week, why not rot your teeth for an evening? That’s how the macro crew rolls.

Follow Phoebe Luckhurst on Twitter: @phoebeluckhurst

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