Frequently Asked Questions

No Nonsense Fitness is a free, education-first nutrition and training resource for Ireland. I share straightforward, evidence-based guidance on fat loss, building muscle and understanding food — no hype, no fear tactics, and nothing to buy. Every tool and guide here, including the calculators and the free tracker app, is completely free, with no signup and no email required.

I'm not a personal trainer or dietitian. I'm someone who changed his own body composition around a full-time job and two kids, and got tired of watching people get sold complicated programmes for information that should just be free. I don't sell supplements, coaching, or anything else. The goal is to give you the information to make your own decisions.

Anyone who wants straight, evidence-based information about nutrition and training without the noise. If you're trying to lose fat, build a bit of muscle, or just understand food better, the guides and free tools here are built for you — whether you've never tracked a calorie in your life or you've been lifting for years.

You don't need to be "into fitness" to get something out of this. Most of what's here is aimed at busy people with a job and a life outside the gym — the exact position I was in when I started. If you want simple, practical answers instead of conflicting advice from ten different influencers, you're in the right place.

Start with the Day One Guide — it walks you through the basics step by step: what to eat, how to track it, and how to set up your first week in the gym, all in one free PDF.

If you want the numbers first, use the calorie calculator to see roughly how much you should be eating, then the macro calculator to break that down into protein, carbs and fat. From there, Fat Loss Basics and the blog go deeper on specific problems — hidden calories, plateaus, eating out — as you need them.

There's no sign-up and no order you have to follow. Start wherever your actual problem is.

I have a full-time job — this isn't how I pay the bills. I changed my own body composition while working long hours with two kids at home, and I got tired of watching people get sold expensive programmes for information that should just be available to everyone.

This is something I do in the evenings and at weekends because I think it should exist. There's no funnel, no email list you get dropped into, and nothing waiting at the end to buy. The tools, guides and the tracker app stay free — that's not changing. If that ever changes, I'll say so plainly rather than dress it up.

Nine times out of ten, it's one of two things: you're eating more than you think, or you're not actually in a deficit. Sauces, dressings, cooking oil, weekend drinks, and the odd handful of something while cooking add up fast — they rarely get tracked and they can wipe out a deficit without you noticing.

The other common one is chasing the scale day to day instead of the trend. Your weight moves several kilos with water, salt, carbs, sleep and hormones — none of that is fat. If you're not seeing movement over 2-3 weeks, the fix usually isn't more restriction, it's better tracking.

Use the free calorie tracker for a week and log everything, including drinks and sauces, before you touch your calories. Most people are surprised by what's actually in their day. If your numbers genuinely match your target and you're still not moving after a few weeks, check your calorie target itself with the calorie calculator — you might be eating less than you need, which can slow things down too.

A calorie deficit just means eating fewer calories than your body burns in a day. Your body needs energy to keep you alive and moving — that total is your maintenance number. Eat below it consistently and your body pulls the shortfall from stored fat. Eat above it and you gain weight, whatever the food is.

That's the whole mechanism behind fat loss. It doesn't matter if the deficit comes from chicken and rice or takeaway pizza — a deficit is a deficit. What does matter is whether you can stick to it: high-protein, filling food makes a deficit far easier to hold than skipping meals and getting hungry.

Use the calorie calculator to get a rough maintenance number, then eat a few hundred calories below it. That's the deficit — everything else is detail.

No. Tracking is a tool for learning, not a life sentence. Most people have no real sense of portion sizes or how many calories are in everyday food — a few weeks of proper tracking fixes that fast.

Once you know roughly what 30g of protein looks like on a plate, or that your usual lunch is 700 calories, you can go by feel a lot of the time and just check in with the tracker when your weight starts drifting, when your routine changes, or before something like a holiday.

I'd rather someone tracked properly for a month and learned something than tracked half-heartedly forever. Use the free calorie tracker to build that awareness, then loosen the reins once the habit and the knowledge are there.

Yes. No food is banned in a fat loss plan, including takeaways — what matters is whether it fits inside your calories for the day, not whether it's "clean" or "dirty" food.

The practical bit: takeaways are usually calorie-dense (oil, sauce, cheese, portion size), so one meal can easily be 1,200-1,800 calories. If you know you're eating one, plan around it — lighter earlier in the day, more protein, maybe skip the side and the sugary drink. You don't need to skip meals to "save up" for it either; that usually just makes you starving and more likely to overeat.

Order smarter where you can: grilled over fried, sauce on the side, single portion instead of a large. But the honest answer is you can have takeaways regularly and still lose fat, as long as the week averages out.

Not automatically. "Processed" covers everything from tinned beans and frozen vegetables to crisps and fizzy drinks — most of that first group is genuinely useful, cheap, and nutritious. What actually matters for fat loss is your total calories and protein, and how full a food keeps you for those calories.

Where processed food causes problems is usually the ultra-processed end: things engineered to be eaten past the point of fullness — crisps, biscuits, most takeaways, sugary drinks. They're easy to overeat because they're calorie-dense and don't fill you up much. That doesn't make them "bad" or off-limits, it just means they're easier to go over your calories with.

A simple rule that works better than banning foods: build meals around protein and something with volume (vegetables, potatoes, rice) first, and let processed extras fit around that rather than replace it.

NOVA is a food classification system that groups food into four categories based on how processed it is — from unprocessed or minimally processed (fruit, plain meat, oats) up to ultra-processed (most packaged snacks, ready meals, fizzy drinks). It's the system behind a lot of the "ultra-processed food" research and the ratings on the tracker's food label checker.

It's a useful signal, not a full picture. NOVA tells you how much a food has been altered and what's been added to it — it doesn't tell you the calories, the protein, or whether it fits your day. A protein bar can be ultra-processed and still be a genuinely useful, high-protein snack that helps you hit your target.

Use NOVA as one extra piece of information, not the deciding factor. Calories and protein still do most of the work for fat loss and muscle.

It's not fat — fat gain that fast is physically impossible. A kilo of fat is roughly 7,700 calories; you'd need to eat several days' worth of food in one sitting to gain a kilo of actual fat overnight.

What you're seeing is water. Salty food, a big carb-heavy meal, alcohol, poor sleep, and (for women) different points in the menstrual cycle can all shift the scale by 1-2kg in a day or two, purely from water your body is holding onto. It settles back down within a few days on its own.

This is exactly why daily weigh-ins can wind people up for no reason. Weigh yourself at the same time most days if you want the data, but judge progress on the weekly average or the trend over a few weeks — not any single number.

Roughly 1.6-2.2g of protein per kg of your bodyweight per day covers almost everyone trying to lose fat or build muscle — that range comes from sports nutrition research on muscle protein retention during a deficit. If you're 80kg, that's about 130-175g a day.

Higher up that range matters more when you're in a calorie deficit, because protein is what protects your muscle while you lose fat — without enough of it, more of the weight you lose is muscle rather than fat. You don't need to hit the number exactly every single day; getting close, consistently, is what counts.

Whole foods first — chicken, eggs, fish, Greek yoghurt, cottage cheese, lentils — with a protein shake to fill gaps if you're struggling to hit the target through food alone. The macro calculator will give you an exact gram target based on your own weight and goal.

Yes, in the right circumstances — this is usually called body recomposition. It works best if you're new to training, coming back after time off, or carrying more body fat, because your body has more room to build muscle and pull energy from fat stores at the same time.

The requirements are the same either way: enough protein, resistance training that progressively gets harder, and a modest calorie deficit rather than an aggressive one — too big a deficit makes it much harder to hold onto muscle, let alone build it.

The further along you are as a lifter, the slower this gets — very lean, experienced lifters usually need to pick one goal at a time. But if you're earlier in the process, don't assume you have to choose between losing fat and building muscle. For most beginners and intermediates, a sensible deficit with proper training does both.

Not specifically for fat loss — the calorie deficit is what causes fat loss, and you can create that through food alone. Cardio just gives you another way to create or widen that deficit without cutting food further, which is useful if you like it or if you're already eating close to your minimum.

Where cardio earns its place is everything else: heart health, recovery between weights sessions, fitness for actually enjoying your life, and giving you a bit more room to eat. It's not mandatory, but I'd still recommend some most weeks for the health side of things, separate from fat loss.

If you hate running, you don't need it — walking, cycling, swimming, a match of five-a-side, all count. Do a version of cardio you'll actually keep doing.

For most people, yes — walking is genuinely underrated for fat loss. It burns calories without adding much hunger or fatigue compared to harder training, and because you can do it every day, the total adds up fast. An extra 30-40 minutes of walking a day can be the difference between a deficit and a stall for a lot of people.

It won't build your fitness or your heart health the same way as harder cardio (running, cycling, rowing) eventually would, so it's not the only cardio you'll ever need long-term. But as your main lever for fat loss alongside a calorie deficit and some resistance training, walking more is one of the simplest, most sustainable changes you can make — no gym, no kit, no excuse about time.

Everything's on the Free Tools page, no signup needed.

The calorie calculator works out your Total Daily Energy Expenditure — roughly how many calories you burn a day — and gives you a target for cutting, maintaining or building. The macro calculator breaks that number down into protein, carbs and fat, so you know what to actually eat, not just a total. The body fat calculator estimates your body fat percentage using the US Navy method, from a tape measure and your height.

There's also a food label checker for scanning barcodes, and the free calorie tracker app for logging food day to day. All of it's free, all of it works without an email address.

As accurate as any tracker in the world, which is to say: it depends more on you than the app. The calorie tracker has an Irish food database (Aldi, Lidl, Tesco, SuperValu, generic foods) and a barcode scanner, so the numbers behind each food are solid. Where accuracy actually breaks down for anyone using any tracker is estimating portions — eyeballing a "handful" of rice instead of weighing it can be out by a couple of hundred calories.

For losing fat, you don't need laboratory precision — you need consistency. If you log the same way every day, the trend in your results tells you the truth even if any single day is slightly off. That's genuinely all that matters.

Yes. There's no sign-up, no account, no email required to use the free calorie tracker. You open it and start logging.

The trade-off is that everything is stored on your own phone rather than synced to a server, so it won't automatically show up if you switch devices. For most people that's a fair trade for not having another account and password to manage, and not having your food data sitting on someone else's server. It's built this way on purpose — free tools shouldn't come with a signup wall.

Yes. The tracker doesn't require an account, so there's no server anywhere storing what you eat, your weight, or your photos — it all stays on your own phone. I never see it, and it's never sold or shared, because it's never collected in the first place.

That's a deliberate choice, not a limitation I'm apologising for. A lot of tracking apps make money from your data or push you toward a paid tier — this one doesn't, because there isn't a business model behind it beyond giving away something useful. See the Privacy Policy for the full detail.

Yes. The core stuff — the calorie deficit maths, the macro targets, the training advice — is just physiology, and that doesn't change at the border. The calculators and guides work wherever you're reading this from.

The one Ireland-specific part is the food database in the tracker and some of the blog content, which references Irish supermarkets (Aldi, Lidl, Tesco, SuperValu) and Irish product examples because that's genuinely what I shop in. If you're outside Ireland, you can still log generic foods and barcodes, you'll just see fewer local branded products in the database. Everything else applies exactly the same.

No. No Nonsense Fitness provides educational content and free tools only. Nothing on this website constitutes medical advice, diagnosis or treatment, and nothing here is personalised to you specifically.

Always speak to a qualified healthcare professional before making changes to your diet, training, or supplement use — especially if you have an existing medical condition, are pregnant, or are taking medication. The calculators here give useful estimates based on population averages; they're not a substitute for individual medical guidance.

I rely on peer-reviewed studies, meta-analyses, and guidance from recognised health bodies, plus my own experience actually doing this. The detailed sourcing lives on the guide pages, where claims carry the study, journal and year beside them, and on how every number here is calculated. These FAQ answers are the plain-English version of what those pages set out in full.

I try to avoid basing anything on a single study, an anecdote, or an industry-funded paper without saying so plainly. Nutrition research is messy and evidence is sometimes mixed or genuinely inconclusive — where that's the case, I say that too, rather than pretending there's a definitive answer when there isn't one.

I don't sell supplements, and I'm not on commission for recommending any of them — everything on this site is free with nothing to buy.

As for what's actually worth taking: for most people eating a reasonable diet, very few supplements make a real difference. Creatine monohydrate and a vitamin D supplement (especially through an Irish winter) have decent evidence behind them. Protein powder is just a convenient way to hit a protein target, not magic — food does the same job. Beyond that, most of what's marketed hard (fat burners, detoxes, "testosterone boosters") does very little or nothing.

If a blog post mentions a specific product, it's because I've actually used it and I say so, not because I'm being paid to mention it. Food and training do almost all of the actual work — supplements are a small edge on top, not a shortcut.

The best way to reach me is by email at keith@nononsensefitness.ie. Whether it's a question about nutrition, feedback on the tools, or you've spotted something wrong on the site, I read everything myself and I'm happy to hear from you. I can't offer one-to-one coaching or personalised meal plans over email, but I'll point you to the right free guide or tool for whatever you're asking about.