What to avoid

Many diets are about what you can't eat. However, this is a bad mindset, and typically the reasoning behind it's flawed. You generally can consume just about everything in moderation, as long as you have an overall healthy diet and an active lifestyle.

Nevertheless, there are 4 things I’d pay special attention to:

Trans fat

Associated with many negative health outcomes, avoid it when possible. Depending on where you live and what you eat, this may be very easy or very hard. Broadly speaking, as long as your diet is mostly whole foods you should be OK.

Processed meats

Generally pink and cured meat products that use sodium nitrate preservatives. Things like ham, hot dogs, bacon products, and deli meats. It’s not clear exactly how bad they are, but the evidence is pointing toward that it’s best to be cautious about their intake.

Fried food

Not to say you can’t have some french fries when you’re out with your friends, but fried food isn’t the healthiest thing, I wouldn’t make it a staple of your diet.

High saturated fat intake

This is not to mean that saturated fat is bad. But very high intakes of saturated fat are indeed undesirable (yes, despite what the internet has told you).

I recommend aiming for around 0.26g/kg (0.12g/lb). Your average intake should be within 5g of this value or so. For someone that weighs 70kg, this would be anywhere from 13g to 23g.

Unless you’re eating saturated fat on purpose (using an excessive amount of coconut oil or butter is common), you probably don’t have to pay much attention to it.