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Ideally, you should strive to build muscle while maintaining low body fat. The best way to accomplish this goal, is to eat exactly according to your needs, no less and no more. Generally, eat three meals a day; eat until you are about 80% full; and never snack. If you have a slow metabolism, you may only need two meals daily. When doing two meals, my personal preference is breakfast and dinner because that works best for my schedule.

Your appetite is not an accurate gauge of how much food you truly need. Our bodies were designed to protect themselves against famine. Your appetite tells you to eat more than you need so that you can store the excess as fat to tide you through periods of shortage. That is why you should only eat until you are about 80 percent full (more or less depending on your own metabolism). And as for snacking, the many little extra meals during the day can easily double your calories.

Tip for feeling full: Let's say that you're skipping lunch but are getting hungry. You can give yourself a feeling of fullness by drinking a large glass of water. Better yet, add supplements to it. Such supplements could include fruit and vegetable extract powders. I use spinach extract. I also add beta alanine for energy.

If you need to lose weight, eat until you are about 70 percent full instead of 80 percent. You will feel hungry, but there is no easy way to lose weight. Your body wants to gain weight and hold on to it, and has built in mechanisms to resist losing weight. When you eat less, your metabolism will work against you by slowing down. (Check out the concept of adaptive thermogenesis.)

As such, diets, no matter how sensible, may simply not work for many people. Their metabolism slows down to match their reduced caloric intake causing them to lose absolutely no weight. If so, there is still one recourse, and that is fasting.

By fasting, I mean real fasting. During a real fast, you only drink water and keep your calories to zero. I wouldn't recommend an extremely long fast; I would say two to three days at most. A two to three day-fast is enough to lose several pounds and recharge your system. Following the two to three-day fast, maintain a restricted calorie diet to keep you from regaining any of the weight lost during the fast. The recharge to your system caused by the short fast should help you to begin losing weight through normal dieting. If the one two to three-day fast was not enough, then repeat the fast every few weeks until you have met your goals.

Dr. Jason Fung is an MD who advocates fasting. You may find his videos interesting:

The best diet advice that I've ever seen are based on the principles of the late Byron Richards. He called his approach the Leptin Diet and it makes perfect sense. It's a well-balanced approach that is based on five simple rules, and it avoids the extremes of many other diets. The Leptin Diet doesn't make false promises. It's a structured approach that helps you eat in moderation and restrain your caloric intake to your needs. The beauty of the Leptin Diet is this: you use it lose weight, and then you follow it for life, so that you never put the weight back on. The diet is maintainable because it does not restrict any major food groups and allows you to eat the same basic foods as everyone else (minus the obvious sugar-laden junk food).

A well-balanced diet consists of all three macro-nutrients, protein, fat, and carbohydrates. The body uses protein to build muscle, bone, hair, and fingernails. Your hair and fingernails will grow faster on a high protein diet. When you lift weights, you will develop muscle faster on a high-protein diet. Despite the emphasis on protein, however, you need complex carbohydrates for energy. 1) Carbohydrates are brain food. 2) The ingestion of carbohydrates results in the release of insulin. Insulin is an anabolic hormone that aids the transport of protein to muscle cells. 3) Stored carbohydrates (glycogen) provide energy to the muscles. The third macro-nutrient, dietary fat, boosts the immune system, provides backup energy, and is needed to absorb the fat soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K. Saturated fats help boost testosterone levels. Omega 3 fats have been shown to promote heart health.

As a note of precaution, I would stay away from extreme, unbalanced diets. We humans were designed by our Creator as omnivores. Anyone advocating a vegan/low-fat diet or a nearly all meat/no grain diet is going against our design. Extremely low-fat, high-carb vegan diets can cause your blood triglycerides to rise to stratospheric levels. But don't go to the other extreme of the so-called paleo diet. The paleo diet, which is supposedly based on the eating habits of ancient man, is a fantasy. Nearly everything we eat has been modified by man over the ages. You cannot go back to the diet eaten by peoples of the distant past. If you wish to do further research, check out this TED lecture. Moreover, a high protein, low carbohydrate diet will leave you depleted of energy.

In summation, exercise is number 1 for promoting longevity, while diet is number 2. There is a reason for that. The human body is far more resilient than many seem to realize. There are people with bad diets who have normal cholesterol and blood pressure. There are heavy smokers and drinkers who make it to age 100 without lung cancer or liver problems. Ingesting some aspartame is not going to kill you as some of the health phobics believe. Even though a balanced diet is by far the best, the human body can survive on a wide variety of diets. However, a lack of exercise causes the body to deteriorate faster than it should. In other words, inactivity causes premature aging, while exercise and strength training increase your healthspan.

Note: There are no guarantees. Sometimes, seemingly healthy people such as Byron Richards die young. The goal is to make yourself feel the best that you can for the time that God has given you.