I admit it took me a while to understand Stan Efferding’s Vertical Diet , a bodybuilder who recommends this food plan as an optimal bodybuilding diet, but also for crossfiters. The principle of the Vertical Diet is actually simple: eat to be strong , and eat in such a way that the food we eat does not create digestive problems.. Only by keeping this premise in mind can we better understand how the Vertical Diet is born. The plan is a bit more complicated, because it is neither a pyramid scheme (so to speak like that of the Mediterranean diet), nor a pie scheme (that is to say, the healthy plate diet, where with a pie chart you know what to put on the plate, in essence), but of a T-pattern.

For Stan Efferding, that is, the basis of the diet is vertical , that is, for a large part of the day, two foods are eaten which therefore represent the food line to follow, represented by the vertical line of the T (but not only for this, we will see later that the discourse of verticality also affects calories). Besides these foods, every day we eat other “side dishes”, so to speak, which provide the rest of an essential diet that does not involve nutritional deficiencies.
They must be present every day, but they are not the basis of the diet. And they occupy the upper bar of the T for this reason. What does it mean?It means that breakfast, lunch and dinner follow the vertical line, snacks and side dishes follow the horizontal line and are optional, you can change it as long as you stay in the choices indicated.
This is because the 2 key foods for Stan correspond to the 3 macronutrients, fats, proteins and carbohydrates. While ancillary foods are used to provide vitamins and minerals.

VERTICAL DIET: THE BODYBUILDING DIET
Breakfast, lunch and dinner as I said, i.e. the vertical basis of the diet must be based on:
– meat (veal, beef, bison, lamb, but not white and lean meat): both lean and stew, as bone broth or stew is recommended. Possibly bresaola.
– White rice. White rice should never be chilled, because resistant starch, according to Stan, creates digestive problems. Eventually it is also good: basmati, oat flakes after being soaked overnight. In addition to this, you can choose accessory foods from the following categories:

– sweet potatoes (one small very well done, cooked without peel and mashed), eggs, red currant juice, orange juice or orange juice with no added sugar, beef or chicken bone broth, raw carrots in salads, vegetables only cooked (apart from carrots, to be chosen from the most digestible ones, i.e. peppers, courgettes, squash, cucumbers, aubergines, spinach, celery), Fage Greek yogurt.
Basically, nothing else is eaten in this bodybuilding diet. You do not take sweeteners, you can take drinks based on fructose, dextrose, sodium and caffeine before the workout. The fats are provided by the meat, so no added seasonings are taken. You don’t drink coffee.
But what about calories? Here, the vertical diet is vertical for this too.
Basically,Caloric needs are increased according to the objectives: if you want to get bigger, you will eat more, in particular you will not eat more meat but instead you will increase the rice. If you want to do a definition diet, the foods do not change, you use the same diet but restricting portions and calories especially for rice. In this aspect, the vertical diet works like a signal diet. Do you want to increase strength, weight and muscle? Eat more. Do you want to keep the lean mass but reduce the fat one? Eat less. An example of a vertical diet. Breakfast: freshly squeezed orange juice, bresaola or ground veal with peppers and white rice (rice should not be prepared previously). Snack:

Who is the vertical bodybuilding diet recommended for?: Stan recommends the vertical diet for athletes. To bodybuilders, weight lifters or at least crossfitters, but to athletes who train every day or several times a day, and want a simple and practical solution to achieve goals with the right diet. In this case, the portions are about 4-5 meals based on rice and meat, with 150-170 grams of meat and half a cup of cooked rice (about 50 grams raw). The athlete should eat numerous times when not exercising, even at hourly intervals and as I said earlier, increasing calories can be done by increasing rice. So the idea is to eat a lot but digest well, without digestion interfering with your workouts. Twice a week you can replace the meat with wild salmon,
What I think: 
1) too much rice
2) too much meat.
Yet the reasoning behind the diet: eat several times a day, eat nutritious but easily digestible foods, is not wrong. The problem with many bodybuilder diets is to provide nutrients and calories without resorting to powdered protein preparations, and without having digestive problems, which ultimately detract from training.One approach that might work in my opinion is to vary the meat with fish, for example tuna or cod, octopus, maybe using whole Greek yogurt even twice a day to help with the fat, or using more eggs. Otherwise, aim for grass-fed meat, which however is difficult to find unless you buy it online, and definitely leaner. And also vary the rice, focusing on oats soaked for at least eight hours with an acid medium (lemon juice / apple cider vinegar) or simple pasta with low gluten content (timilia). Americans don’t have it, we do, and it’s a highly digestible pasta.