You are What you Eat

Let me caveat this section with the following. There is no substitute for going to a qualified nutrition expert and having them give you a detailed and accurate assessment of your nutritional needs and a plan for you to attain your goals. Let’s face it we all don’t have either the time or money to be able to do that unfortunately.

I am not a nutrition expert and the field itself is highly complex and there are many schools of thought you can subscribe too. My advice is to always seek expert help and to take a great deal of care in how you go about planning your nutrition. You don’t want to take any major risks with your food. Make sure whatever you decide to do that you don’t make any sudden changes and you focus on long term health benefits as opposed to supposed quick fixes.

If you can maintain a healthy body weight and keep your body fat percentage at optimum levels through diet and exercise, you’ll be going a long way to maintaining optimal health. The way I’m going to approach this is from the same perspective I came from which was as a complete novice without any real knowledge or grounding in nutrition apart from what I’d picked up here and there through the various media sources.

To start here’s a list of things I didn’t know, or thought were true that are in fact false and that had I known earlier would have saved me a great deal of grief. Hopefully these points will help you when it comes to finding a diet plan that compliments your health and fitness lifestyle.

Calories In minus Calories Out (energy expenditure) is crucial

After all the marketing and products, you’ve been subjected to all the various plans, all the revolutionary new training methods, your set of 12 complete body workout DVD’s… At the end of the day, it comes down to calorie intake vs. expenditure. It’s a simple as that? No not quite but it’s a good place to start for people new to health and fitness.

Calculate your daily calorific intake (how much calories you can eat in a day). If you eat exactly that, in theory you will stay the same weight. If you eat e.g., 300 calories less than that you will lose weight, if you eat 300 calories more than that you will gain weight. My major problem with this is that this is highly dependent on the quality of the calories you’re eating. Remember 1,000 calories of pizza is a lot different to 1,000 calories of wholefood consisting of healthy proteins, fats, carbs, and grains.

You cannot eat whatever you want after you exercise

You’ve just absolutely killed a workout and now you’re going to reward yourself by getting the meatiest and mightiest pizza money can buy. It’s fine of course because you just worked out. Wrong. I’ll state it once again those 1,000 calories of bad food are not the same of 1,000 calories of good food and that’s the simple truth.

The make-up and the nutrients of what you eat are important; eating heavily processed foods is going to hinder your progress significantly. You need to eat natural whole foods which means meat, vegetables, fruit, grains, and nuts.  

Eating loads of fruit is the way to lose weight

While there are a lot of benefits from eating fruit and you’ll frequently hear, ‘one of your five a day’ mentioned on advertisements fruit is not the way to health and fitness. You should aim to eat a balanced diet that of course contains fruit but don’t rely on it, fruit can contain lots of sugars and as well as that you can have too much of a good thing with fruit.

As part of a healthy diet, you need to consume fruit but you don’t need to have fruit in every meal and you certainly shouldn’t restrict your diet to just fruit. Your goal should be to find the right balance and eating anything in excess is not balance.

Eating loads of vegetables is not the key

Get this bulk solution mind-set out of your head; consume vegetables as part of a healthy diet based on your own goals. Include all the major food groups, plan your calorific intake, and review it on a monthly basis to see if you’re losing or gaining weight. Keep in mind that initially the changes will be bigger than as you become fitter and healthier. In that situation you may need to do your checks every two weeks.

Eating loads of protein is not the key

Again, you think that by cutting out bad foods and just eating protein you’ll reach your goal, instead you’re just going to harm your body. You need the right balance of fats, proteins, carbohydrates etc. and any diet or plan that suggests you neglect an entire food group should be cause for speculation immediately.

Low carb diets can do more harm than good

Anyone who’s been on a low carb diet will attest to the fact that they are exhausting and physical draining, often they can lead to binge eating as an individual’s body struggles to change from using carbohydrates as its main energy source. People who have very bad diets often discover just how carb laden their foods are and the shock to their system from going cold turkey is often too much to take.

It is often the case that when a person comes off a low carb diet, they can balloon up to a weight that exceeds the weight they were prior to starting. Low carb dieting is a short-term gain procedure and not a solution. Unless you are on top of your own nutrition and at a point where you have a legitimate reason for going low carb don’t. Focus on long term dietary balance and you shouldn’t need to go without any of the major food groups.

If it doesn’t rot you shouldn’t eat it

Fruit, vegetables lean meats, fish and herbs all rot after a short time. Some rot sooner than others but ultimately, they all fade and reach an expiry date in the short-term. As a rule, if your food rots it’s usually a sign that it’s a good food to eat. Frozen precooked dinners packaged food meant for oven cooking and fast food are all examples of foods that are typically laced in preservatives and made with ‘lowest bidder’ ingredients. Be conscious of this fact and stick to natural foods as much as possible. There are some exceptions to this with frozen fruits and vegetables being fine. Check the ingredients to ensure no additives or excessive levels of salt or sugar.

It’s always got more calories than you think

In my own experience and for whatever the reason I would always underestimate the number of calories in foods before I got on top of my dietary tracking, I would always take the lowest possible value for a food and as such my metrics for my daily calorific intake were skewed. This directly impacted my results and goals. If you eat bad food, be honest, log it if you are tracking your intake and move on.

If you don’t know how many calories are in a food don’t just guess. Find out and if you can’t find out immediately make sure you know for next time. I’ve been shocked and disappointed in so many supposedly healthy foods that have huge calorific content because of excessive additives.

As you progress with your healthy diet, you’re going to become very cynical and suspicious of food products. In those cases, scepticism is a healthy choice.

If you don’t plan ahead you will over eat

You cannot expect to be able to get on top of your dietary needs without careful thought, consideration, and planning. If you leave any doubt or any opportunity for you to eat bad food or divert from your plan, chances are you will.

We’re all human and hunger and habit are powerful forces when you’re trying to break out of a cycle. Many bad foods are extremely easy to get and convenient, you step out of work and the fast-food deli counter, or the sweet shop are open and the food is ready to go, you have your debit/credit card and you can be in and out of the shop in minutes.

Particularly as you start to make changes it will be harder for you to resist these temptations especially if you are a person who has existed on this type of food for so long. Win the little battles and bit-by-bit you will win the war.

Plan your meals. If you can get Monday – Friday planned, then you can afford to let your self have a little slack on the weekend. Be mindful of not undoing all your hard work but do allow yourself some sort of bad food to help with those cravings. If you eat out in work every day perhaps with your colleagues, it might be time to take the lonely option of microwaving your lunches and eating at your desk. I did say that some choices would be harder than others.

Alternatively, if you must eat out pre-screen the menu and have what you want to order ready in your mind long before you get to the restaurant or shop.

If you try to go cold turkey you will fail

Just like we have outlined for exercise the same rule applies for nutrition. Don’t try and build Rome in a day. Small incremental changes are the key to success. If you’ve been eating a certain way for several months or years, you’re not going to change that in a day or a week or even a month, even if it is a ‘New Year’s resolution’.

If you habitually get cravings for savoury or take away food those cravings are not going to disappear overnight. It’s important that you start to recognise the cravings for what they are; they are based on habits that have been re-enforced in some case for years.

It will take time and effort to get past these; you must make that effort though. Don’t assume you’ll just do it tomorrow or next time, the only time that matters is this time and that’s now your challenge. Can you empower yourself to make the right choice, can you face that habit of craving and defeat it bit-by-bit?

Your big change is dependent on the little ones.  

You need to set yourself valid goals of making small changes that when added up will make a big impact to your health and fitness lifestyle. Be warned that going cold turkey on anything is a sure-fire way of setting yourself up for a failure. Be smart and take your time, remember it’s a marathon and not a sprint. Reduction should be your first order of the day not completely removing everything until you’ve successfully reduced it to that point. That’s winning the little battles and using progressive improvement to attain your goals.

I presume a lot of people reading these are thinking hang on a minute I thought that was right, why isn’t it the case? I learned the hard way with many of these and did the reading and the research that eventually led me to understand what I was doing wrong.

I hope that by listing these out and providing some clarifications on what exactly I mean I can help you to avoid making the costly mistakes I made for so long. Going cold turkey failed so many times for me that I question my own intelligence as well as my own sanity in terms of how many times I believed it would work ‘this time’.

Adopting a healthy lifestyle is so often about the little choices you make on a day-to-day basis. These might seem like small and meaningless acts but if you add up the cumulative benefits of making the right choices when it comes to your health and wellbeing they will add up and you will feel the benefits.

It can be hard to do this, it takes discipline, and the rewards are long term and hard to see, often enough there is very little, short term gratification. You need to accept this. Your goal is long term health and fitness but that doesn’t mean you’re going to keep binge eating on rubbish food at every opportunity you get.

You need to make a conscious effort to make the healthy choices instead of making excuses.

Remember, chin up, chest out and handle it.

Yours,

Stephen