How To Enjoy Nutrition While Taking Out The Guesswork
Welcome to FIT FC! This week we're going to cover how we can enjoy nutrition while still taking out the guesswork. So a lot of times eating healthy can feel like a burden and we don't want it to feel like that, in order to make it sustainable you have to enjoy what you eat.
When doing this and going through the process you want to think about four things quality, quantity, timing and supplementation. Let’s start with quality first, to begin her want to start with Whole Foods foods. The best way to approach this is to go through some of the categories of food so meat which also means seafood, fruits, vegetables and nuts/seeds to start. With those four categories write down all your favorites. Now these next three categories some people do very well with and some do not. They are kind of the middle ground. These food categories are, dairy, grains and legumes. Write down all your favorites for those as well. From there we're making sure these are Quality Foods, so when choosing meat making sure we're choosing pretty good quality. Same goes for nuts and seeds, making sure they're raw not salted or roasted as raw nuts and seeds. So now we have that list that's our quality.
From there we can look at the quantity and see how much we need. So in a quantity section we're going to first look at Water we want about 67 ounces based on your body weight. Next looking at protein we need to look at the person's ideal body weight or something that they're shooting for and being realistic. We want to set that level of grams per ideal body weight of 1:1 and try to hit that or close to that on a daily basis. Next we're looking at our fruits and vegetables. These color groups include green, yellow/orange, red blue/purple and white/tan. We are looking to get at least one serving of each per day. To properly organize our food we are going to make plates. Let’s look at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. First see if the athlete eats all these meals or just lunch and dinner. This determines how you're going to format it. Now we're going to help you with designing the plate. This is how quantity and the quality comes into effect so. Looking at having your meat protein your meat/seafood, your nuts and seeds, fruits and vegetables and you want in each plate. For at least two meals a day make sure you're having some type of starch. If you want to be higher quality we're looking at more of your potatoes, yams or some of the starchier root vegetables. If we're not getting it there we can look at those grains and legumes potentially. Nuts and seeds we're having at least three to four pinches and then we're utilizing dairy grains and legumes as needed but if we're going super clean at first and trying to take guesswork out we're gonna probably stick to those other four categories and from all this we're trying to make the our favorite plate so you can make multiple or you can make one for each and stick to it.
Organizing nutrition is some of what we do within sessions here. If you're wanting help with this you can always reach out to us. However it can be very simple on your end. Picking your favorite foods, organizing it correctly and really setting your protein and water, the fats and carbohydrate will fluctuate per day.
The timing piece comes into play for when your most physically active. We want to make sure we're not having our meats to close to difficult physically activity, even some of our fats because those will take longer to digest. Four to five hours for most. So planning these out is important.
supplementation will come into effect when we look at everything that you're eating for the day and seeing if each vitamin and mineral is getting hit at adequate levels. We can easily measure these out and see what the ranges are. From there we pick and choose the supplements that are necessary. This makes it so we are not always taking a multivitamin but just better off picking and choosing the ones that are a little bit low and really trying to get them through food. If you're having a hard time then adding those supplements there is ok.
So remember quality, quantity, timing and supplementation. Pick your favorite foods, organize them correctly in the groups mentioned above to make plates and set your water as well as protein levels. Once you get some plates established then it's going to be easy you can start to eyeball stuff and create more plates. This will make it so you're taking all the guesswork out and you enjoy what you eat!