Eating for Beginners
Congratulations on committing yourself to arguably the most important aspect of your health; nutrition. This is a topic that gets an enormous amount of attention through mainstream media, social media and the oversaturated forum, word of mouth. The amount of times I hear the words “they say” as it pertains to nutrition is shocking. They certainly do say a lot, but consider the sources folks. Like training, nutrition is not a one size fits all prescription. In order to properly understand nutrition, its crucial to correlate your dietary needs to your personal goals and expectations. I think you can start to see a pattern forming here. The only way to attain and maintain sustainable success with your health is by making sure your approach is laser focused on yourself.
There are more diets out there than I can comfortably write about in one article so for the sake of argument, lets just rattle off a few and discuss their basic premises. First and in no particular order, there is the ketogenic diet. The basic premise behind this diet is to force the body into ketosis, the state in which your body uses fat as its primary source of energy due to a lack of carbohydrates. This is a vast oversimplification of the very complex processes that actually occur within the human body in this state, but for this article it should suffice. By reducing carbs to a very minimal percentage of overall calories consumed, the individual is forced to consume a moderate amount of protein and high amount of fat to supplement the loss of carbs. Proponents of this diet claim that it greatly aids in weight loss, reduces inflammation, and helps the body control blood sugar.
Next, we have the ever popular intermittent fasting diet. This diet dictates that you consume all of your calories in a certain window of time, rather than dictating the types of nutrients to consume. Typically, people on this diet will eat all of their calories between 12pm and 8pm. Proponents of this diet claim that metabolic function improves, insulin sensitivity increases and overall weight loss occurs.
Finally, there is the vegan diet. This has gained popularity as of late due to its emphasis on not only helping an individual lose weight, but also by helping the environment. The main premise of this diet is for an individual to consume only plant based foods and no animal products at all, including meat, eggs and dairy. By reducing the amount of food choices available, this diet essentially restricts calories and in turn, aids in weight loss. Proponents of this diet claim that it helps control blood sugar, aids in heart health, and also helps lower cancer risks. There are numerous off-shoots of the vegan diet, but this is just to bring it to light in the most basic way.
Now that we’ve explained the basics of a few popular diets, let me put my two cents in. Firstly, I hate the word “diet”. The main reason for my disdain is that it assumes a certain period of time with a definitive start and finish. We’ve heard the term diet associated with many short term goals such as losing weight for a vacation or getting on a diet to improve blood work for a future doctor’s visit. Diets tend to end and the individual who may have seen some sort of benefit from said diet tends to very often not only regain the weight lost, but also gain additional weight. This is the concept of yo-yoing. Secondly, although all three diets mentioned above are distinctly different, their underlying reasons for efficacy are the same and those reasons are caloric restriction and caloric control. When an individual adopts a certain diet, they are automatically signing up for the idea that it will control their eating in some way. This dietary control, in my opinion should be learned through a pattern of behavioral change and adherence to a lifestyle conducive to ones goals.
To overemphasize my core ideology, sustainability and consistency are the most important factors of determining success in a nutrition and/or training plan as well as generally living a healthy lifestyle. Now, I don’t want to discourage people from diets as I’ve seen and heard of people having success with them, but in all honesty, its hard to really determine the sustainability of that success. Dieters are like gamblers, they almost always tell you about their successes, but almost never tell you about their losses. In addition, as temporary as diets seem to be, they are very difficult to measure and evaluate. Furthermore, diets tend to be too restrictive and demanding for an average person to comply consistently.
In my opinion, the best diet is no diet at all, but the understanding that food is fuel and you are the machine that requires it based on your own very specific needs. Speaking in generalities and trying to be all encompassing, I want to discuss some basic rules for nutritional success. Nutrition requires thought and active participation. If you don’t take an active interest in what you ingest on a daily basis, you open yourself up to chaos and inconsistency. I’ve heard every excuse in the book from “I travel too much for work to eat healthy”, to “its hard to eat healthy when you have small children at home”, to “I eat well most of the time just not on the weekends”, and the list goes on. I want to make something painfully clear, there is no excuse to poison yourself and furthermore, if you have a specific aesthetic or performance goal, fueling yourself to ensure success should be a priority just like work or child care.
Lets address the basics. Do you drink enough water? If your water intake is lower than two liters per day then you are not drinking enough water. Secondly, how much should you eat? If you are sedentary, I like to adhere to the following caloric baseline, consume 15-30 calories per kilogram of body weight, 15 being on the low end and 30 being on the high end. Try to consume at least .8-1 gram of protein per kilogram of body weight. Look for at least .5-1 gram of fat per kilogram of body weight. If we adhere to the basic rules of 4 calories per gram of protein, 9 calories per gram of fat, and 4 calories per gram of carbohydrate, then we should have enough math here to finish the equation. After you figure out your total caloric need, your total protein and total fat, the rest of your calories can come from carbs. Oh my god, that means if I am a 150 pound female, I’d have to eat almost 600 calories, or 140 grams of carbs a day? Yes madam, lets start there and see how you feel for at least 4-6 weeks before we freak out or constantly step on the scale every 3 minutes to see how much weight we’ve gained or lost. I would recommend using the scale only once every 2-3 weeks, but more importantly track things like energy levels, hunger, differences in sleep, and monitoring changes in how your clothes fit.
So what does a typical day of eating look like? I believe that you can consume all of your food needs in 3-5 meals per day. In my opinion, protein sources should include fish, poultry, eggs, whey isolate protein powder and some red meat. Eat all the vegetables you want and prepare them as simply as possible, usually steamed or very lightly sautéed in a healthy oil such as coconut or avocado. As far as carbohydrates, I usually recommend gluten free carb sources such as rice, potatoes, quinoa and fruits such apples and berries. Lastly, your fat should come mostly from your protein intake, but to ensure compliance to your consumption needs, you can add in nuts, nut butters, avocados and various oils as long as you stay within your parameters. Preparation should be simple, limited salt, only the oil needed to very lightly coat the cooking surface and you can experiment with spices to whatever dietary preferences you have. Just remember, the more deviation from simplicity, the more room for error and non-compliance. Portions of food should be controlled and Precision Nutrition has some great guidelines that you can look up online regarding portion visualization with great infographics.
Let me close out this discussion on basic nutrition with some final notes. I tend to adhere to the idea that personal nutrition is activity based. Most people entering into a new nutritional plan are novices that tend to be sedentary so the above recommendations are for those types of people. Obviously if you are an active person, who works out regularly, you would have to make some adjustments and if you need further guidance with that, feel free to email me. In addition, nutrition is experimental, meaning that you can make adjustments as you see fit based on the results you feel or don’t feel. In general, you have to stick to your nutritional guidelines for at least 3 months as a novice in order to truly see, track and analyze results. As you become more comfortable with a certain lifestyle change, you can make more specific adjustments to evoke new physical responses. Don’t forget that you’re human and will have moments of weakness and that is totally fine. If you practice at least 80% adherence to your new lifestyle, you should see some favorable changes within that three month realm. If you fall off the wagon, just remember to stay the course and continue striving towards fueling your goals. Eat out as infrequently as possible and control your food as much as you can by preparing your own meals or making the best choices when dining out. Don’t be afraid to ask restaurants for accommodations to your needs.
If you have any specific questions or would like to discuss this any further, I am happy to arrange a consultation so reach out to me via email at aram@4weeks2thebeach.com. Keep up the good work!