Here are a list of three things you can do today to improve your nutrition depending on your goals:
Eating Clean:
- Start each meal with a salad, with either no dressing or olive oil & vinegar
- No more fast food
- Don’t eat anything from a packet
Losing weight:
- Slow down eating, so you can fully enjoy the food and really sense when you’re body is satiated
- Don’t eat because you’re bored
- Drink a full glass of water before you eat your meal.
Gaining weight:
- Eat fast
- Drink a protein shake after each meal
- Eat more healthy fats and carbs. Add coconut oil to protein shakes.
Being more mindful:
- Use My Fitness Pal and log everything you eat for the next week
- Pick a diet/nutrition plan and stick to it for at least four months
- Use a calorie calculator to determine what you actually need to eat every day
Performance:
- Increase carbohydrate intake around workout time
- Don’t be in a caloric surplus
- Increase your intake of omega-3s
General Health:
- Increase vegetable intake
- Reduce/eliminate refined sugars
- Increase intake of fermented foods, e.g., yoghurt, sauerkraut, kimchi, pickles, kombucha
For more comprehensive steps to improving nutrition, I’ll be posting more articles and blog posts in the future. For the most part, any diet will work, this is evident with the amount of diets out there and almost all have successful representatives. The one thing that doesn’t work, is failing to complete the nutrition plan or changing diets every month.
Consistency is the key to any shift in eat habits and the biggest tip I can give anybody, is to focus their efforts on the long term. There’s no point starving yourself for a week in the hopes to lose a bunch of weight. It took a lifetime of actions to get you to where you are today, it’ll take a lot more effort to bring you to where you want to go. Forget the short term and focus on the long term.