5 Nutrition Tips
1. Improve your food environment. This one is a challenge for even the most motivated athletes but the bottom line is if the food is in the house, you’re probably going to eat it. Start being healthy by shopping healthy. When you store food in the house, keep sweets, desserts and “foods of questionable nutrition” to a shelf in the pantry or a single cabinet. Don’t be afraid to put some foods “out of sight” by using cabinets you don’t commonly look in. I’m not saying to never purchase these foods—just to be smarter about what you bring into your household food supply and to what extent you expose yourself to it. Your food environment is not only in the home, and you must consider where you eat out as well. Consider eating at “healthier” establishments using some of the tips below as a guide but don’t forget to allow yourselves some leeway in what you eat and where.
2. Color—eat more foods that are naturally Green, Red, Yellow, Orange, Blue, and Purple. The chemicals that make these foods so colorful are also being shown to have many significant health benefits in our bodies (especially for athletes). In addition, many of the foods that meet the “colorful” rule are also high in vitamins, minerals, fiber and carbohydrates. Here’s a short list of foods to consider keeping in the house: broccoli, spinach, romaine lettuce, strawberries, tomatoes, cherries, apples, grapefruit, cantaloupe, squash, carrots, sweet potatoes, blueberries, blackberries, grapes, eggplant, and plums.
3. Better Breakfasts—breakfast is the most important meal of the day. When you wake up in the morning your liver glycogen is lower, your metabolism is slower, your body is craving energy. Stop thinking of breakfast as being a huge multi-food kitchen disaster. Instead, go simple, a quick smoothie, a banana, peanut butter on a slice of bread, all quick simple and easy could constitute a first “early meal”. Just remember that you need to eat frequently throughout the day (every 2-3 hours is ideal). When you are designing a healthy breakfast, especially for longer training days, think complex carbohydrate (oatmeals, pancakes, waffles, granola), fruit, and healthy additives like wheat germ, flax seed, berries, and nuts. All of these foods can be used to make a powerful healthy breakfast.
4. Keep a Food Diary—Want to be healthier? Want to lose a little weight? Simply keep track of what you eat! Most people seem to know “what” to eat; it’s more a matter of getting them to eat it that is the challenge. Keeping a food diary helps you stay honest; it holds you accountable to yourself. The frequency with which you keep a food diary (i.e. daily, weekly, or periodically) depends on you (or your coach/dietitian). Researchers from Kaiser Permanente's Center for Health Research kept tabs on 1,685 overweight and obese adults (men and women), whose average weight was 212 pounds. The researchers encouraged participants to adhere to a reduced-calorie, DASH eating plan and asked them record their daily food intake and exercise minutes. After 20 weeks, the average weight loss was 13 pounds per person. But researchers discovered something else; the more participants recorded what they ate, the more weight they lost in the end. Participants who did not keep a food diary lost about 9 pounds over the course of the study, while those who recorded their food intake six or more days per week lost 18 pounds—twice as much as those who didn't track any food!
5. Stick to a simple healthy message—eat less saturated fat (solid at room temperature), eat smaller meals every 2-3 hours, eat more fiber (25-25 grams per day), eat lean protein, eat more fruits and vegetables, consume less simple sugar—these are “healthy” themed messages that should form the foundation of your efforts going into 2010. Try and stay away from getting into the technical and “cutting edge” nutrition topics if you haven’t given significant efforts to improving your foundation of nutritional fitness. For example, it’s silly to worry about the ergogenic effects of caffeine if you skip breakfast. It’s useless to try and gain any benefit from eating a gluten-free diet if you aren’t eating enough carbohydrate to perform at a high level. If you feel you are ready to dive in deep with the latest nutritional science topic, do it with an expert by your side—it’ll make sifting through the science more enjoyable, and hopefully more practical.
Cheers!!!
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