I can’t overstate the importance of proper nutrition, no matter what your daily life looks like. It doesn’t matter if you work out or not, if you’re a professional athlete or not, sit behind a desk all day long or not. Nutrition is important for every single person because it basically determines how your body and brain are functioning throughout the day. You’re not into working out? Alright, well your brain needs the right nutrients too. It’s such a big misconception that nutrition is only for the professional athletes or the avid gym-goer. If you feed your body the wrong nutrients, how can you expect your brain to function to the best of its capabilities? It’s not like your brain takes whatever ”good” nutrients you put into your body while your muscles, organs and other parts of the body get the ”bad” ones, it doesn’t work that way. Depending on how ”in-tune” you’re with your body, you will definitely feel a difference when you have a ”bad” day of eating, maybe not today but definitely tomorrow and possibly the next day too.

As we all know, there’s no real right or wrong way of going about your nutrition, because it’s yours and you should know what works for you and your lifestyle. But no matter what nutrition guide or diet you follow there will be similarities because somethings are universal for everybody. One of those things is the nutrients that we get into our body.

What to eat?

Whole foods

Let’s start off with the most important thing here, nutritious and whole foods. For anyone that’s chasing better energy throughout the day, better brain or muscle function or even just a better physique, whole foods are the first and most important step in that process. Why? Whole foods offer the most amount of nutrients per serving. Let’s take broccoli for example, everyone knows how healthy broccoli is, because of the nutrient content it holds, whereas everyone understands that generic cereal or ice cream doesn’t contain any of that. If you think about those 2 examples, we can also agree that the whole food (broccoli) makes us feel a lot more satisfied than the cereal or ice cream. There are a couple of different reason for that but the main 2 are the Nutrional content and the impact it has on our blood sugar level. Without getting into sugar levels too much (you can read more about it here), we know that the more sugar goes into your body, the more your body is going to keep asking for it. That’s why whole-foods are so important because the offer a lot of micronutrients* and are in most cases very low in sugar.

Food you enjoy & creating staples

The best diet in the world is the one that you’re able to stick to whenever life inevitably happens, because it will. We have to find certain foods, meals and a way of life that we enjoy living because that is what we can hold onto when life gets tough or changes happen. Think about going through a breakup, travelling, raising kids, ever-changing work schedules and so many more daily examples that can throw your nutrition off if you’re not prepared for it.

I always like to advice people to create 9 staple foods and even meals for themselves. 9 foods split equally over the 3 macronutrients (protein, fat and carbohydrates). For example:

Protein staples: chicken, eggs and fish

Fat staples: avocados, peanut butter and almonds

carbohydrate staples: sweet potato, blue berries and any vegetable

With just these 9 staple foods you’re able to create so many different meals. Make sure these 9 items end up in your shopping cart whenever you go shopping and it will set you up well whenever life happens. (plus, it will help you save money when you don’t buy a lot of stuff you don’t really need)

Macronutrients, what nutrient does what?

For the purpose of this blog, it’s important to understand 3 things about macronutrients: One, fat and protein are the only 2 macronutrients that are necessary for survival, carbs are not. Second, fat and carbohydrates are out only 2 fuel sources, protein is a building block. Third, carbs are our most ready form of energy, that’s what the body will turn to first, then fat.

When we realize what the nutrients in our food are actually used for it becomes a lot easier to understand and ”schedule” our meals and nutrient intake. Which we’ll get into during next week’s blog.

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