The most important thing that’s going to help you achieve your fitness/performance goals, besides your training itself, is your diet.  Let’s face it, the way you eat on daily basis and all the foods you put in your body are going to affect your results.  If you don’t eat the right things, it’s going to affect the way you feel, the way you perform and the way you look.  When you think about it, there is not that many things that affect our whole life as much as the food we eat.  I’ve discussed before how our nutritional habits today are shittier than ever (for lack of a stronger term).  And I’m not exaggerating one bit; we get up in a hurry every morning and opt for the easiest, quickest breakfast option (muffin and a coffee, or something like that), and that’s if you’re one of the few who actually eat breakfast.  Lunch time isn’t any better since we didn’t take the time to bring a lunch to school or the office, so we go out and get fast-food, eat quickly and get back to work.  If you’re lucky, you’ll MAYBE eat a decent meal in at dinner with your family.  We always go for the quick fix and we don’t treat nutrition the way it should; we eat just because we’re hungry (instead of doing it to fuel your body) and give little to no importance to the quality of foods we ingest everyday.  But I digress.

The important thing to remember is that the way you fuel your body is THAT important in order to achieve your performance/fitness goals.  The key to fueling your body the right way is: PREPARATION.  You need to plan ahead.  The first step in planning is cooking!  The best way to plan is to cook in big batches so you have many meals prepared ahead for your week.  That way you avoid going for the quick fix because you already have food prepared for almost all your meals.  And if you don’t know how to cook…well, learn how to!

Eating healthy and foods that taste good at the same time is possible.  Most people associate eating healthy with boring, tasteless foods.  That couldn’t be further away from the truth.  In the last couple of years there has been many healthy cookbooks that were published.  One of my all-time favorite cookbook is Gourmet Nutrition, by John Berardi.  It’s a great book that gives you over a hundred great tasting recipes that are, for most pretty easy to make.

More recently (this week actually), my colleague Dave Ruel launched his Metabolic Cookbook.  I just took advantage of his launch price (which is 50% off, by the way!) to buy it, and honestly I haven’t tried any recipe yet, but I was completely blown away by the quality of this resource.  The recipes in the e-book are classified by categories (types of meat, breakfast, sides, snacks, etc).  It also includes over 10 bonuses going from strategies to use when eating out at the restaurant to a fat loss guide.  But more important than anything else, you have over 100 different recipes that are all so easy to make that even a dog can cook them!

Guess who’s cooking for me this week?

Seriously, it’s healthy eating made simple….real simple.  You just need to follow the instructions.  As my colleague Brian St. Pierre put it, the only downfall to his product is that most recipes might be a little too low-fat because he uses egg whites and low-fat dairies, but this is a very simple problem to solve by simply substituting with whole eggs and whole-milk dairies.  What’s really cool about this resource is that Dave is still offering Metabolic Cooking at the introductory price of 47$ (retail price is 97$!)  If you’ve been struggling to plan ahead your meals and just eat healthy foods that actually taste good, I strongly suggest you pick up a copy of Metabolic Cooking.  If you hurry up and order it before Friday, you’ll still get the introductory price where you save 50$!

P.S. Friday I will have a special bonus included on my weekly newsletter!  To make sure you get it, be sure to be subscribed to my newsletter (if you already signed up, no need to sign up again, you’ll receive my FREE bonus!)

We all know that nutrition is an essential part of any successful training program.  Whether it’s for muscle gain, fat loss, increase your strength or improve your performance in your sport, good nutrition needs to be a part of your plan if you want to achieve the desired results. And nutrition like everything else is evolving, but maybe in a not so good way.

It just seems to me that the more we know about nutrition, the more we try to complicate things in order to achieve our goals; low carb, high carbs, low fat, cycling, vegetarian, ketogenic and all types of diets.  We try to manipulate our protein/fat/carbs ratio perfectly to maximize our results and take all sorts of supplements to help give us an extra edge.  We just try to do too much and most of the time we just fall off our over-complicated plan in as quickly as a couple of weeks.  The truth is that it’s hard too keep up with a diet that requires you to calculate your macro-nutrient ratio, to count calories and weigh your food every meal and snack you eat.

How did we get there?  I’m no nutritional expert, although I probably know more than the average person because of my background and because of what I do for a living, but why does nutrition need to be that complicated?  Well, it doesn’t.  Good nutrition, no matter what your goal is, should be to eat as much natural, unprocessed foods as possible.  Our ancestors never had any weight or cholesterol problem because they were eating too much red meat or too many eggs!  And I’m pretty damn sure they never EVER counted calories either.  When did we lose the focus of eating foods that could be grown or hunted?  When did we start making lunch meats, crackers and cookies staples in our diet?  When did freakin’ cereals became the most popular breakfast?? Come on!

When did this become a healthy breakfast?

We count calories, carbs, fat and everything, but we eat incredible amounts of highly processed foods on a day-to-day basis.  That just doesn’t make sense to me! Next time you’re going to have a granola bar or something like that, do me a favor and look on the label.  Don’t even look at the protein, fat and carb content; just look at the list of ingredients.  You’ll be surprised at the number of preservatives and chemicals with weird names there is in there.

We need to take a step back and look at our lifestyle as a whole; we move less, we eat more processed food, we’re always looking for the quick fix when we’re hungry (we don’t spend time cooking and actually sit down to enjoy our meal).  And yet we’re counting calories, complaining about our obesity epidemic, arguing over what works best between low carb and low fat diets and wondering why there are more and more types of cancer and other types of disease that didn’t exist 100 years ago.  Really?!

When you’re eating a good balance of real, natural foods that can be grown (fruits, vegetables, whole grains) and hunted (all sorts of meat) every piece of the puzzle will fall in place.  Low-quality processed foods are nutrient-deficient and no matter how much you eat they never really fill you up, so it’s way too easy to over-eat and that’s when you need to start counting calories.  Real food on the other hand will always fill you up because of the high nutrient content and it is be very hard to over-eat.  Nutritionist Brian St. Pierre‘s recommendations has gone in that same direction for a long time; people need to start eating REAL food! (By the way guys, Brian’s blog is awesome and filled with great information about nutrition so make sure you check it out).  Buy real food, cook more, prepare in advance, enjoy your meals and try to limit the amount of processed foods you eat, and I guarantee you everything will fall into place.

Nutrition should really be THAT simple. Period.

Last week I came across an article on the internet about the obesity epidemic that has been going on for over a decade now in the world, and especially in North America.  To say that it was shocking would be an understatement.  It explains how people got this fat and how the ADA (American Dietetic Asoosication) is in big part responsible for this problem that is growing at an alarming rate.

The ADA is the association that controls the nutritional information that is given to the people, and no nutritional  recommendation can be made without the permission of the ADA.  So basically, they control what they want the poeple to know.  But it’s also very interesting that the ADA is sponsored by big companies such as Coca-Cola, Hershey’s and Kellogg’s just to name a few.  Yes, you read that right!  So this professional unbiased association is suppose to tell us what to eat?  Are you kidding me?! 

But wait, the best is still to come.  The ADA actually has a section on their website that invites companies to sponsor the ADA! 

That’s not it.  This is my favorite part; the article goes into detail as to when this obesity epidemic started and the following graph is presented showing a drastic increase in obesity and overweight people in 1977 in the United States.

Weird, huh?  But what happened in the United Stated in 1977 in order to create a drastic increase in overweight people? 

Are you ready for this?

The article sites that in 1977 the ADA basically changed their nutritional recommendations to the following:

- Eat more starch

-Eat more carbohydrates

- Saturated fats are bad

Does that sound familiar? Is that what we have been led to believe what “good nutrition” is by the medias and most of the nutritional information easily accessible?

If you still think that’s right, time for a reality check:

If this is considered good nutrition why does obesity, diabetes, all sorts of cancer and the like are growing at an alarming rate ever since?

How did our ancesters never had all these same problem while they weren’t concerned about eating fatty meat and definitely weren’t eating as much carbohydrates?

If you haven’t read the article, I strongly suggest you do so.  It’s literally a slap in the face of common nutritional recommendations and how we’ve been wrongfully informed on nutrition as a society for the last decades.  Check it out HERE.