It seems like it’s been a while since I last wrote a post about nutrition.  I am no nutritionist and that’s why and I don’t write about it all that often.  But we have to face the fact that nutrition has a huge impact on your training, no matter what your goal is (performance, muscle mass, fat loss, etc).  Nutrition and sleep are probably the 2 biggest factors that affect our recovery.

But what’s good nutrition?  For the most part, I think that most people have a pretty good idea of what eating healthy means.  But I also think that we get caught too often in the macro-nutrient breakdown pitfall.  What I mean by that is that we focus too much on the number of calories, ratio of protein, carbs and fat contained in each food we eat.  I wrote a complete blog post a little while ago about that subject.  Not to toot my own horn, but if you haven’t read, you might want to; I think it was pretty eye-opening for a lot of people.

Let’s Stop Over-Complicating Nutrition

The most important thing in eating healthy (and also the thing that is the most overlooked factor) is to have a plan!  If good nutrition is about eating more natural food that are not transformed food products (read: everything that comes in a bag or a box), thin about what that implies:

- Food at most restaurants and take out place have ingredients that have been conserved in a fridge for days and even weeks, and therefore need a good amount of preservatives to not go bad.

- Trying to find a quick fix when you really hungry and haven’t planned anything for lunch will almost always lead you to poor food choices

- Skipping breakfast, and eating a small lunch will always lead you to over-eating at dinner or at night

My point, if you haven’t figured it out yet, is that it’s not so much about what specific food you eat, but how you plan your meals.  You’re not going to be able to eat healhty if you never cook yourself (read: buy frozen dinner and the like).  You’re not going to be able to have healthy nutritional habits if you never pack a lunch for work or for school.

The biggest mistake you can make in my opinion is to leave your house with your hands empty and not knowing what you’re going to eat during the day when you’re going to be away from home for 8-12 straight hours.  You’re setting yourself up for failure, no matter how good your intents are.  Even with the biggest will power in the world, you’re not going to be able to maintain good eating habits over a long period of time if you never plan ahead.  Of course it does require some time, some effort, quite a bit of forward thinking (always thinking what all of your meals are going to be for the next day) and YES, you will have to set your alarm clock at least 15-30 minutes earlier in the morning.  But what’s more important to you?  Your long-term health or the extra 15 minutes of sleep you get 5 days a week?

Wanna get 3 reports on speed training, soft-tissue work and shoulder injury prevention for FREE?! Simply enter your information below!

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!)