Nutritional Counselling
Improving your diet takes time and energy. But the benefits are worth it!
Nutritional counselling is a big part of what I do as a trainer. Constantly monitoring food diaries and tweaking your nutrition is what I need to do to help you make the changes you desire in your body composition.
If you really want to change your body composition you need to focus on your diet. We are exposed to so much processed, modified and mutated ‘foods’ our bodies don’t know what to do with them. Eating healthy takes a lot of education and a lot of effort! There are so many misconceptions surrounding foods that I often spend the first few sessions with a client focusing a lot on their nutrition and teaching them how to eat. Eating to be lean is very different from a diet. I truly believe that ‘diet’ is a ‘4 letter word’ and I never put my clients on a low calorie restrictive diet.
Eating to be healthy and lean requires healthy real foods, eaten regularly and in smaller amounts. Don’t buy into the new ‘larger sizes’ or ‘supersize me’ mentality. You can’t get away with it… I can’t get away with it! It is just harmful to your body and so not worth it. A healthy fit body knows what to do with the food consumed and learns how to store it in the muscle to be used as energy and not convert it to fat to store it in the most undesirable place!
Think of your metabolism like a wood stove… When you wake up the stove has gone out, so you need to put some wood (food) into it to get it burning. If you put too much wood (food) in, you will smother it and the fire will go out as it can’t accommodate too much wood at one time (read: store fat!). If you put the wood in and then leave it for too long, the fire will go out and get cold (metabolism stops). To keep the wood stove burning optimally you must feed it a log of wood (smaller meals) very regularly. That way the stove keeps burning which means you are burning more calories and that your body is ready to receive its next meal. Remember, if the stove goes out, it takes a lot of work to get it burning again!
All my clients receive nutritional counseling with their personal training sessions. This is an on-going process which usually needs to be tweaked periodically. I highly recommend that each client fills out a detailed food diary and shows it to me at each session. That way you are accountable to yourself as well as someone else for what you put in your mouth.
Changing your eating habits, changes your body composition!
Here are some of my favourite nutrition tips I give to all my clients to help improve their eating habits;
Keep a food diary - write down everything you eat, it is a proven tool to help aid a weight loss program.
Hydrate! Drink ½ your body weight, in pounds, in ounces of water a day - let’s face it, the old ‘drink 8 glasses of water a day’ can’t be applicable to my 95lb client and my 300lb client? You need to drink according to your weight. The more body mass you have, the more water you need.
Eat breakfast everyday - It really is the most important meal of the day and studies show that you drastically decrease your chances of being obese just by this simple act.
Eat small meals every 2 to 3 hours - snacking is great (provided the snacks are healthy!), it helps keep our metabolisms going and helps regulate blood sugars so that our hormones don’t get out of whack and tempt us to make bad choices.
Don’t late night snack - this is a tough one for some people, but end of day snacking when you are sitting on the couch and then heading to bed is most likely going to end up in your fat stores.
Eat your veggies - and lots of them. In all my years as a trainer, the clients who had the most success grew to love and eat lots of vegetables.
Fast a minimum of 12 hours every evening. Stop eating by 7pm and then don’t eat again until 7am the next morning. Your body needs time with an empty stomach so it can focus on other things beside digestion.
These are just a few of the tips I believe will help you improve your overall nutrition and help you shed some of those unwanted extra pounds. Improving your diet takes time and energy. But the benefits are worth it!