One of the biggest hurdles that most people face when looking to get leaner or increase their sports performance is that they don’t supply their body with an adequate amount of nutrients for optimal results.
When you under eat your or are malnourished by eating nutrient poor foods instead of nutrient rich foods, your body literally starts to eat itself up to keep ticking over.
It will pile on fat, stress you out, reduce your ability to concentrate and problem solve and basically make you feel like shit.
Not a nice way to be and definitely not something you should settle for especially if it’s something completely within your control to change.
One way of getting on top of this is to simply add in 1-2 snacks every day to your daily routine.
To make it clear, the idea of adding in these snacks is to raise the nutrient content (protein, vitamins, water, fibre, carbs, etc.) of your nutrition habits. Therefore adding in a scone or mars bar and saying you’ve started snacking doesn’t count as they provide no real benefit in terms of nutrients and there are far better choices to make you healthier, leaner and perform better.
Here’s what we recommend to our clients as a legitimate snack- 1 piece of fruit and 1 piece of protein.
This combination provides a much better balance of nutrients to support your goals.
The fruit provides:
- Vitamins
- Minerals
- Fibre
- water
- Carbohydrates
The protein source obviously provides protein. Protein plays many important roles including:
- Muscle building
- Repairs muscles from training
- Increases satiety- fills you up so your not hungry
- Boosts your metabolism- this is called the THERMIC EFFECT OF FOOD (TEF). Protein is very tough for your body to break down so your body has to use more energy to do it
- Enzyme, hormonal and many other functions
Compare that to your scone.
There’s a lot of benefit in that simple little snack isn’t there. The best part about this is that it’s super simple to incorporate into your eating routine and should take less than a minute to prepare.
- apple and cottage cheese
- Banana and a protein bar
- A kiwi and a handful of nuts- now we’ve added in some healthy fats aswell
- A protein shake and a mandarin
These are all simple and can be stored in your car, at the office or where ever else you might find yourself. You could also add in other protein sources such as chicken but this a bit more preparation so probably isn’t the best way to start developing this habit. Stick to sources that are convenient and don’t take any time to prepare. Once you have the habit developed feel free to experiment.
Start today guys and increase the over nutrient quality of your food with this one simple strategy and your body will thank you for it.
Let us know your thoughts or other strategies that work for you in getting in high quality nutrients without it being a big challenge.
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