The Framing stage of the everyday athletes system is based largely on two pillars - nutrition and recovery. This post is about that first pillar: nutrition.
Nutrition is such a complex topic that I have to narrow the definition in order to talk about it properly. So in the context of everyday athletes, weâre going to talk about managing what you consume in order to optimize health, performance, and body composition.
Diets
We have to spend a bit of time talking about the elephant in the room - âdiets.â
The terrain of pop culture nutrition is riddled with hundreds of fad diets that each cherry pick bits of science and history to argue their case. Every one claims to be the best and correct way to get to optimal nutrition or body composition.
The fact of the matter is that everything reasonable works. Any type of restriction of calories, focus on whole foods, or exclusion of foods will result in changes in your body as a result of this change in intake.
But rather than try to dig into specific diets and their rules, I'm going to attempt to distill what makes them successful so that you can figure out what works best for you.
Direction
Whenever you begin to look at changing your nutrition, you need to start by understanding the direction you want to go in. Without knowing the end result you want, you canât make informed changes. I generally split nutritional goals of this kind into five categories:
Weight Loss - this is the most common goal in my experience. People have too much body fat and want it gone.
Weight Gain - following close behind loss, there are some people who are too skinny and want to put on muscle.
Recomposition - many people find their size and weight to be acceptable, but donât like the way they look in the mirror. This is a combination body fat loss and muscle gain.
Health - this is a goal that can be combined easily with any other. The focus here is to improve your intake to optimize the way your body functions and to prevent disease.
Performance - this goal is a specialized one for people that have specific physical tasks they want to succeed at. Physically demanding jobs or sports will often need you to focus on this.
Think about yourself right now, and pick out one or two of these that you think are your core focus. As you progress with training and nutrition, you will naturally move from goals 1 or 2 to 3, and eventually to 4 and 5.
Identification
We begin our journey with food identification - meaning being able to look at a food and tell if it will move us in the direction we want or not.
The first thing to do when it comes to identifying foods is to take note of any specific types of foods you have allergies or poor reactions to - nuts, gluten, spicy foods, whatever it may be, real or perceived. Eliminate any intake that causes reactions, or makes you feel bad. There will always be more options.
Once that is out of the way, look at what I call the dominating factor of the food. There are three such factors:
Nutrient dominant foods are things like fruits, vegetables, eggs, beans, and organ meats. These are the foods that contain lots of health-promoting vitamins and minerals, often decent amounts of fiber, and lower calories by volume alone.
Macro dominant foods are those with lower nutrient levels but high levels of a specific macronutrient (carbohydrates, fats, and protein). These are things like meats, bread, pasta, potatoes, and oils.
Energy dominant foods are dense with calories, either spread across multiple macros or due to added sugar or fat. While lots of boxed or bagged foods like crackers and chips fall into this category, so do a lot of pastries, baked goods, and even dairy.
For completenessâ sake, let me just mention the idea of âtoxic foodsâ. There are very few foods that are legitimately toxic - puffer fish, mercury laden fish, e. coli covered spinach - most of them are simply contaminated. True food stuffs do not contain âtoxinsâ despite what late night juice cleanse commercials tell you.
Identification is the step of education - you will need to spend some time to learn about the foods you eat. At a high level, the best foods you can eat are whole foods - if it has a nutrition label with 10 or more ingredients, itâs probably not made up of whole foods. For everything you eat, look up some information. Learn to recognize the dominant factors in foods through something like this site, google, or a food logging app.
Mapping
Mapping is where we start to actually make changes to our diet. You have one or more directions you want to move to and you know how to identify foods by category. So letâs see where we should place our focus.
If your direction is weight loss, you should steer clear of energy dominant foods and focus strongly on nutrient dominant foods. Losing weight is a battle between the external and the internal - simple energy balance vs human psychology. Nutrient dominant foods are often bulky, full of fiber, and low in energy. This will help reduce your energy balance while preventing excessive hunger.
If your direction is weight gain, you should focus on energy dominant foods. Gaining weight is a challenge just like losing weight. Often people who struggle to gain weight have problems feeling too full. To this end, consuming less bulky nutrient dominant foods will allow you to increase your energy balance and gain weight.
If your direction is recomposition, you have a choice: either focus on weight loss and weight gain in repeated cycles of 4-6 weeks; or emphasize both nutrient dominant and macro dominant foods, at the exclusion of energy dominant foods. The idea here is to have a fairly stable energy balance, with it fluctuating daily by small amounts due to what you consume. Energy dominant foods will likely skew your balance far too much.
If your direction is health, you should be focusing as much as possible on nutrient dominant foods, with a spread of macro dominant foods filling in the rest of the diet. By âspreadâ, I mean that each macronutrient should get somewhat equal focus - consume roughly the same amounts of carbohydrate dense foods as protein dense foods as fat dense foods.
Finally, for performance goals, you will need a more specialized diet. Often times you will need to focus on one specific macronutrient in the macro dominant foods in addition to energy dominant foods, but thereâs a lot of variety. At a general level, if you want to perform better when moving quickly or moving for a long time, focus more on carbohydrates or fats, but if you want to increase strength, skew more towards protein. Performance diets will always need to be fine tuned and fiddled with over time to ensure your consumption is helping you improve.
Nutrient Timing
Nutrient timing, or when you actually eat, can impact different goals. Itâs another variable to manipulate if you want more, but it shouldnât be a major focus.
When gaining weight or improving performance, eating many smaller meals during the day might help you eat the amounts you need to. Maybe add 2 meals between the typical breakfast, lunch, and dinner and keep those original three smaller.
When improving performance, you will need to consider your intake before and after training and competitions to adequately fuel your activities and to help you recover from them.
When losing weight or working towards recomposition, removing snacking, especially after dinner, is very beneficial. Having a long block of uninterrupted time without eating (from dinner to breakfast) is popular with the intermittent fasting crowd, and some even go so far as to eat only two meals a day in order to increase the length of time spent not eating.
Conclusions
I'm not gonna tell you what to eat or what not to eat. That's individual. But I want to give you tools to solve the equation for yourself. The tools of identification and nutrient timing.
Focus on identification as much as possible. Donât worry about numbers or amounts. Eat intuitively in ways that help you achieve your goals.
Achieving nutritional goals is about winning a fight with the primitive part of you that desires food to protect against times of famine. Use any tricks available to you.
Like all aspects of training, this is about practicing skills - getting good at identifying foods you need for your goals, getting good at filling your meals with those identified foods, and even getting good at timing your meals to fit your goals.