Nutrition

The bedrock of a healthy diet is quality protein, fat, and vegetables

One service I offer to all of my full time training clients is free nutrition and health counseling. I offer this service free because it is a fundamental part of reaching fitness goals. Many people look to improve their appearance or fitness level through exercise alone. This can be a difficult path to take and usually results in slow progress or stagnation. The far more successful approach is to tackle both exercise and diet at the same time. If someone is unhappy with their appearance, fitness level, or health in general, I have found 100% of the time that they have room for improvement in their diet. When you know what to tweak and how to manage a diet, small changes can have profound effects on body composition and performance. The wonderful thing about putting effort into both diet and exercise at the same time is that they feed off each other and give you tangible results much more quickly than you would get from trying to only improve your exercise levels.

It is my firm belief that sound nutrition is MORE  important than a fitness program for both performance and health. An effective fitness program will undoubtedly have positive effects on muscle mass, fat loss, cardiovascular health, hormone levels, and blood lipids. However, there is only so much you can accomplish with exercise considering it represents at most about 4-8 hours out of your entire week. The effects of your diet, on the other hand, are virtually non stop. Our daily food choices form the backbone of our short and long term health, and have ramifications for our:

• Blood sugar
• Triglycerides
• Blood pressure
• Body fat
• Muscle mass
• Hormone release
• Energy and mood levels
• Sleep quality
• Workout and sports performance
• Libido
• Gut health
• Organ health (liver, kidney, heart, gall bladder)
• Aging
• Immune response to germs and disease

When taken together, these bullet points represent how healthy we are as individuals. If you have type 2 diabetes, high body fat, poor digestive health, low energy, poor sleep, and seem to get sick all the time, these are signs seriously poor health. There is no amount of exercise in the world that can repair many of these issues if a person’s diet remains poor. However, all of these ailments can be lessened or completely reversed through an overhaul in a diet.