There’s a lot of misinformation out there about nutrition. Eat this. Don’t eat that.
Here’s the deal: There are rarely, if ever, any concretes in life. And while there are a select few things you shouldn’t ever eat (paint chips, home insulation, etc.) nothing truly edible should be completely off limits. When you take something off the market, it means you have to consciously think about that food to avoid it. Whenever you do that, it only serves to make it harder to evade.
I’ll let you in on a little secret: It’s all about moderation. If you haven’t started eating right, that’s the first step. But cutting anything out of your diet forever is the wrong way to start. It’s intimidating and off putting. A bowl of ice cream every once in a while isn’t going to hurt you. Just follow these easy steps for a better diet, and don’t sweat the little things:
Balance
One of the key aspects to any healthy lifestyle—both for your training and your diet—is balance. Like I said earlier, nothing is going to hurt you exponentially as long as it makes up the proper part of your life overall. The USDA got it right when they changed the food pyramid to the myplate system: Your meals should be about one fourth vegetables, fruits, grains and protein, along with one serving of dairy. The figurative size of the plate changes for the individual’s needs. It’s simple and easy to visualize.
Change
If you do anything repeatedly in the same fashion, it’s bound to get old after a while. The same goes for your diet. Boredom in terms of the food you eat is an easy thing to avoid. Even if you have some sort of major allergy, such as to gluten, there are still enough options on the market where you can plausibly create enough variety to keep your body satisfied and stay interested enough to stay away from junk foods.
Proportion
Obviously our country not only has a problem with eating the wrong foods, but with eating too much in general. This is, once again, a fairly easy problem to correct. If you think you’ve been overeating, it’s time to take a good look at your lifestyle and get a rough idea of how much you should be eating. Your size, your natural metabolism and your activity level all affect the amount of calories you burn in a given day.
Plausibly, if you follow those guidelines, your eating habits are pretty solid. There are a few tricks you can remember to keep your diet even sharper, however.
If you haven’t already, switch to whole grains. There’s almost no downside to eating something made with whole grains instead of something made with refined grains.
Next, I’d make sure to pick the low-fat version of virtually all dairy products when you’re at the grocery store next time. These are, for the most part, better for you, and the processes to remove the fat are very efficient and safe.
If you’ve done all of these things and are still looking to improve, the next step I would take is to eat less red meat, ultimately limiting your consumption to a couple times a week. Red meat contains more saturated fat and many types are frequently heavily processed, which makes them less nutritionally complete than meats like chicken and fish. While the skeptics are still numerous, studies have consistently linked red meat to cancer and heart disease. Those aren’t diseases you want to mess with. Like I said previously, don’t feel bad about eating a steak or a hamburger once in a while. Some bodybuilders have been known to eat big macs occasionally (sometimes splurging is actually good for a diet—it shocks your system into retaining a higher metabolic rate). It’s all about limiting the frequency with which you do so.
And finally, before you make any major changes to the way you live your life, get an accurate idea of what your diet should look like. Follow through for a couple weeks, until you know you can adhere to that sort of lifestyle. Then, if and when you ultimately change your activity level, you will only have to play with that variable. Getting overwhelmed is a big problem for people who are looking to become healthier—it’s a huge commitment! Take it slow.
Want more tips about how Brett stays fit as a fiddle? Email him your burning questions at bbachman@wisc.edu.
