Jes Reynolds…Your Fitness Coach

In my previous post I talked about the importance of a nutrition plan that correlates with your fitness goals.  While fitness goals vary greatly depending on the individual and their personal experience I find that often nutrition strategies are generally the same from person to person no matter what the goal.

If you have a performance oriented goal, you should also develop a logical nutrition strategy that supports you in achieving it.  You can do this by developing a good understanding of what your goal requires ie: endurance, speed, or strength, and then creating a structured plan.  Planning ahead will cause you to feel more prepared and therefore will cause you to be more confident and facilitate higher levels of both fitness and athleticism.

Tips for Performance Nutrition Planning
1.  Goals should be clearly defined
2.  Nutrition strategy should correlate with goals
(i.e., acknowledge the difference between weight loss, endurance running, and sports nutrition plans)
3.  Performance nutrition can but does not always need to include supplements

Performance Nutrition Basics
There are always certain fundamentals of a performance oriented nutrition plan that are the same.  These basics can be adjusted based on the specific individual and their chosen activity.
Some important elements that come into play when considering performance nutrition are things like:

• Caloric Intake:  Having the proper caloric intake for your sport is crucial to optimum performance.  Some sports require a light, lean body while others require mass and size.
• Balance of Macronutrients:  In order to be most effective in fueling your body, meals should have the proper balance between carbohydrate, protein, and fat.  Another example of this includes the concept of carbohydrate loading or depleting.
• Nutrient timing:  Timing of meals throughout the day and in accordance with your daily training regimen will affect your ability to perform on a consistent basis.

Based on my knowledge and experience, I feel additional areas of importance include natural supplementation, sports drinks such as Gatorade and PowerAde & manufactured supplements such as those sold at GNC.    In my next article I will cover the basics on each of these topics and go over how each of these can be applied to a performance nutrition plan.

Football season has descended upon Ann Arbor and with it, a favorite fall tradition that everyone loves…tailgating!  To me, tailgating is sort of like a BBQ with footballs, Frisbees’ and an added ‘party’ element that makes everything more fun.  Last May, I offered tips for a healthy BBQ and since a tailgate presents similar healthy lifestyle challenges, I’ll thought I would suggest some healthy tailgating tips that keeps the fun while losing some of the calories and fat.

Of course, everyone has certain favorite tailgate dishes they just don’t want to give up.    When I host a tailgate,  I usually keep a few of my favorite ‘less than healthy’ dishes on the menu, ones I know people love, and then adjust the rest of the items as I’ll describe below.  Your favorites might range anywhere from sweets, to chili, to Irish Coffee…keep them on the menu and enjoy a sensible amount.  Just be sure to supplement your appetite with the other healthy alternatives you’ve also included in the spread.

I’ve taken the main courses, appetizers, snacks, and drinks I’ve seen most often and offered healthy alternatives in and attempt to reduce total calories and improve the overall healthfulness your tailgate.

Traditional Main Dishes

Doughnuts and Muffins
Subs
Beef Chili
Hot dogs, Burgers, & Brats

Appetizers
Swedish Meatballs

Snacks
Peanut butter and Chocolate Rice Crispy Treats
Guacamole and Chips

Drinks
Coffee
Hot Cocoa
Beer
Bloody Mary
Irish coffee

For early games, instead of doughnuts and muffins, try a breakfast burrito (egg whites & veggies) with salsa or serve whole wheat bagels with light cream cheese.  Sub sandwiches are generally pretty healthy but to improve their overall health content, opt for turkey or veggies subs instead of salami or roast beef and substitute mustard for mayo.  If you’re a chili connoisseur, try making white bean and chicken chili or turkey chili with extra veggies instead of traditional beef.

The healthy version of hot dogs, burgers, & brats is a cinch.  All beef hot dogs, sirloin burgers, and turkey brats with whole wheat buns are tasty and healthy alternatives.  Instead of Swedish meatballs drenched in fattening gravy, you can improve the overall healthfulness of them by using whole wheat bread crumbs, using ground sirloin or turkey and serving them with a light marinara sauce.

As far as snacks & dessert, it’s going to be tough to replace peanut butter rice crispie treats or even guacamole and chips with anything…I would focus on substituting traditional nacho chips with the baked version and using natural organic peanut butter for the crispie treats.

When it comes to alcohol, replace regular beer with light versions, make hot cocoa with skim milk, use light half & half in your coffee.  If you could consider an alcoholic drink ‘healthy’ a bloody mary is a good choice.  But remember to BE CAREFUL and stay hydrated.  Try to drink one glass of water for each alcoholic drink you consume.

There are a number of steps you should take to create a healthy meal plan that is in accordance with your goals.

Define Your Goals
As I’ve said before, fitness goals can range anywhere from qualifying for the Boston marathon, to weight loss, to fat loss, to building muscular endurance and strength.  It doesn’t matter what your goal is, the key is to define it and create a workout plan that leads you to achieve it.

The same is true for nutrition.  General rules of healthy eating can generate results, but having a nutrition strategy & creating healthy meal plans will cause you to reach higher levels of both fitness and athleticism.  Your nutrition plan should facilitate your achieving fitness goals.

Calories in vs. Calories Out
I find that while peoples’ approach to fitness & athletic goals is specific and well organized their approach to nutrition is often haphazard and very general.  Most people, regardless of their specific goal, rely on the old standard: fewer calories in, more calories out.  While caloric balance is a significant factor in weight/fat loss, there are more factors to consider.  These variables include: the bodies hormonal response to food, the thermic effect of food, blood sugar response to food, and macronutrient ratios of each meal.

If calories in versus calories out were the only factor required for weight loss, then you could eat anything you wanted and you would lose weight as long as you ate fewer calories than you burned each day.  Common sense tells us it isn’t true…you could eat gummy bears, snickers, and a coke three meals a day and still lose weight.  No way, not long term anyway!

SIDEBAR:

When I was 20 years old I absolutely loved fruit snacks.  I thought they were the perfect food.  Think about it, they have all the right qualities…sweet tasting, fat free, & low in calories.  I worked outside all day at a golf course in the summers so I decided to bring just a box of fruit snacks for my food for the entire day (yes I did this repeatedly).

RESULT: I got fatter even though I worked my butt off every day (and I feel sick thinking about it now).

General Nutrition Guidelines

This set of tips gives you an excellent set of foundational guidelines than can be adjusted to work in accordance with almost any fitness or athletic goal.  For anyone seeking general fitness results, I recommend using these basic guidelines as a starting place for developing an optimal nutrition plan.  In future posts, I plan to discuss the various elements of creating a plan specific to certain goals such as weight loss, fat loss, and athletic oriented goals.