If you haven’t found about a million sites talking about nutrition – what to eat to get big, what to eat to lose wait, what to eat to maintain, what to eat to prevent illness, etc., etc, well then you haven’t discovered Google yet 🙂

I’m pretty sure that you can find hundreds of meal plans that will all claim to do the same thing but are all structured differently.  So who do you believe?  My advise is to believe science, believe someone you trust and then believe in yourself.  Here I will introduce you to the very basics of nutrition and from there its up to you but what I would not do is go to some bodybuilding site somewhere and try to adopt the exact diet of someone who looks like you want to look like.  Once you are armed with just a little bit of knowledge you can hopefully have a conversation with someone that you know and trust who has some experience with nutrition – either someone who has lost or gained weight (friend or family member) or someone who has helped someone else out, maybe a personal trainer.  If you don’t have anyone like that, then build on what I provide below, learn more about the science.  Then, its not hard to experiment on yourself.  Everyone is different and although some extremes may hold true for everyone (eat 800 calories a day and you’ll likely lose weight) you won’t know what is best for your health until you try something out.  Remember, its about you you feel first and foremost and how you look is just a side effect.  If you’re focused on nutrition because you want to look a certain way then you haven’t quite grasped the concept of the wellness vectors just yet.

Since I’m only covering a small subset of even the basics, I feel obligated to point out sites like Choose My Plate and books like Essentials of Strength Training and Conditioning for the full meal deal (so to speak.)  This post hopefully will give you some of the basic vocabulary and convince you that it’s not really all that complicated – at least if your only interest is increasing your knowledge to the point where you can make better decisions about what you put into your body and/or have more intelligent conversations with people that actually study this tuff in depth.

NUTRIENTS:  Nutrients are what you take in as food or liquid and provide the body with energy.  They’re generally categorized as macronutrients and micronutrients.  Macronutrients include proteins, fats, carbohydrates and depending on your reference, water.  Micronutrients include vitamins and minerals. Let’s spend just a few sentences on each of these and highlight what’s really important for further reading.

• Proteins:  So everyone has heard of proteins,  they have several roles in the body however the one that gets the most attention, at least for us weight lifters, is tissue repair.  Their other contributions around metabolism, the endocrine system (hormones), etc., are also important but you can read about those in one of the links above (or one of many other resources out there).
• Carbohydrates:  I think carbs are the least understood by the general population probably since there are so many totally opposite opinions out there on what you should be taking in for carbs both in terms of amount and source.  I think most people understand that carbs are a source of energy during exercise, and that is a fact, but they’re also pretty important to brain health as well.  Good Carbs and Bad Carbs are a couple of phrases that are thrown around a lot and rather than try to list examples or direct you to websites/books other than the ones I list above just use common sense; if something has been processed or is loaded with sugar or high in calories and low in micronutrients it’s likely a Bad Carb – sometimes called an Empty Carb.  If you find yourself debating whether something is good or bad, chances are its bad 🙂
• Fats:  Fats have a really bad reputation and if you read books like Grain Brain you can learn a whole lot more about what, how and why that is.  For the purpose of this blog though, know that you must get a certain amount of fat in your diet or you will not reach your goals whatever they are. Fats are a fantastic energy source, they are critical to cellular turnover and they are the medium by which many vitamins are delivered. The key is to understand good fat versus bad fat but that is actually really simple.  As with carbs, common sense here should prevail.  Really the only good fats are from oils, nuts, seeds and fish.  Pretty much everything else has little if any value to your body so lay off the sweets, the cremes, the butters, etc. – well unless you are a huge fan of Grain Brain which I’m not bad mouthing at all, it’s just that I’m not willing to try some of the high fat diet suggestions made there.
• Vitamins and Minerals: I’ve read a lot of materials on these, and other supplements, and will undoubtedly have a blog or two in the future with more focus here, for now suffice to say that (a) yes you need these things and (b) if you eat a balanced diet you are probably just fine already.  If you’re just starting out learning about nutrition, learn about this last.

FOOD SOURCES:  So I’m going to skip discussing details on food sources for the macronutrients as the links I provided already cover that well.  Here are some of the big hitters though so you can think a bit about what might be on your plate to make the ratios I’m about to cover:

• Proteins: Fish, Meats, Dairy, Eggs, Legumes
• Carbohydrates: Grains, Fruits, Vegetables
• Fats: Nuts, Seeds, Oils, Fish, Meat, Dairy

MACRONUTRIENT RATIOS: When deciding what to eat obviously you need to have a goal in mind.  Just as important in reaching that goal obviously not only is what you eat but how much of it you eat.  When you eat also turns out to be pretty important depending on what you are trying to accomplish. For all of the prescribed diets out there for either losing weight, getting cut, packing on mass, whatever – I think your best bet is to follow these simple steps:

1. Identify the healthy foods that you already enjoy
2. Determine your caloric intake (there are a million online calculators you can google to find this)
3. Figure out your macronutrient ratio (more on this in just a second)
4. Decide how you track your intake so can adjust in real-time
5. Eat/Track/Repeat

I can tell you this works for me and it has worked for many, many other people out there as well.  I think the reason it works is because you will learn about what you are doing as you plan your meals and that knowledge automatically vests you in the process.  More importantly, you are not following a recipe that was created for the masses in order to make a profit; you are changing your eating habits.  That’s what will make this work and that’s what will make this last.

So, what formula should use you use to correctly and accurately come up with the optimal mathematical ratio of macronutrients that will deliver the results that you are looking for?

Luckily its just not that hard!  There are, again, a wide variety of opinions out there and I’ll point to just one, here to get you started reading about them.  Honestly, from the various readings I’ve done I ended up going with the recommendation from my trainer which is 20/50/30 (fats/carbs/protein) and I’ll write about the huge success I had with that ratio in another post.  My goal, by the way, is not uncommon and is generally very difficult for someone who has been training for years – to preserve or gain lean muscle while decreasing body fat percentage at the same time.  And I did it using this ratio and a really well put together program from my trainer.  I’ll talk more about that, along with tools for tracking/adjusting along the way in another post….