Having regular meals can help you structure your day, and fuels you for whatever you’re doing whether work, activity, exercise, recovery etc. You need nutrients for energy and eating healthy, nutritious wholefoods, rather than processed takeaway foods helps. If you do miss breakfast, you’re more likely to get hungry earlier, and you’re probably going to reach for something quick and easy which can mean processed snacks, high in sugar.
If you eat a nutritious breakfast of complex carbohydrates which are slow release energy, this will help sustain you throughout the morning. Especially in comparison to only having a coffee which is an artificial energy or stimulant contributing to another crash thus creating a cycle of reaching for another quick fix… Eating regular good meals, means less of those big highs and lows. For example you won’t get home ravenous and then eat all those kilojoules for dinner.
You might find that even though you eat more food, you actually eat less kilojoules overall because you’re not eating those energy dense quick fixes. Also, by keeping your energy levels more regular throughout the day, you’re less likely to crave sugary foods. It will also help with results in the gym ie weight loss or weight gain.
It can take time to reinforce these new habits but meal prepping for a couple of weeks can help you get into the daily habit of consuming regular meals. Don’t let missing one meal, make you fall off the wagon and give up. It happens, we all miss meals or get hungry or go out and eat takeaway and that’s perfectly fine.
Educating clients on healthy balanced nutrition is always going to be the way to go and you can get a lot of great results from just educating on kilojoules in, kilojoules out, the five food groups etc. Treat your client as an individual because their needs are going to be completely different to other clients. So work with them on what they’re going to be able to implement regularly on a regular basis and if you get them focusing on those healthy food groups and eating good quality food and they’re going to see all the results they want.
The confusion comes from what they’re going to see on social media and the outside world where they get told that they should take supplements etc. yet as fitness instructors we obviously know we wouldn’t recommend it and we’re not allowed to recommend it in our scope of practice. All the supplements in the world isn’t going to fix a problem if you’re not eating enough kilojoules to put on muscle. Similarly if you’re not eating the right amount of carbohydrates or getting enough whole food to fuel your energy, you’re not going to be able to perform in the gym.
Nutrition is the basis for everything and there’s a lot of big basics that you can focus on. Once you start seeing results, motivation will kick in and you’ll enjoy the process. So focus on the little things and minimize that outside noise!
