If you want a fitter, healthier body get your diet right first. Eating the right foods will go a long way to improving your health and performance. Training plays a part in improving your physique, but you can’t out-train a bad diet.
Eating well really needn’t be complicated. Your meal plan could be as simple as this:
Meal Plan
Eat 2 or 3 meals per day made from:
- vegetables / salad
- meat / fish / eggs
- butter / ghee / coconut oil / olive oil
Snack if needed on:
- nuts / berries / dark chocolate
Safe Starches
You can include some starch (carbs) with your meals depending on your goals and preferences. ‘Back-loading’ carbs means only having carbs after training when the body will more readily store them in the muscles to replace used energy rather than in the fat cells. There’s a lot of debate about whether high-carb or low-carb is better, but there is no one size fit’s all answer. Experiment and see what works for you. If your goal is to maintain a healthy weight then eating whole unprocessed foods the majority of the time will do the trick. Starchy tubers contain far more useful nutrients than grains. Beans and lentils if well tolerated can be a useful source of micro-nutrients, protein and provide slow steady release of energy. Safe starches:
- Sweet potatoes
- Potatoes
- Yam
- Plantain
- Cassava / Yucca / Taro
- Beans
- Lentils
- Quinoa
- Rice
Further Reading
To dig into the subject of nutrition a little deeper try any of these books, and their corresponding websites and pod-casts:
- Mark Sisson – The Primal Blueprint
- Chris Kresser – Your Personal Paleo Code
- Dave Asprey – The Bulletproof Diet Book
- Robb Wolf – The Paleo Solution
- Paul Jaminet – The Perfect Health Diet
All of these authors have recipe ideas on their websites.
The bulletproof diet is a great starting point and is free to download. It condenses a huge amount of information and research into a one page guide. We recommend all gym members download the .pdf file and stick it to their fridge!