5 Nutritional Mistakes

This is from my friend out in Nevada, he sums up exactly what I preach about health and nutrition. Wanted to share it with you. Enjoy! Nutrition has often been recognized as the most effective way to improve immunity, increase longevity, decrease risk for chronic diseases, lose weight, gain lean muscle tissue, and feel well. With such an important aspect of life, why is it so confusing, and why don't most of us enjoy the benefits of a healthy diet? There are 5 key mistakes that I believe are limiting you from reaching all of the benefits provided by a healthy diet and what you can do to change these mistakes into learning experiences and get better. 1. Eating too much like everyone else The modern North American diet is composed of mostly what? Usually whatever people feel like eating, or whatever they are being sold or told to eat. There is no rhyme or reason behind the physiology of why they should eat certain foods. I have news for you, you are different than any other person you meet and thus you need to nourish your body differently than everyone else. Do you know someone that has had great results with one typical diet plan, and someone else that has completely failed with that same plan? The key to learning from this is to listen to your body and feed the body the most nutrient dense foods it deserves. If your body doesn't agree with a certain food or makes you feel sluggish or slow then you should limit your consumption. 2. Ignoring the importance of workout and post-workout nutrition Pre-workout, during workout and post-workout are the most important times of the day to eat if fat loss, and muscle gain/maintenance are your goal. Not to get too much into the physiology of it, but you must also listen to your body, monitor your energy levels before, during and after an exercise bout, and make some adjustments accordingly. 3. Not adding good fats There has been a lot of misinformation about fats in the media in the past few years, but it’s important to understand just how important they are to a healthy diet. Fats are great for maintaining hormonal balance, increasing the fluidity of cells, and forming the membranes of most cells. However, we must make sure to get our fats from good sources like avocados, nuts, olive oil, flax seeds, fatty fish,etc. These are the fats we need, not the fats found in fruit pastries and bakery rolls. 4. Poor breakfast habits Breakfast sets your metabolism up for the entire day, skip it and watch your metabolism stay in a FASTED state. Breakfast is the perfect time of the day to get some good, energy boosting and nutritious foods in. If you are new to eating breakfast then start small and make sure you eat some high quality whole foods. 5. Not getting enough protein, vegetables and/or water. Too many people get barely the recommended amount of protein per day. Since there is no storage of protein in the body, it is important that we get enough or our muscles and various other cells of the body will become degraded. Vegetables have phytonutrients in them that have shown to reduce the risks for chronic diseases, and improve health. In general it is safe to say we don't get anywhere close to the recommended amount of vegetables per day. 5-6 servings is recommended, and we usually only eat vegetables for dinner, and this has to change if improved health is a goal. Water is the most biologically important nutrient that we can get, you can go a few days without eating, but how many days can you go without water? Far less than you would think.