Nutrition Top Tips - You Are What You Eat

Here's our Top Ten Tips for improving your diet and increasing the level of nutrition in the food you eat:

1. Only fill your cupboards and refrigerator with high quality, nutrient packed whole foods. Whole food is real food that grew naturally or once roamed the countryside and hasn’t been processed to lengthen shelf life, or sweetened, flavoured, coloured or preserved by adding chemicals to it or by removing parts of the food (i.e. ‘low fat’ products) to make the product more appealing to the consumer. What makes a food whole is that it contains at least some protein, some fat and some carbohydrate. Whole foods generally have no other ingredients apart from the food itself (e.g. a carrot is a whole food) and have not been altered by human intervention in a factory or laboratory in order to ultimately increase food manufacturers profit levels.

2. Avoid all processed food - predominantly buy foods from the first few aisles in the supermarket i.e. fresh meat + fresh fruit & veg = wholefoods. Stay close to nature and avoid modern pseudo ‘franken-foods’ like ready-meals or diet soda etc If you can’t read or correctly pronounce the ingredients - don’t buy it or eat it. Toxic chemicals found in non-organic processed foods damage the digestive system which has a knock on effect to every other system in the body including your musculo-skeletal system.

3. Try to eat more fresh seasonal raw organic vegetables every day – try and have some salad with at least one meal or include juicing in your daily routine. Cooking and heat tends to breakdown the nutrients in your food thus lowering the levels of nourishment in your meals. The fibre in raw vegetables and fruit is also essential for a healthy digestive system.

4. Look for Organic options or have an Organic Meat & Veg box delivered by Riverford Organics. Organic crops have higher nutrient levels than conventionally grown produce and is grown without the use of toxic pesticides, herbicides, fungicides or chemical fertilisers

5. If weight loss is your objective then refined sugar is the enemy. Reduce or completely eliminate sugar intake, choose carbs with a lower score on the Glycaemic Index to slow the absorption of glucose into your bloodstream and balance your blood-sugar and insulin levels. This will help avoid diabetes, obesity and insulin insensitivity and optimise your body’s fat-burning capability. It’s tough but after 3 to 4 days you’ll probably no longer crave sugary snacks.

6. Everyone is different and what might work for your friend may well have absolutely no effect on you yet could even make a third person worse. Try to eat the correct proportions of macronutrients (i.e. protein:fat:carbs) for your own body and not somebody else’s, determined by your genetics and your lifestyle. By finding your ideal balance you can optimise the energy production of every cell in the body !

7. Try Metabolic Type® testing to calculate the ideal balance and ratio of CARBS : PROTEIN : FATS for your type and learn how to listen to the signals your body is giving you in order to fine tune your diet to provide you with optimal energy, mental clarity, satiety, health and well-being.

8. Avoid TRANS FATS altogether, these are often labelled as ‘partially hydrogenated’ vegetable oils and are used by food manufacturers to make cakes, pastries, muffins, cookies and other confectionary. However, don’t avoid good fats ! Butter, coconut oil, avocado, eggs, fish, meat, nuts, seeds and olives are all great examples of sources of good fats that can actually help you absorb more nutrients and even burn more fat !

9. Minimize your usage of the ‘4 white devils’ – refined sugar, table salt, pasteurised milk and white flour (especially wheat). These foods are heavily processed to the point that they contain very few vitamins and minerals and essentially their nutrient value has been destroyed or denatured significantly which makes them hard for your body to properly assimilate causing significant health issues.

10. Avoid calorie restriction and 'dieting'. Cutting calories can cause the body to perceive itself as being starved and as a result causes a fight or flight response, triggering the release of hormones that actually break the body’s muscles and bones down to obtain the vital nutrients it needs to function. The body’s stress response also prevents it from burning fat as fuel. If weight loss is your objective, try and get into the mind-set of looking after your body by providing it with as many nutrients as possible. If you look after your body, it will look after you and you’ll find that by eating well, fat loss is easily achieved alongside suitable levels of exercise, sleep and hydration.