Nutrition Simplified — 16 Dietary Truths To Live By

13.  Eat breakfast.

Never, ever skip breakfast.

Imagine how hungry you’d be if you ate at noon, but not again until 8PM? That’s how your body feels after its 8 hour sleeping fast. It’s absolutely critical to replenish your body, provide energy, and eat food to get yourself out of a catabolic state-the state in which your body uses its own muscle, fat, and tissue for fuel.

Skipping breakfast will make you sluggish, tired, and cause a “cognitive haze,” where you can’t think sharply. Eat eggs and oatmeal, yogurt, a protein shake, or something quick if you’re pressed for time…just eat something (with protein!). Breakfast also kickstarts your metabolism and the calorie-burning process.

14. Eat 5-6 smaller meals each day.

Eating a small meal every 2-3 hours keeps your metabolism revved up, control blood sugar, and encourages effective digestion. Your body has a much easier time digesting a small 500 calorie meal than it does digesting a huge 1000+ calorie binge. When you consume massive amounts of calories at once it takes your body a looooooooong time to completely digest everything, and as a result it has no choice but to stuff some of the calories away as body fat. Huge meals = body fat gain.

Additionally, large meals elicit huge blood sugar and insulin spikes-smaller meals keep blood sugar levels under control. Eating small, frequent meals is also  a fantastic way to encourage healthier eating, as healthier foods tend to be less calorie dense.

15.  Center your diet around natural foods.

Whenever possible eat natural, unprocessed foods. That means lots of fruits, vegetables, fish, chicken, beef, nuts, seeds, dairy, whole grains, etc.

These foods generally have the highest nutritional content and lack synthetic chemicals, sweeteners, and preservatives. As a rule of thumb, avoid foods in a can, box, or other packaging as often as possible-your best options are in the produce, dairy, meat, and cheese aisles.

16. Become a nutrition label detective.

If you’re buying packaged food your 100% have to check the nutrition label and ingredients beforehand. Here are a few rules and guidelines:

• Look for foods high in protein, fiber, vitamins, and minerals.
• Avoid foods with high sugar, trans fat, saturated fat, or sodium.
• Ingredients are listed in order of quantity. The first ingredient is the most abundant and the last ingredient is generally insignificant. This all depends on how many ingredients there are. As a rule of thumb the less ingredients the better. More ingredients means more artificial crap.
• Anything with HFCS, vegetable shortening, and partially hydrogenated oils should never be eaten.
• Avoid foods with aspartame, crystalline fructose, sucralose, saccharin, maltodextrin, and erythritol.
• Sugar should not be the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd ingredient. If it is put it back on the shelf.
• With the exception of fruit, anything with over 6g of sugar is very high in sugar and should be avoided.
• Check wheat bread to make sure that white flour isn’t listed.

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Bryan DiSanto

Owner & Editor-in-Chief at Lean It UP

Bryan DiSanto is the Owner & Editor-in-Chief of Lean It UP, ACE-CPT & CSN, NYU graduate, ex-fat kid, and all-around fitness/nutrition nutjob.

When he’s not working on his (or somebody else’s) abs, whipping up Eggocados, or running a Tough Mudder, he’s probably off yelling at a Carolina Panthers game somewhere.

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