On paper, fall is just about the worst possible time for someone to start a diet. Seriously. When you think about it, fall is basically designed to get us to overeat.
Gone are the days of lounging by the pool in a swimsuit and fighting off the anxiety of whether or not you can take off your cover-up. All the fall clothes are flattering, warm, and don’t dream of being revealing.
At the very same time, it’s like all of the food that gets popular is about as calorie dense as possible. It’s like all of the sudden everyone agrees that people need to increase the pie baking production per capita by 10-fold. Oh, and while we’re at it, let’s toss cookies and pumpkin-spice-everything into the mix.
Seriously – when it comes to building a season that should wreak havoc on a diet, it’s hard to do much better than fall.
It’s not hard to see that I’ve got a lot of thoughts on fall, which partly for the reasons listed above, is my favorite season.
But here’s the great irony of my thoughts on fall: I actually think right now is the best time of the year that you can start dieting.
Maybe it’s because fall follows summer, a season that we all look forward to from about February on – but once late July hits we’re about done with. Grilling out and having cookouts with friends and family is fun, but it’s hard to eat and drink with reckless abandon for too long without feeling bloated and exhausted.
Or, maybe, it’s that fall coincides with back to school time. Back to school is like this phenomenon that impacts just about all of us, no matter if you’re actually going back to school or not. The signs, the ads, the school-supply aisles popping up. It’s impossible to ignore, and I think that’s a great thing. It’s a chance for all of us to take stock of our year up to this point. A natural moment of reflection plopped about ⅔ of the way through the year. That is my favorite thing about fall.
Fall is the time for children to return to school and use what they learned the previous year and expand their knowledge and experience. I like to think about fall as the same thing for all of us who have weight loss, muscle gain, or performance goals. Especially those of us who are tracking and paying attention to what we eat.
It’s hyperbole to say that for most of us, we tend to slack off a bit in the summer. That’s not a criticism on anyone because I can absolutely say that’s true for me. It is a time to enjoy the progress we made, maintain our weight and live in LIFESTYLE MODE.
How can you not ease off the gas a bit whenever it seems like every weekend has some cookout, some outdoor event built around food and drinks, or some other social plan that seems to always pop up? Those are all just normal things that come along with summer, and for most of us, they’re things that we’re fortunate to be able to take part in – so why wouldn’t we enjoy that?
Fall,on the other hand, is a natural place to go back to the basics, reflect and make a better diet. It is a time of year in which it makes sense for us to take stock of our processes, our daily behaviors, and make sure those are lining up with our goals. It’s that very process of regularly auditing yourself that sets successful dieters apart.
For some of us, taking stock of things might mean renewing your focus on how you’re weighing and measuring your food. For others it might be auditing how you’re going about logging your day to day food intake, to make sure you’re not missing anything. And still, for others, it might be a matter of looking at what your planning looks like and identifying ways in which you can improve your process to make your life easier.
The actual behavior we’re talking about doesn’t really matter. What does matter is the spirit behind it. The knowing that you’re actively working to take control of your health and your behaviors to become a little bit better each and every day.
At Strive Fitness and Performance, this is something that we not only encourage, but want to actively support as much as we possibly can.
Are you ready to make a change this year?
Are you a life long learner?
Do you want to become 1% better?
Committed to your success,
Derek Ledwidge
Why do our Strive Fitness and Performance clients count macronutrients?
Why should you?
With any nutrition or diet goal, calories are king, they are the cornerstone of losing weight and gaining weight. The other measurement to consider is where those calories come from. The quality of food that makes up the calories determines what weight is lost.
Filling your daily calories by eating fast food and ice cream is not equal to filling up on whole, unprocessed foods like grass-fed meats and veggies. If you have performance or body composition goals, you will benefit from breaking your calories into macronutrients (protein, carbohydrates and fats).
We do not expect our clients to always need a food scale or the myfitnesspal app. That is not the point of tracking what you eat. The goal is to put the control of nutrition/dieting back into the hands of our clients.
So many people depend on programs and meal plans that when they move off of them, they are lost and gain the weight they lost back.
Knowing how many calories you are consuming can be valuable info to know for sure if you’re fueling your lifestyle or workouts properly. And taking that a step further, wouldn’t you want to know how lose weight while still fitting in time with friends, family and pizza!!!
Tracking your macros may seem hectic and chaotic at first, but the benefits far exceed the small learning curve.
Here are my favorite benefits of macronutrient counting:
Tracking your macronutrients is the only way to know exactly what’s going into your body and it can be seriously empowering! You will be surprised if you are mindlessly eating your snacks. What foods cause you to feel bloated? What foods give you the most energy for your workout? Tracking macros also educates you on what foods are high in fat and which foods are high in protein only. For example, lean protein sources like chicken breast have just trace amounts of carbs and fats whereas whole eggs contain almost equal amounts of protein and fat. If you see that you’re high in fats for the day, then you would reach for chicken as your next protein source.
Any "clean eaters" out there that have plateaued and can not find out why? Tracking your macronutrients will show that while you’re likely grossly under eating carbohydrates and protein, you’re overeating fats. No matter how healthy the source, fats still pack a punch of 9 calories per gram. Dialing in how many fats, carbs, and protein to eat each day will take out any guesswork and help get to your goals faster.
When you TRACK YOUR MACROS AND FOOD LOG, you will be able to look back at it and see what needs to be adjusted to make the perfect plan. Each week is a learning opportunity, where you look at weeks past to see how you can become better overall. Maybe your breakfast can be better, or maybe you are always eating pizza on Tuesdays and Thursdays because you have no time. By tracking your macronutrients, you will be able to see the holes in your plan and come up with a better plan in the future to achieve your goals.
Overall, hitting your daily macronutrient recommendations will lead you to make more balanced food choices. Keep in mind the big picture of health and wellness and fill up your macros with a variety of whole, unprocessed foods.
This is a biggy!!!
The problem with restrictive meal plans is that they restrict your foods and your food timing. They force you to fit your lifestyle around a certain plan. Instead, by counting macro nutrients and adjusting your plan as you go, you can fit your plan around your lifestyle so it works for you.
Want to watch your waistline while still being able to go to happy hour with friends? Macro counting is sustainable because it can be so flexible. Personally, I couldn’t stick with other diets I tried in the past because there were too many foods I felt like I wasn’t “allowed” to eat. With macros, there is always a way to make tracking work for your lifestyle. Depending on the timeline of your goals, you can track macros and eat any food you want as long as you count it towards your daily totals. So, yes, you can have that scoop of ice cream or slice of pizza, just log whatever you eat and drink and count it towards your daily macro goals. The catch-22 is that you may have to be a little bit more cautious on the other meals during the day.
Tracking macronutrients is not only flexible in terms of what you can eat, but also with how strict you want to be. If you don’t think you can handle logging your food every single day, try tracking just Monday through Friday and give yourself a break on the weekends. This is what we call LIFESTYLE MODE and is the overall goal we want our clients to achieve....The opportunity to maintain the goals they achieved by using their knowledge to make good decisions while still living their lives (instead of always restricting their eating)
[To Apply For A Free Strategy Call, To Go Over YOUR Personalized Macro Plan, CLICK HERE NOW]
The above steps should set you up for success as you start your macro counting journey. Macro counting is flexible, empowering, and sustainable and I urge you to try tracking your macronutrients at least once in your life. No matter if your goals are to lose fat, build muscle, or just to learn healthy eating habits, macro counting can be of use to you!
You will learn exactly what you’re putting into your body, how you respond to different foods, and how to best fuel your individual fitness and nutrition goals.
