Transform your approach to nutrition and unlock your full potential for health. Photo / 123rf
Personal trainer Samantha Bluemel gives tips on how to make informed dietary choices for long-term health.
In this week’s column we are zero-ing in on the biggest contributor to your daily health: nutrition. As much as it pains me to admit this as a personal trainer, you can’t out-run, out-train, out-sleep or out-meditate a bad diet.
And believe me, I’ve tried. I recently went through a season of high stress and anxiety that lasted years, and during that time I didn’t care a jot for what I put in my mouth. My alcohol consumption skyrocketed, sugar was my best friend and my energy in/energy out balance was all off. Despite crediting a commitment to exercise during that same period with saving my sanity, I still looked and felt like I’d abused my body, and I knew something had to change.
As a result, 2023 was a year of reckoning for me, and I decided to attack a series of nutrition-related habits that brought my physical and mental health back to life. I reduced my body fat percentage back down to a level I was comfortable with, my energy levels slowly crept back up to normal, I slept better, reduced my stress levels and most importantly, I started to feel good again, inside and out.
(It’s important to note that your weight doesn’t need to have anything to do with making better nutritional choices. But if you’re aiming to lose body fat percentage - and I encourage you to focus on this metric, rather than scale weight - that’s a perfectly ok goal to have.)
Here’s how I did it.
No matter what diet is currently trending in our common zeitgeist, they all pretty much lead back to the same thing: consume a healthy ratio of protein, complex carbohydrates and healthy fats, eat the rainbow, stay hydrated, and treat yourself in moderation. Truly for most of us, a solid approach to nutrition can be summed up as simply as that (unless you have medical conditions that require a more specific approach).
I took a look at my overall consumption and forced myself to be honest about how much I was consuming that was outside of these general guidelines. Processed food, refined sugar and alcohol don’t belong in the daily category, and I split my week out into an 80/20 ratio of home-cooked, nutrition-packed meals on weekdays (but still delicious - this is very important!) while reserving treats for the weekends.
It had been years since I considered just how much I should be eating to provide me with optimal energy levels without overdoing it. This is an easy point to trip up on, as big servings of the wrong foods can feel very normal if that’s what you’re used to. I used an online calorie calculator to give me a rough idea of what I should be aiming for, and made a conscious effort to reduce my servings of certain foods to bring things back into balance.
This process can be jarring at first. It certainly was for me, as someone who has always been active and never had a problem metabolising whatever I ate, until things got a little out of hand. Pulling out the kitchen scales to weigh your ingredients while you cook feels a little ridiculous too, but after a short period, you’ll have a better idea of what the right kind of portion sizes look like. Then you can feel free to put those scales back in the junk drawer and let the battery die, smug in the knowledge that you’ve conquered that particular learning curve.
If you’re like me and enjoy eating a lot, then this can also be a helpful exercise in understanding what foods you can pile onto your plate without consequence. Nowadays my salads and stir-frys are monsters, and if anyone tried to take greek yoghurt away from me, there would be hell to pay.
This might be a new term you’ve heard floating around lately. It was new to me too, and that’s because scientists have only recently begun to understand the implications our gut health has on the rest of our well-being.
In a nutshell, gut health refers to the health of our gut microbiome, a pocket of microbes around 40 trillion-strong (made up of bacteria, fungi and viruses) that sits in our large intestine. To keep this living organism happy, we want to encourage a diverse range of the “good” bacteria to flourish, by feeding them what they need to survive. This can have a positive impact on pretty much everything, even our mood, with around 90 per cent of the”happy hormone” serotonin produced in the gut.
Much of doing so comes back to conventional wisdom, with a particular emphasis on diversifying the number of plants we consume across the week (plants include fruit, vegetables, grains, legumes, nuts and seeds) plus maintaining a high fibre intake. The gut is also partial to fermented foods, and I make an effort to include things like sauerkraut, kimchi, kombucha and yoghurt in my weekly diet.
If this column was limited to one piece of advice to get your nutrition on track it would be this: plan your meals ahead of each week, and grocery shop accordingly. I can not overstate how helpful this is in sticking to a change in dietary lifestyle.
Every Sunday I make a list of the meals I want to have the following week including breakfasts, lunches, dinners and snacks. I usually shop that afternoon for everything from Sunday night through to Friday afternoon, and leave Friday evening and Saturday unplanned to cook something I really want or to go out for a meal. I then do as much prep for the week as I can: I make all my work lunches and snacks, and make sure I have the ingredients for quick and easy breakfasts and dinners ready to go.
Having my meals pre-prepared works 99 per cent of the time to stop me from buying unnecessary takeaways or treats during the week. It can be a bit daunting at first, but very quickly I realised that this is the fastest and easiest way to make sure I’m eating the foods I love, in the right portions, day in and day out.
And hey, if you miss a lunch and find yourself ferreting out a mouldy piece of tupperware from the back of the fridge two weeks hence, don’t beat yourself up. Life happens.
Looking back on my year of reckoning, it doesn’t seem so drastic now that I’ve got the right systems in place to support healthy habits. As with any kind of lifestyle change it can be hard at first. You might feel awkward suddenly changing an aspect of your lifestyle to reflect a different version of yourself, but the rewards are well worth the short-term friction. Dust off that blender, write yourself a meal plan, and you’ll be well on your way too.
Samantha Bluemel is a personal trainer and the founder of new Ponsonby fitness studio Mode, which opens in March. The 2024 Transformation series continues next week. Previously in this series: how to set wellbeing goals that actually work; how to change your habits and set yourself up for a successful year of health; how to take an honest look at your wellbeing, and how to start working out.
Samantha wears AJE Athletica
New York Times: The importance of specialised care for fragile new mothers.