Nutrition is concerned with consuming the right vitamins and nutrients to support your mind and body. Easy in theory but difficult in practice.

My aim is to give you suggestions and ideas that make you think more about what you put inside your body.

Why Should you Care? Without good nutrition both the mind and body will suffer. Disease will set in and you will not function properly. In order to live a healthy, happy life good nutrition is essential.

3 Step Process to a Better Diet

1. Keep a food diary
2. Look at what you eat and drink in a week
3. Reduce/remove/find alternatives to the worst offenders

Food diary – It might sound overly simple but in practice it’s not that easy. The food diary takes a little practice because you need to make sure you remember to write/take photos of everything you eat and drink.

Food & Drink – Looking at what you consume is filled with hazards. Often a seemingly innocent drink or shop bought sauce can have lots of added sugar or horrible chemicals that hinder the body’s ability to work efficiently.

Reduce, Remove, Alternate – This is the hardest part. Reducing or removing requires will power or, better still, a healthier alternative. My aim here is to provide you with alternatives to try.

#FoodCollageDiet

I came up with this idea when helping friends to keep track of what they were eating. This is how it works:

1. Take pictures of the food and drink you consume each day
2. Make a collage and post it to Instagram
3. Follow and tag me (@purpose_fit)
4. I will suggest improvements

3 Reasons why it works

#1 – Being Accountable: When we are held accountable we’re usually more likely to take action. For example, when you promise to call your mum you’re more likely to do it than if you didn’t say you would. Evolutionary theorists claim this is so you appear reliable and honest. If you are unreliable and dishonest, your tribe won’t think highly of you. This would have been a big problem when we lived in small tribes.

#2 – Awareness: We can often forget or unconsciously distort what we think we ate. Popping that extra chocolate in our mouth is so easy to do. When you can visually see everything you eat in a day it’s quite easy to identify what is not so good for you and take action to correct it.

#3 – Social Pressure: Knowing that you have to post your food picture publicly might just help you say ‘No’ to that piece of cake that’s flying around the office…Maybe!

‘Dieting’ is a dirty word

Diet is a dirty word! It’s banded around willy nilly without any consideration for how it makes people feel…It immediately makes me feel restricted, malnourished and seriously annoyed at whoever enforced this unwanted phrase in my now sorrow-filled face. Fear not, I have a different way of looking at things…

I could go on but I’ll keep it short and sweet. Not the artificial, sugary kind; something much more wholesome.

A diet is what you eat. It’s what you consume each day. Being too restrictive and counting calories is not sustainable. It’s just another fad diet that you won’t stick to. We all want a bit of cake here or an alcoholic drink there. That’s ok, I wouldn’t expect you to deprive yourself of the occasional guilty pleasure. The key word here is Occasional…

The diet, activity and mindset you have the most is what you become

I’m not saying that if you eat McDonald’s every day you’ll turn into a cheeseburger, although you might start to smell like one. However, if you are putting toxins into your body every day you can’t expect it to run like a Ferrari and smell like fresh roses. It’s that simple.

So, what’s the answer?

Put very simply it’s to eat as fresh and natural as possible. It sounds easy but in practice it’s very hard. Most processed foods nowadays have lots of chemicals and sugar added to them. It’s much more profitable for companies to do it this way. Fresh food goes off very quickly, is hard to transport and costs a lot to produce. Manufacturers are interested in profit, not health.

What you can do starting today…

Reduce anything artificial you eat. Cakes, sweets, fizzy drinks, etc. Maybe you will have one treat a week but you should try not to consume these each day. If you normally eat 3-4 chocolate bars and a litre of coke each day you should just try to cut down a bit at a time. It takes time to change a habit so take it one step at a time.

Get uploading your food collages to Instagram and I will try to help you out as best I can.