You might think nutrition doesn’t matter. Maybe you’ve gotten along just fine with a little extra weight. Unfortunately, the older you get, the more those surplus pounds take their toll. You’re more vulnerable to heart disease and diabetes, you have less energy, and you don’t accomplish as much as you otherwise could. No matter how successful you are, I’m sure you’ll agree that you could do even more if you were in better shape.
The bottom line is that, left unchecked, your body is a crisis waiting to happen. Consider this your two-minute warning. Fortunately, there’s still time. Joe Montana and John Elway fashioned Hall of Fame football careers out of their last-minute comebacks. In that spirit, we’re going to show you how to turn your nutrition plan around quickly.
Maybe you already have a good plan in place. At this point, you have a game plan to build your centered self. You’ve installed an athlete’s mentality and know to build everything from the core. But think of yourself as the general manager of a new franchise with far greater resources.
Now we’re going to literally transform our bodies through nutrition. You will learn how to eat and drink to fuel your body for optimal energy and production. In short, the Core Nutrition game plan is a great way to maximize energy, lose fat, gain lean mass, and save money and time.
Have you stocked your pantry, refrigerator, and freezer with foods that you can quickly put together for a nutritious meal or snack any night of the week?
Have you stocked your office cabinet or vehicle with similar foods?
Do you ever react to your body by grabbing caffeine or snacks at the vending machine to “keep you going” throughout the day? (And have you ever considered walking around the office or doing pushups instead?)
When you’re hungry and searching for your next meal, do you often decide to pull through the drive-thru because of time constraints?
But before you get started with the program, please complete the Core Nutrition Assessment above.
The purpose behind these questions is to illustrate that at the core of great nutrition are environment and planning, things as simple as the power of your pantry, refrigerator, freezer, and a well-stocked desk at work. So, if you answered no to either of the first two questions and yes to either of the last two questions, you’re setting yourself up for long-term health problems.
As with the rest of this program, I want you to think like an athlete about nutrition. After all, you’re certainly competing in a high-stakes game, and you need a powerful, turbo-charged body that burns fuel efficiently and produces the consistent energy you’ll need to reach your full potential.
If you consume soda, hot dogs, and fast food regularly, you’ll end up among the ranks of the obese, putting yourself at an extreme disadvantage in everything you do. Oh, you don’t agree? Well, in 2003, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock tried to eat nothing but McDonald’s for an entire month. A healthy, fit young man when he started, he packed on more than 20 pounds in a couple of weeks. Soon he was walking around in a daze, with little energy and an addiction to the food. His doctors and nutritionists told him that if he did not stop the McDonald’s diet, his vital organs might shut down.
Spurlock’s movie, Super Size Me, inspired McDonald’s to eliminate its largest portions from its menu. He deserves praise for educating the public on the dangers of fast food and how it’s so shamelessly marketed.
We’re up against the wall when it comes to eating properly. Everywhere we turn, someone’s trying to sell us quick, convenient, cheap junk food. They will stop at nothing, labeling food “low fat” or “low carb,” even as they load it up with high-fructose corn syrup and trans fats, two fat-producing substances we’ll discuss in-depth later.
From now on, be an educated consumer when it comes to playing the food game. Be a smart player. Whether it’s ordering a restaurant meal or reading a label for contents, you need to make the best decision for your healthy lifestyle, which you’ll learn how to do in the next chapters.
Most important, you have to plan and prepare. Otherwise, you’re at the mercy of what’s out there, most of which is not good. The number one reason people don’t eat properly and sabotage their fitness programs is because of shoddy planning.
When it comes to nutrition, like everything else in this program, you have to think for the long term. It’s easy to rationalize eating unhealthy food—after all, you’re hungry and you need to eat something. You’re not that overweight. Perhaps you didn’t want to be rude to your hosts, refusing that high-fat dish they served. Besides, it really tastes good!
Each time you face such a dilemma, stop and ask why you’re on the brink of eating whatever junky food is at hand. Are you letting emotions drive your decisions? What could you do to make a better decision? Even if you are stuck in a fast-food restaurant, what’s the best choice available?
After all, those few moments of junk-food-induced pleasure end quickly. So, too, does the value of the food in terms of producing energy. Soon you’ll be hungry again. There’s also the negative long-term impact that the unhealthy food will have on your body.
Make a positive investment instead. Each time you eat properly, remind yourself that you’re not only giving yourself the energy needed for optimal performance, but you’re also investing in your long-term health—to say nothing of helping yourself feel and look better.
I know the prospect of embarking on a new nutrition plan is scary. Maybe you’ve tried other diets. You’ve counted calories or carbs, followed the Atkins or Zone diets—whichever one happens to be trendy this week. Perhaps you’ve experimented with miracle supplements that supposedly help you lose weight or gain energy. None of them have proved to be a complete, long-term solution. Instead, they set you up for failure.
The challenge with most programs is that they tend to address the symptoms—too much weight and a lack of energy—rather than the problem, which is poor nutrition in general.
Under this plan, you’re going to have five or six small meals or snacks a day, which means you get to eat something every 21⁄2 to 3 hours. If you eat often, your body becomes a more efficient energy-producing machine. (Ask yourself what burns more wood, a hot fire or smoldering coals?) Not only that, frequent eating keeps you from overeating. If you know you’re going to have something in a few hours, you’ll be less likely to overeat—and less likely to be extremely hungry.
The reason most people don’t eat properly is because they don’t plan ahead. Remember the athletic mentality? If an athlete does not prepare, looking ahead to what he will face in the game, he’s doomed to fail. The same is true with eating. If you don’t plan, you end up devouring whatever you can grab.
The process of stressing out over where and when to eat is unhealthy, a problem made worse by the junk you inevitably consume in such a state. As a result, you end up increasing body fat and decreasing lean mass, which defeats the purpose of following the Core Movement program in the next section. Not only that, but eating on the run is also expensive. It costs more, not just in terms of the money you lay out at the restaurant, but in terms of the damage it does to your health.
As we formulate our game plan, let’s take a look at the strengths of our opponent, which really aren’t strengths at all but widely held misconceptions.
Eating right is time-consuming: On the contrary, eating right saves time. If you have your meals plotted out for the entire day—or the entire week—you’ll save hours each week.
Compare the person in your office who brings lunch from home with the person who has to go out to a sit-down restaurant or unhealthy fast-food franchise. The one who brought lunch from home already has saved a minimum of 15 to 30 minutes, and most likely he’ll eat a healthier alternative.
I’m not advocating eating at your desk, though in many hectic offices this is reality. If that’s the case, you’ll fall behind by ducking out to locate lunch. Not only that, but if you have lunch handy, you’re less likely to go hungry and rush out to find the first option available, which usually is a losing battle. One easy way to get a jump start on the week is to do all of your shopping on Saturdays or Sundays, which will help you plan out your meals for the week. This is a great way to be really proactive about your choices.
Eating right is expensive: Actually, eating right saves money. If you’ve planned your day and week, chances are you’ll eat out infrequently, which saves a lot of cash. When you have not prepared ahead of time—like the reactive office worker above—you’re more likely to grab the first option available, regardless of cost.
NAME: PAT BINKLEY
AGE: 36
Like a lot of new parents, Pat Binkley struggled to find the time to exercise. With a hectic schedule as an executive for a software company and three children under the age of 6, he saw no openings in his schedule.
Still, he knew he had to find a way. His cholesterol was 270. He carried 170 pounds on his 5-foot-9 frame, which, although hardly obese, “was bad weight,” according to Binkley. “I had a double chin and a pretty good spare tire going. I even had man boobs.”
Binkley joined a gym, began leaving home at 5:30 for morning workouts, and followed the Core program religiously. He made it home to shower and have breakfast before the kids got out of bed.
“There was no way I was going to find an hour in the day anywhere else,” Binkley says. “I’m sort of a morning person anyway. I had to do it. Now it’s become my sacred time.”
Binkley overhauled his diet. He began looking at the supermarket in terms of zones, focusing on the outer aisles, where produce, meats, and healthier foods are housed. He learned how to study labels for nutrition content. Most important, he made sure he grazed on the right kinds of food throughout the day.
“I’m more aware now that I can’t let my body go into starvation mode,” he says. “I try to eat something during those long in-between periods. That gives me more consistent energy all day long and allows me to eat less during what used to be three larger meals. If you don’t have those in-between-meal snacks, you’re going to make poor decisions and overeat later.”
Since starting the program in March 2004, Binkley has felt stronger. The spare tire has begun to disappear. His wife has noticed the difference. Then there are the intangible rewards: “The thing that surprised me the most is how much more energy I have for the kids,” he says. “I can pick them up and even hold two or three of them at a time. Before, my back would be hurting. Now I can put the heaviest kid up on my shoulders. I can wrestle with them, ride bikes, play catch—be there for all of those quality-time things that I couldn’t really enjoy before.”
These days, Binkley’s weight is down to a lean 157. His cholesterol is below 200. He recently ran into a pharmaceutical salesperson who had told him it was impossible to reduce cholesterol by 10 percent—let alone 35—by diet and exercise alone.
“I thought I’d need [to take] drugs,” Binkley says. “I still wonder if I’m going to be able to make this a lifelong routine as opposed to something I did for a couple of years in my midthirties. But when you feel good and can be there for your kids, that’s all the motivation you need.”
Let’s not forget the greater cost of eating out: the cost to your health. Researchers at the University of Massachusetts found that eating more than one-third of your meals in restaurants increases your risk of obesity by 69 percent.
Eating right means I’ll only be consuming bland, tasteless food: This is a big misconception. It’s easy to prepare meals that not only are good for you but taste good as well. There are dozens of delicious foods, condiments, and spices that we’ll discuss in the coming pages that will help you to eat meals that are both healthy and delicious.
Fast-food restaurants thrive because they perpetuate all these myths. After all, they provide tasty, inexpensive food, quickly. That food might be cheap, though it’s still not as inexpensive as planning and preparing meals. Moreover, low-nutrient, high-sugar, high-fat foods rob us of energy, produce nasty mood swings that affect our relationships and decision-making, and increase body fat. In the long term, this may decrease your quality of life and overall wellbeing.
We have come to believe that, even though we work hard, we have no control over our lives and are not making the most of our potential. It’s a brutal downward spiral. We make the excuses that there’s not enough time, that we’re in too much pain, that we don’t have enough energy, or that spending time with family is more important than taking time to plan and stick to a healthy game plan.
It all starts with the food we eat. No matter how diligently we follow the Core Workout—or any program—it won’t matter unless we properly fuel our bodies.
Did you know that most people eat poorly 80 percent of the time and healthfully the remaining 20 percent? Most of the time, they consume high-calorie foods low in nutrients and fiber.
We want to flip that equation, striving to eat healthfully at least 80 percent of the time. It’s unrealistic to think that we’ll be perfect, no matter how hard we plan. Plus, we’re building in a “free” day to eat whatever you want, within reason. That’s one-seventh of a week right there.
So, let’s sound the two-minute warning. No longer will we be nutritional goalies, scooping up everything that comes our way. Instead, we’re going to deflect these shots, letting in only those foods that will fuel us well, provide energy, and contribute to long-term health.
Chapter 3 Summary: The key to eating properly is planning. By stocking the pantry, refrigerator, and freezer with healthy options at home, you avoid eating poorly at home. By keeping an office cabinet supplied with similar foods, you avoid having to grab caffeine or snacks at the vending machine to keep you going. Eating healthful meals and snacks saves money and time.