EveryBODY is Different

More than 4 years ago, I came across one of my CSCS (Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist) colleagues’ blog – Isabel De Los Rios.  She was talking about her career in nutrition and leading people towards healthy dietary lifestyle.  More I read about her expertise in nutrition, more I got drawn into her blog.  Her main premise was, and still is, promoting a dietary change in life to lead to health – as opposed to having a one-time diet to temporarily loose weight.

Neither Derek nor I have ever been into dieting to loose weight.  We have been athletes our whole lives so we believed in fueling our body constantly to get the best performance.  We believed that we ate healthy but still wanted to give Isabel’s logic a try to see if we would drive even better performance out of our bodies.  Her logic was, still is, very straight forward – get rid of any processed food and refined sugars, understand your portions and learn about your metabolism type.  Within one weekend that’s what we did: cleaned out pantry, learned to adjust our portion sizes, increased the number of our meals to 5 and found out that we are more satisfied when we have a balanced portion of carbs to protein.  You would be surprised how much of your pantry is full of “healthy” food with ingredients that none of us can pronounce.  Taking such a drastic step was definitely not easy but we decided to give it a try.  At the end of 3 months, Derek’s hereditary high blood pressure was way down to normal, his stomach issues were gone and both of ours performance at the gym was significantly better – mostly due to being in single digit fat percentages.  As a result, I decided to start studying nutrition and getting certified to be able to advice people about nutrition.

3 years into my studies, I will be taking my exam once my baby arrives.  Through out these years, I have also studied most of the major “diet programs” to gain a better understanding on their promises.  One thing for sure is that every human being is different; therefore, there cannot be only one type of diet that would work for everybody.  The other key thing is that if loosing weight would have been that simple, this country wouldn’t be dealing with such a huge obesity problem.

I see a lot of people trying new diets with the New Year.  My advice, if you are on the same path, is first to understand the logic behind it.  For example, the diet asks you to cut grains – ask the question “why?” before you blindly do what they say.  Like I wrote last week, your body is your best indicator – listen well…   Remember, there is never ONE easy solution for healthy living.  Please feel free to let me know if you ever have any questions with the diet choices you make.  I am not a doctor but I can at least help you understand how your body reacts to different components of a basic diet – carbs, fats and protein!  What you fuel your body with is what you get out of it when you perform!