Sustainable and Intelligent Flow Approach to Nutrition for Performance

How to achieve flow and flexibility in your nutrition so you never have to follow another diet all meal plan ever again. 

The media sets you up to fail. The media makes you confused. The amount of misinformation is designed to overwhelm you, to make you think you need a diet to be healthy, to make you think you need to eat consistently to keep your metabolism going. When in fact it’s the complete opposite. Instead of a diet or meal plan you need to build intelligence in your decision-making so that you have the knowledge and intuition to make better decisions. And, eat less frequently.

Under any circumstances, in any location, at any restaurant on any given day.

When we have our new clients start with us it’s usually one of the first questions they ask. 

The relief on their faces – sometimes relief, sometimes confusion when they hear me share the same advice gives them some hope that there is a smarter, easier and more sustainable way to optimize energy, to lose fat, to have the confidence in their body without having to follow a meal plan. 

This is just one of the areas we educate and transfer our knowledge with true proven systems and methods that our clients use to stay in control of their nutrition habits and the choices which last a lifetime.

Now don’t get me wrong there are some details that need to be shared.

In an article like this, it’s impossible for me to give you the exact blueprint of what would work best for you because you need your own personalized strategy based on your preferences, your goals, your lifestyle, your mindset, and your association (both emotion and physical dependence)  with food.

Your habits, behaviours and details of each, what has worked for you before, the things that haven’t worked well, stress, sleep, triggers, addictions, beliefs and patterns just be considered so you can develop and optimize an effective, flexible strategy that allows you to be in flow with your nutrition.

This will help you understand the nutrition Matrix and how different types of foods, macronutrients, meal timing, meal frequency, triggers, habits, behaviors, etc (there are many others too – just to give you some perspective) are based on your activities on any given day.

Whether it’s training for strength, general health, losing weight, confidence, high-stress work environments, emotional eating patterns, comfort response, travel, holidays, weekend vs weekdays you can establish strategies for each situation and have options to make the most informed and empowering decisions during each situation.

Now there is a very specific science behind our methodology. Food is fuel, but it is not the only source of fuel or energy. If you stop to think of your nutrition as simply a form of energy and nutrients that help you to perform at your best, manage energy, facilitate your recovery, and optimize the right hormones – then you are entering a brand new area of awareness and understanding of what nutrition actually is.

When you focus on the right types of food at the right time for the right reasons, it will help you to optimize and amplify the right types of hormones that influence your mood, the quality of sleep, your mental and physical energy, and focus – then food, or nutrition, or more important the decisions you make related to nutrition – becomes a very powerful strategy.

When you look inside the details, nutrition can influence every aspect of your life. Then nutrition as a fuel becomes a very intuitive and powerful element in your overall success strategy in life, not just health, performance or weight loss. An understanding!! Powerful stuff.

The elements that I described above all have an impact on how your body utilizes nutrients and the influence it has on hormones as well as behaviors that lead to specific outcomes. Ideally the outcomes you WANT, not the ones you don’t want.

You must consider and understand the principle of ‘cause and effect’ before you actually look into what you are eating. It is essential to look at your emotional response or attachment and association to food choices and how that impacts you physiologically and psychologically.

You see, often food has been used as a trigger or a response to a particular trigger predominantly some behaviors such as stress, boredom, procrastination, comfort, and habits, or as a reward.

And this is where it is essential to understand the meaning that you associate with those behaviors because they become patterns. They become habitual. They become your trigger response and over time either lead to negative or positive changes in your physiology, mood, energy, mental health, and performance.

Once you understand this, you will understand that you have the ability and the inner power to reprogram your responses in certain situations and therefore your choices that lead to better outcomes,, balanced energy, emotional states, sleep, focus, fat loss and health.

Ultimately, it’s a domino effect. When you’re stressed, you reach for food. Usually, poor nutritional choices that are fast, less healthy, give you a quick dopamine hit, or blood sugar spike or insulin response that make you think it is a reward. Do you think it makes you feel better, more energized, or more comfortable?

This might make you feel better in the short term, yet very quickly on a cellular level, the increase in insulin is helping you to effectively store fat and confirm your behavioral response to stress.

When you repeat this process and it affects your mental focus, productivity, energy,  the quality of your sleep, levels of motivation, mood swings. It’s a double-edged sword.

Instead, the ripple effect kicks in and you respond to stress consistently in the same way which leads to increased weight gain, lower self-esteem, and lower self-accomplishment, self-doubt, lower productivity, more fatigue, poor sleep, and less energy which in turn increases your stress. Which means you take longer to complete work projects, tasks, and responsibilities.

This in turn leads to more time behind a computer, less productivity, then more stress because you have to stay up late, leading to lower quality of sleep, poor time management, and poor energy management, you wake up less refreshed, feeling anxious and even more stressed –  leading to poor food choices and so the cycle continues.

Next, you’re heading to accelerated levels of burnout. Mental health affects your relationships, affecting your ability to manage or lead your team or colleagues effectively, putting strain on your relationships outside of work instead of being fully energized and in control of your energy, your mood, and productivity.

This is exactly why this is the FIRST area that you need to acknowledge and shift the way you think about food.

Your goals will also determine what type of nutritional choices and behaviors you implement into your strategy. These will also be influenced by your lifestyle and other inherent lifestyle behaviors and choices.

Your goals may vary from wanting to reduce cellulite, to getting lean, losing weight, getting fit, getting stronger, reducing pain, building your immunity, or just building a positive and focused mindset for enhanced productivity.

Any goal is leading you to either personal growth, confidence or business success.

We say this comes down to your WHY.  Your aspirations.  It’s important to acknowledge intelligent goals are one step to be truly effective in building a high-performance lifestyle. 

You need to know the reasons why achieving these goals and changing your lifestyle are important for you in the short and long term. You need to know your endgame and your WHY.

We will go into more detail on goal setting and achieving systems in other articles but for the purpose of this article just remember that your body is unique.  Your genetic blueprint, your behaviors, your goals and your aspirations are unique to you.

The type of training, amount of sleep, the amount of stress that you are under and how you develop a personalized and intelligent nutrition strategy based on those daily activities and situations will prove invaluable for you. For you to understand what works best for you and how you can achieve that flow and flexible approach to nutrition for long-term success.

This is the objective from day one to build a flexible and intuitive approach to nutrition. Helping transfer the knowledge and understanding of how different foods affect our hormones and mood our energy and health goals so you can be empowered to make informative and simple decisions on the go at any time on any day.

Confidence and increased awareness of needs versus wants play a crucial role not just in nutrition and health goals, it also applies to the other five pillars we help our clients Master for life-changing results.

I can tell you from my 25 years in the coaching industry that this is the first and most essential skill set to achieve any level of success in any area of your life.

If you wish to believe that diets, PDFs, ‘one line tactics, meal plans and fad diets lead you to the success and the results that you desire, I’m sorry to inform you that you will constantly be chasing shiny objects, celebrity diets the latest fad and nutrition trends and be forever searching for the Holy Grail of nutrition. It doesn’t exist.

Or if you read this article to the end and what I have shared with you makes a little bit of sense and might even be perfectly logical to help you to be a little curious into how this methodology can help you in your health, fitness, performance and weight loss goals then send me a message.

Choose the first step in taking control, mastering your behaviors and be the catalyst of change for sustainable personal growth, health, confidence, and success.