Powerful Nutrition Strategy

Nutrition can have a powerful effect on an athlete’s performance. Not only does it strongly influence body composition, but food can both facilitate and combat inflammation, strengthen or weaken immune systems, and enhance or impair sleep (as a few examples).

Today’s “Thursday Throwback” features a very simple, but incredibly powerful nutrition strategy from my friend Brian St. Pierre. While this was originally posted in 2009, I still believe this is the first change you NEED to make!

Last summer I was fortunate to work alongside Brian St. Pierre. He is a brilliant nutritionist that continues to get phenomenal results with his clients. Brian really knows his stuff when it comes to altering individual diets to help people shed fat, build muscle, recover faster from workouts, and improve their overall health.

In today’s post, Brian shares with us a nutrition tip that will have a large impact on your health and performance.

Brian’s Nutrition Tip:

“Eat Real Food!”

“It may seem trivial or vague, but if you sat back and really took stock of the food in your home, you would probably be shocked to realize just how much of it qualifies as a food product, not actual food. Increasing the amount of real food, defined below, and decreasing the amount of food products you consume is the easiest thing you can do to improve your nutrition and health. It doesn’t require counting calories, worrying about nutrient timing, calculating macronutrient percentages, or any of that, and it will have a far greater impact on your health.”

Real Food Conditions:

  1. If you couldn’t hunt, fish, pluck, grow, or ferment/culture the food, you probably shouldn’t eat it.
  2. If it wasn’t food 100 years ago, it probably isn’t food today.
  3. If it comes in a box or a plastic wrapper, it probably isn’t food, it is a food product.
  4. If it contains lots of industrial vegetable oil (canola, cottonseed, soybean, safflower, sunflower, etc) and/or added sugar/high fructose corn syrup, it probably isn’t food, it is a food product.

If your response to this is “I knew that already”, you should probably ask yourself “Am I doing this?” Most people know what they should be doing; few are actually doing it. If you know anyone else that you feel would benefit from this information, please pass it on to them.

Brian wrote what I still firmly believe is the best nutrition resource for hockey players, parents, and coaches available today. Not only does it cover the “why” of specific nutrition and supplementation strategies, it covers the “how”, which makes every strategy incredibly easy to implement. Check it out here: Ultimate Hockey Nutrition.

To your success,

Kevin Neeld
OptimizingMovement.com
UltimateHockeyTraining.com

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