Advanced Nutrition Strategies | Nutrition Pt. 3

Nutrient timing, ketogenic diets, intermittent fasting & supplements | nutrition pt. 3

We have been talking about how to optimize your nutrition, which the step is to review certain higher level strategies like Nutrient Timing, Macronutrient Removal, Fasting, and Supplements. None of these will be successful unless you’re executing on your habits.

At this point it should be clockwork - sleep, drink water, eat vegetables, and be mindful with eating. You have developed a healthier understanding of how much you are eating and what you need to adjust based on your goals. Now we want to unpack some of the more complicated strategies we may have heard of through your own personal research. 

First off there is no panacea in nutrition, and it will never be a passive-easy experience. Anything worth having requires pushing past our comfort zone. The hope is that you have conditioned yourself to be more disciplined and making a major change by adding one of these protocols will not be a massive change. 

You may have heard some of these protocols we are about to talk about. If you have not, it is probably better that way so you’re not influenced by someone speaking anecdotally about their incredible results. There is no magic bullet when it comes to health and nutrition. Changes in body composition or body mass are the sum of its parts. The parts matter less than the consistency it takes to reach a goal. 

The first higher-level strategy to talk about is Nutrient Timing. Nutrient Timing is optimizing when to eat carbohydrates, and subsequently when to eat fat. The simple message is “earn your carbs”. Carbohydrates are energy: energy to do something and energy to recover from something. If you are working out, especially resistance training, carbohydrates are critical. The caveat is if we are insulin resistant. This essentially means that even if we are working out, we probably will not use carbs as well as we should so it's best to lower in general regardless if we are working out. 

This leads to a Ketogenic Diet. For the record Ketogenic diets is a ‘fat adapted’ diet, not carb restrictive diet. It is used in a lot of medical situations for someone experiencing seizures and going through neural degeneration diseases like Alzheimer’s and dementia. Ketogenic diets are considered “fasting mimicking” meaning we are depriving glucose. This in turn uses the next available, and more bountiful fuel substrate: fat. For someone that is struggling to lose weight or has been overweight for a long time, chances are your mitochondria and metabolism is altered. Increasing fat, and decreasing carbohydrates promote ketones which support mitochondria function. The downside is that resistance training is anaerobic, which is glucose-dependent. Resistance training on a ketogenic diet is very challenging and leads to decreased performance. 

This then leads to Intermittent Fasting. This is sometimes referred to as “timed restricted eating”. The concept is that our physiology is designed to go periods of time without food. When food becomes present we have the ability to over indulge in calories and store as fat for the next period of food scarcity. This is how we handled living in periods of feast or famine as hunting and gatherers. We no longer have to worry about food scarcity, so we now have to artificially create periods we do not eat. When we do fast we give a break to our digestive system and endocrine system and we run more optimally. We also use energy stored as fat more readily, which is the reason we have storage of fat in the first place. 

Nutrient Timing, Ketogenic Diets, and Fasting are not the panacea of health. Like anything, they need to be adhered to over a certain period of time with consistency. If we are inconsistent and give in early, the efficacy lowers exponentially. These strategies are not knee-jerk reactions to poor health choices. We cannot counter poor dietary and lifestyle habits with a dietary approach like the ones mentioned. Plan your work, work your plan. When experiencing a set back start back with the Habits and build back up to these higher-level strategies. 

The final piece here is supplements. Bottom line: they work, the main component is quality and consistency make the difference. You get what you pay for and you get out what you put in. Taking a multivitamin a couple days a week is not going to help. Supplements should be based on a goal and some level of deficiency or area of weakness. Wanting to lose or gain weight has massive differences in regards to what supplements you should take. A good place to start is the Basic Level Plan: Multivitamin, Magnesium, Protein (Whey or Plant), Creatine, and Collagen. There are other supplements we offer that are more specific to a certain goal which you can discuss with our coaches.

Higher-level strategies are contingent on a sound understanding of their purpose and consistency.