THE HIERARCHY OF NUTRITIONAL IMPORTANCE
There’s a tendency to focus on the wrong things when aiming to make positive changes with diet, health, and body composition goals.
This leads to frustration and making no progress and needless wheel spinning between fad diets, special supplements and pills that never work in the long run. We want to highlight the hierarchy of nutritional importance to help you gain a better understanding of the things that are most important, less important, and of least importance. The goal of this hierarchy is to help you nail the basics, because contrary to what you hear in popular media, the basics are really all that matter – everything else, to a degree, tends to only be noise and marketing hype.
Total energy intake in a day or the quantity of food you’re eating.
How you’re allocating the energy intake - protein, carbs, and fats.
Quality of your diet. While total energy intake matters, the quality of the foods you eat will impact performance and how you look and feel.
When you choose to eat your meals throughout the day.
How often you choose to eat your meals over the course of the day.
While a nutrient rich, whole food diet should always be your priority, intelligent supplementation can make up for where your diet may lack.
These are the things that matter the most. If you understand and nail only these you’ll be on your way to making progress.
Regardless if your goals are fat loss or muscle gain the number one key to changes in your body composition is energy balance.
Simply, if you eat more than your body requires, the excess will be stored away as body fat; conversely, if you are eating less than your body requires your body will burn body fat.
This is the part of the puzzle everyone misses, and ends up resorting to ‘eating clean’, or ‘special supplements’ or avoiding certain foods.
Any successful diet – paleo, atkins, keto, will, in one way or another, even if they claim ‘calories don’t count’, has you controlling calorie intake.
Low carb diets have you omit carbohydrates, by removing a whole food group you’ve automatically cut calorie intake. Intermittent fasting diets have you controlling intake by setting rules on when you can and can’t eat. Paleo diets have you remove certain food items and resultantly you cut calorie intake. You get the idea. Calories are the foundation, everything else is built on this.
When we say macronutrients, we’re referring to: protein, carbs, and fats. Once you have your calorie intake in place, the next order of priorities is macronutrient intake.
If calorie intake determines overall body composition changes; macronutrient intake will determine the quality of that composition change. Meaning, are you losing fat or muscle or both? The macronutrients play a key role:
Protein is the building block of muscle and if you’re a physically active person, especially one who engages in high intensity training like weight lifting, protein will help aid muscle growth, retention, and recovery.
Carbs have come under quite the attack recently, but there’s nothing to fear. Carbs, specifically glucose, are if calorie intake determines overall body composition changes; macronutrient intake will determine the quality of that composition change.
Meaning, are you losing fat or muscle or both? The macronutrients play a key role: the bodies preferred use of energy. Keeping carb intake adequate when training will help you perform and recover better.
Dietary fats play key roles in the body, especially when it comes to hormonal health. How high you keep your fat intake will depend on your taste preference. But, here at PrimalTrainingClub® we recommend no lower than 15% of total calories to come from fats or as a minimum 0.3g/lb of bodyweight.
Once calorie balance and macronutrient intake is determined, the last thing you need to understand is the importance of food quality.
Can you lose weight eating only ‘junk’ food? Sure, that doesn’t mean you should. Getting the majority of your calories from whole, nutrient-rich foods will ensure that you’re getting enough vitamins and minerals for health, recovery and growth, and reducing your chances of getting ill.
1. Try to consume 1-2 pieces of fruit per day.
2. Try to eat 2-3 servings of vegetables per day
3. Don’t be afraid to eat a wide variety of fruits and vegetables to ensure you’re getting
a full spectrum of vitamins and minerals.
These items are important, but not as important as the first half. Meal timing simply refers to when you eat your meals and the specific macro makeup of those meals.
Meal timing simply refers to when you eat your meals (meal timing) and the specific macro makeup of those meals (nutrient timing).
While there are many diets that are based on manipulating these two variables for improved fat loss, these factors aren’t as big a factor as some people make it out to be; no, you won’t lose muscle if you don’t slam back a protein shake the second after finishing your last set, neither will you go catabolic and crash your metabolism if you skip breakfast. With that said, there are some ways we can use meal and nutrient timing in our favour.
The first is to do with the hormone, Ghrelin. The more consistent you can become with your meal timing, the less variability in when you get hungry. Secondly, carbs, for some, can trigger hunger and cravings. If this happens to you, then skip carbs at your first meal and save them for around the workout. This will ensure that you can go through your morning without experiencing cravings.
Finally, when carbs are low, like during a dieting phase, keeping the majority of carbs around your workout window – pre and post workout – will help with performance in the gym and recovery after.
Meal frequency is how many meals you’re consuming in a day. While the myth of six small meals for boosting your metabolism is still pervasive, it’s simply not true.
Eating six meals is comparatively no different than eating 2-3 larger meals and holds no ‘metabolic advantage’ as far as fat loss goes. Ultimately, how many meals you choose to eat will come down to what best suits you and your lifestyle.
We recommend you experiment and find a meal frequency that suits you, generally speaking, we recommend 3-4 meals per day. This could be three main meals with one snack.
There is no one best diet for everyone. People’s taste and preferences differ, fortunately research supports the notion that as long as calorie intake is controlled, fat loss can be achieved through a variety of (sane) diets. This is why it’s important to consider the choice of diet you wish to use. Whether it be high carb, low-fat or low-carb, high-fat, vegan/vegetarian, Paleo, etc. Some things you should consider when selecting a diet:
1. It should accommodate foods that you
enjoy eating
2. Take into consideration any health
concerns and allergies
3. A way of eating you can adhere to for
the long run
Don’t be afraid to experiment with different diets to see what suits you best.
This is the last part of the hierarchy and are the things that don’t matter as much, if at all.
This may seem counter-intuitive as the diet industry spends millions every year on making you believe that supplements are more important than they actually are.
While there are some supplements that can be beneficial once the rest of your diet is in order; if you don’t have the fundamentals in place first, no amount of supplements are going to help you move toward your goals.
