At Fitter Food we’ve been in the industry a good few years now and had the opportunity to work with thousands of individuals both in person and online. We have helped people of all shapes and sizes with very different starting points, different goals and barriers to progress. This experience has allowed us to develop different strategies and approaches to ensure people get results, however, they all have one thing in common and start in the same place.
We’re often out and about attending the latest industry courses and seminars to continue our professional development. Daily research, reading and listening to podcasts also inform much of our guidance and allow us us to constantly evolve our knowledge and advice to clients.
Sometimes we come across conflicting theories or seriously complex information on gut health, hormones, disease prevention, performance nutrition and training periodisation. It’s easy to get excited to an extent about the more sexy stuff but often in doing so we tend to see people neglect the most effective step to achieving their goals. This one thing is so important that all the fancy supplements and strategies are pretty much a waste of time if you haven’t got this in place. This one thing is always mentioned by anyone who is worth listening too. What is it? This one thing is nailing THE BASICS.
We attended a seminar with the awesome Chris Kresser this week and that was exactly his message, all change must take place at a basic level first of all and then further work on gut health, hormones, metabolic function and immune health might be necessary if these initial changes don’t have the desired outcome.
THE BASICS
What does this mean exactly ? It’s pretty simple:
- Ensure the majority of your meals are based on nutrient dense, single ingredient foods.
- Move daily.
- Exercise 3-4 times a week.
- Get 8-9 good quality sleep.
- Stress less.
Technically it’s 5 things but each is a fundamental part of the foundation of good health and they all have a knock on effect with one another.
If you eat better you will have more energy, if you have more energy you will move and exercise more, if you move daily you will sleep better, if you sleep well you have a healthy balance of cortisol levels, if you do all those things you will feel awesome and get great results. Results will encourage consistency because you see and experience the benefits of the changes.
We’re prone to overcomplicating things these days, often believing the more advanced and complicated an approach is the better the results will be, but its simply not true. Modern man has enough to worry about without making health and fat loss a full time job too.
Of course there are some cases where we need to dig a little deeper with clients to achieve the desired results, but ideally before we consider any kind of testing or supplementation protocol we like to see them in a routine mastering the basics so that any further investigations are based on a more responsive platform.
Is it really that simple? Yes it is. In fact this is exactly what the folks on our Fitter 365 plan are doing. They are nailing the basics and we’re helping them to adapt the rest to meet their own needs. They eat Fitter Food most of the time, enjoy the odd treat, move daily, sleep like a log and are discovering methods of training they enjoy and can sustain. That is what it’s all about for us, loving life and getting results. However, many of our members have been where you are, trying to complicate everything as they believed it was the only way to get results. Thankfully they discovered this is not the case and they found their happy place. Want to find yours? Then come and join us here.
We go into more detail about getting on top of the basics in our 2nd book Fitter Food: A Second Helping which is available for pre-order now. Be sure to check it out.
Matt “B to the asics” Whitmore
