Nutrition opinions get thrown around everywhere. Social media, your family reunion, the break room at work, morning news, random conversations with other parents at school pick-up… you get the idea.
The truth is that they are just that, opinions. On the other hand, nutrition principles based on physiology and science are rarely, if ever, discussed. You really have to go out of your way to figure out what actually matters when it comes to how to feed yourself.
And that’s where the idea for this blogpost was born! I’m going to normalize what’s actually normal when it comes to food. Here are 5 nutrition principles that you aren’t hearing about nearly as often as you should:
1. It’s normal to need food 5-6+ times a day.
I’ve learned that saying this makes people mad.
The reason this triggers people so much is the collective fear we have of (dun dun duuuun!) “overeating”. And the fear of overeating is the really fear of (dun dun duuuun!!!) weight gain.
So we all like to pretend that it doesn’t matter if we eat enough food, often enough. In fact, we celebrate waiting until noon to have breakfast, or tricking our afternoon hunger with tea. The less we eat the better, right?
Wrong. But it takes a lot to challenge the idea that your body needs more food than you are comfortable giving it. But just because it makes you uncomfortable, does not mean your body doesn’t need the food.
Your body and mind will not be able to function without food, and they run out of fuel within a few hours of eating… and then they need more to keep functioning. Eating a well-rounded meal (3-5 food groups) to comfortable fullness will likely provide you with 3-4 hours of energy. If you’re going longer than that between meals (and most of us are), you need a snack in between. A substantial snack (2-3 food groups) will last you 1-2 hours.
So let’s say you have breakfast at 8 am. You’d want to check in with yourself around 11 for a snack or early lunch. If you choose a snack, you’d want to make sure you ate lunch by noon or 1 pm. If you choose lunch, you’d want to revisit a snack by 2 or 3 pm (by 4 and if you had a later lunch). In either of those scenarios you’d want dinner by 5 – 6 pm or so, and then a snack around 8 – 9 pm.
Keep this in mind and anticipate your needs ahead of time!
The exact times don’t matter as much as the pattern. Your day will look different, and maybe even different today than it does tomorrow. The point is that you DO need multiple eating events in one day and it’s not just 3 meals. Which brings me to…
2. Having snacks is necessary and encouraged.
Snacks aren’t “extra”. They are how you bridge the gaps between meals and provide additional and necessary nutrition throughout the day. They prevent you from getting overly hungry, they help to steady your blood sugar levels, and offer your body and your brain consistent fuel for them to function optimally.
Try to get through the day without snacks and you’ll likely notice fatigue, foggy brain, lack of focus, low energy levels and a lot of irritability. Notice how you feel 3ish hours after a meal. If you’re seeing any of these symptoms creep up on you, get yourself a snack! Better yet, anticipate it ahead of time and be prepared with something balanced and substantial.
I’ll insert my favorite tidbit of wellness information here: Under eating is pro-inflammatory. So those aches and pains, your foggy brain, the regular headaches and difficulty sleeping… before you blame sugar or gluten, make sure you’re eating consistently, regularly and adequately.
3. Eating enough food is health promoting.
There are a lot of people who are worried about their health for very legitimate reasons. Maybe you have a diagnosed medical condition or are just sick of feeling sick and tired. You want more energy and vitality and you want to make sure you’re caring for yourself in effective ways.
I validate all of that. I want that for you too.
So that’s why this principle is so important to understand: nothing you do with food will matter unless you are eating enough to begin with.
This is the very base of the nutrition pyramid. Before you try to fine tune your eating for any reason, you have to be eating adequately.
Current health trends include a lot of talk about balancing hormones, healing the gut or boosting metabolism. Nutrition recommendations aimed to do those things often forget the basic necessity of eating enough food. This is particularly hard for people to wrap their head around when they are focused on weight loss. You can definitely be under nourishing your body at any weight. We assess adequacy through behaviors, symptoms and functionality, not weight.
As an RD for the past 17 years, I’ve had many people in my office with health concerns they feel could be caused by what they are or aren’t eating. 95% of the time, those people are under eating and undernourishing themselves. By just implementing basic nutrition hygiene like described above (see principle 1!), those symptoms have dramatically decreased or disappeared. Don’t underestimate the power of eating enough food, often enough.
4. The “right” choice is always circumstantial.
If you’re a client, you’ve heard me say this over and over again :). This truth challenges the black and white labels we assign to food. There is no food or food decision that is inherently “right” or “wrong”, “good” or “bad.
Instead, a competent and confident eater will be able to filter numerous points of data in the present moment to make a wise eating decision. This data includes things like their level of hunger, what sounds good, how much time they have, what’s available, what has worked for them in the past, what they need to do after eating, feelings about food, what other people with them want to eat, medical conditions, nutrition knowledge and more. (make sure you note that nutrition is only ONE of those things!)
The truth is that an eating decision should be personal and individualized. There is no such thing as a the “right” choice, only the wise choice you land on after assessing your current circumstances. Competent, confident eating demands that you are present and connected to yourself. It DOES NOT MATTER what the people around you are doing. You’ll take the best care of yourself when you focus on what makes sense for you.
5. Healthy eating is not restrictive eating.
I’d actually argue that restrictive eating is the very opposite of healthy eating. In reality, “healthy eating” is flexible and inclusive of a wide variety of foods. There really is nothing healthy about living at extremes – rigidity or chaos – with food.
If you are finding yourself putting conditions on when, where and how often you can eat certain things, I’d encourage you to consider how that effects your behaviors when eating those foods. Are you sneaking, hiding or overeating those foods when you finally give yourself permission? What’s your level of stress and preoccupation with eating? Are you finding yourself afraid of doing something “wrong”? Do you feel like you have to walk a right rope in order to be healthy? All of these things are signs that your beliefs and behaviors with food aren’t “healthy”.
I hope this was a helpful outline of what really matters when it comes to food, nutrition and eating.
