Following a diet is very different from choosing a nutrition plan. A diet plan is meant to help you achieve short-term results but is rarely a long-term plan. While nutrition is the building block or structure of everything we eat.
It’s not quite semantics because it’s easy to follow a catchy diet and miss the importance of nutrition.
Your Nutrition Plan Should Be Unique
The nutrition plan we design for our patients here at Digital Nomad Health is a way of eating and fueling the body that is both individualized and can be adjusted by the patient to fit their needs.
Diet vs nutrition → nutrition always wins.
The tough thing about a nutrition plan is that it’s a change for life. It might take 15 years to get there or just a couple of years for someone else, but it won’t happen overnight.
A nutrition plan factors in:
- your nutrient requirements
- your metabolism
- your risk factors
- personal goals
- lifestyle factors
- age & gender
The nutrition plan that helps you control your apoB levels while giving you plenty of energy throughout the day differs from the one your partner adopts, who is dealing with blood sugar issues and muscle loss.
What Does Your Body Need?
My body may love salt but doesn’t do well with it; blood pressure shoots up, my feet puff up, and I am exhausted for 3 days to come.
→ My nutrition plan needs mineral management. So, I would likely replace my high-salt foods & cravings with some potassium salt.
Late-night eating leaves you with crashing blood sugar by 3 am, a handover in the morning, dry mouth, gum disease, and sleep apnea.
→ Your nutrition plan needs to involve a time restriction as to when you can eat.
Building a Daily Nutrition Practice
We’ve never seen a patient successfully adopt a new habit overnight. Aiming to go from 248 lbs down to 175 lbs is destined to fail. Instead, a plan of going down to 245 lbs and maintaining it – that’s the success of a nutrition plan.
This requires daily practice, which is the backbone of forming a habit. Doing something you may not necessarily want to do or feel is ineffective. Sticking it out, daily, that’s success.
From 245 lbs, the next goal is 242 lbs. And keeping that 242 lbs weight. Celebrating the 3 lbs weight loss. That’s success. And you know what else is part of the success? Failing and going back up to 245 lbs or 258 lbs.
The Path to Success is Paved On Failure
Use your favorite proverb here, but we know that those patients who embrace failure or setbacks without judgment or resistance tend to achieve their goals.
Goal setting requires knowing which general direction you want to go and maybe a few general wins you want to achieve. To get to that, it’s often necessary to step over a few failures.
This builds the resilience necessary to make a habit stick.
One Small Step
Want to take your first small step? Let’s come up with a nutrition plan that is right for you; something unique to your needs, individualized, and sustainable.
Let’s track this goal together and discuss successes and failures. Once that small goal is achieved, we’ll take the next small step.