If you want the winning edge, sports nutrition is your secret weapon.

More the just eating well, sports nutrition is a strategic way of eating that optimizes your athletic performance. It ensures your calorie, protein, carbohydrate, fat, vitamin, mineral, and fluid intake will meet the demands of your sport, the unique needs of your body, and your individual goals. 

All so you can train your hardest, perform your best, and unlock your full potential as an athlete.

In this article, we’ll give you the essential sports nutrition strategies for peak performance, backed by scientific recommendations and practical advice.

Interested in advanced techniques like nutrient timing and post-workout nutrition? We’ve got you covered there, too—with our free sports-specific nutrition guides for dozens of sports.

Why is sports nutrition important?

The goal of sports nutrition is to ensure you’re well-hydrated, well-fueled, and well-nourished.

If you just take care of those three factors, you give yourself a serious edge.

That’s because you’ll improve your ability to gain strength, muscle, and endurance, recover faster between workouts and competitions, heal more quickly from injuries, and perform your best when it matters most.

But research shows that athletes rarely meet all of their nutritional needs.¹ Even those who try to eat a healthy diet may not get enough fluids, calories, macronutrients, or micronutrients.² This is true for everyone from youth athletes to professional athletes.

That might sound surprising, but because athletes expend so much more daily energy than non-athletes—and need to replace more nutrients and water for muscle repair and training adaptations—they often have a harder time achieving adequate nutrition, let alone optimal nutrition.

These nutrient deficiencies can^2,3:

• reduce endurance
• decrease muscle strength and power
• increase recovery time
• reduce muscle mass
• increase body fat

The bottom line: Nutrient deficiencies are very common, and they can be detrimental to both health and performance.

Thankfully, you can fix any deficiencies and optimize your diet with the right information and plan.

Understanding athletes’ caloric needs

Because athletes burn more calories than the average person, they also require more calories. The importance of adequate energy intake reaches far beyond athletic performance.

When hard-training athletes don’t eat enough, they may experience a condition known as Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport, or RED-S.^3,5,6 Besides leading to a decline in athletic performance, RED-S can negatively affect an athlete’s:

• menstrual cycle
• bone density 
• immunity (getting sick a lot)
• cardiovascular health
• psychological health  (particularly increased anxiety)
• growth and development (in young athletes)

How many calories do athletes need?

The number of calories you need as an athlete depends on your size, age, overall activity level, and goals. The easiest way to calculate your personal calorie needs is to use our nutrition calculator.

Just answer each question, and in less than a minute, you’ll have a sports nutrition plan that’s 100 percent customized for your goals, including the amount of calories, protein, carbs, and fat you should eat.

(Note: When using the nutrition calculator, unless you already have specific preferences, we recommend you choose “athletic performance” as your goal, and select “anything” when it asks for your preferred eating style.)

Do athletes have to count calories?

Based on our experience coaching over 100,000 clients—including UFC Champ George St. Pierre, US Open Winner Sloane Stephens, and eight NFL, NBA, and NHL teams—the answer is no.

If you find it helpful and interesting, you certainly can count calories—it’s just not required.

What’s most important is that you nail the essentials. Many athletes who accomplish this don’t ever need more advanced (a.k.a. time-consuming) strategies like meticulously counting every morsel they eat.

The importance of macronutrients for athletes

Protein, carbs, and fat are known as macronutrients, or macros, and they’re key to nailing the essentials of sports nutrition. Getting the right amounts of each macronutrient ensures you’ll have the energy and raw materials you need to perform your best and get the results you want.

Protein

Athletes need more protein than non-athletes. That’s because protein is necessary to repair the muscle damage caused by hard-training and intense competitions. When athletes don’t eat enough of this nutrient, it’s harder to build muscle, lose fat, and recover from practices, workouts, and games.

Protein also helps you:

• digest your food better
• make hormones (like growth hormone)
• maintain a healthy immune system

How much protein do athletes need?

Eat 0.65 to 1 gram of protein for every pound you weigh (1.4 to 2.2 grams per kilogram). Some athletes may benefit from slightly more protein, but this is a good target for most. This recommendation is based on research that shows this is the upper range needed to maximize muscle growth and training adaptations for most people.^7,8

For example, if you weigh:

• 150 pounds (68 kg): Eat 100-150 grams of daily protein.
• 200 pounds (91 kg): Eat 130-200 grams of daily protein.
• 250 pounds (113 kg): Eat 160-250 grams of daily protein.

To make it easy, you can use your hand to track your intake. For example, one portion of lean protein—say, lean steak, chicken breast, or tofu—is the diameter and thickness of your palm and provides about 25 grams of protein. A scoop of protein powder is usually the same. (Check the product label to be sure.)

Based on this, a 150-pound (68 kg) athlete would need about 4-6 palms of protein each day.

(Here’s the math: 150 pounds of body weight x 0.65-1.0 grams of protein = 100-150 g protein. Then 100 g or 150 g of total protein / 25 g protein per palm-sized serving = 4-6 palms of protein per day.)

The best protein for athletes

Primarily, we recommend athletes emphasize minimally-processed sources of lean protein. That includes animal protein such as lean beef, chicken, turkey, and fish, and plant-based protein such as lentils, beans, edamame, tempeh, and tofu.

But you don’t need to rigidly eat chicken breasts at every meal. Instead, think of your protein choices on a continuum, as shown in the protein food list below.

The idea: Most of your protein—about 80 to 90 percent—should come from the “Eat More” and “Eat Some” columns. The other 10 to 20 percent can come from whichever column you prefer. This provides you with flexibility while still allowing you to nail the essentials.

Carbohydrates

Athletes need carbs to be at their best. If you don’t get adequate amounts, your energy levels will suffer. This negatively affects not only your physical performance but also your mental performance—causing slower reaction times, poor decision-making, lack of focus, and deterioration of technique (think: throwing, shooting, and running mechanics).⁹

While you might have heard that low-carb diets help athletes, the body of scientific evidence just doesn’t support that.⁹ Rather, getting enough carbs is crucial for optimizing your performance, recovery, and body composition.

What’s more, eating carbs can also help you:

• keep your thyroid functioning well
• maintain healthy levels of sex hormones (testosterone for men; estrogen and progesterone for women)
• regulate your mood and emotions
• sleep better

How many carbs do athletes need?

Eat 2-3 grams of carbs for every pound you weigh (5-7 grams per kg).⁹

(That number is slightly higher—3-4 grams per pound (7-9 grams per kg)—for endurance-sport athletes, so if that describes you, get more precise recommendations in our sports nutrition guides.)

For example, if you weigh:

• 150 pounds (68 kg): Eat 300-450 grams of carbs every day.
• 200 pounds (91 kg): Eat 400-600 grams of carbs every day.
• 250 pounds (113 kg): Eat 500-750 grams of carbs every day.

As with protein, you can use your hand to track your intake. A portion of carbohydrate-rich foods—fruit, potatoes, grains, beans—is the size of your cupped hand and provides about 25 grams of carbs.

Based on this, a 150-pound (68 kg) athlete would need about 12-18 cupped handfuls of carbs each day.

(Here’s the math: 150 pounds of body weight x 2-3 grams of carbs = 300-450 g total carbs. Then 300 g or 450 g of total carbs / 25 g carbs per cupped-hand serving = 12-18 cupped handfuls of carbs per day.)

The best carbs for athletes

Choose high-quality carbohydrate-rich foods that are minimally processed. This includes any whole fruit, starchy vegetables such as whole potatoes and corn, a variety of whole grains (including oats, whole grain bread, and wild rice), and beans.

Use our continuum to guide your choices: About 80 to 90 percent of your carb intake should come from the “Eat More” and “Eat Some” columns in the carbohydrate food list below. The other 10 to 20 percent can come from whichever column you prefer. (Note: If you’re wondering about vegetables, check out “The importance of micronutrients” below—they have their own category.)

Fat

People used to think dietary fat made you fat, slowed you down, and caused heart attacks. But that’s not true: Especially if you focus on the right kind of fat.¹⁰

In fact, you need healthy fats to help¹¹:

• burn body fat and build muscle
• your cells to work properly
• make sex hormones (like testosterone and estrogen)
• build a strong immune system
• absorb important nutrients like vitamins A, D, E, and K

How much fat do athletes need?

Eat about 0.5 gram of fat for every pound you weigh (1.1 grams per kg).

For example, if you weigh:

• 150 lb (68 kg): Eat about 75 grams of fat every day.
• 200 lb (91 kg): Eat about 100 grams of fat every day.
• 250 lb (113 kg): Eat about 125 grams of fat every day.

As with protein and carbs, you can use part of your hand to track your intake.

A portion of fat—for instance, nuts, peanut butter, olive oil—is the size of your entire thumb and provides about 10 grams of fat.

Based on this, a 150-pound (68 kg) athlete would need about 7-8 thumbs of healthy fats each day. (Here’s the math: 150 pounds of body weight x .5 grams of healthy fat = 75 g of healthy fat. Then 75 g of total health fat / 10 g fat per thumb-sized serving = 7-8 thumbs of fat per day.)

(Again, this is a good fat intake recommendation for many sports, but to get the numbers specific to YOUR sport, download the sports nutrition guide for your sport here.)

The best fats for athletes

We recommend that athletes eat mostly minimally-processed healthy fats. Aim for a mix of whole-food fats (like nuts and seeds), blended whole foods (like nut butter and guacamole), and pressed oils (like olive and avocado).

This doesn’t mean, however, that you can’t enjoy butter or bacon (in moderation). Your goal: You want 80 to 90 percent of your fat intake to come from the “Eat More” and “Eat Some” columns of the food list below. The other 10 to 20 percent can come from whichever column you prefer.

The importance of micronutrients for athletes

Intense athletic training and competition can deplete micronutrient stores.⁹ Micronutrients—which include vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients (healthful substances found in plants)—are involved in hundreds of metabolic processes that influence energy levels, appetite, strength, endurance, and mood. So they’re critical, for both performance and overall health.

Without enough micronutrients:

• you’ll get sick more often
• your brain function and coordination will decrease
• your muscle (and heart) contractions will be less powerful
• you’ll be weaker and your endurance will suffer
• you’ll suffer muscle cramps
• you’ll increase your risk of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and more

What micronutrients do athletes need?

Athletes should consume a wide variety of micronutrients—to cover all nutritional bases—but they’re most often deficient in vitamin D, magnesium, zinc, and calcium. They also tend to come up short in phytonutrients.

There’s a relatively simple fix, though: Make sure your plate is full of colorful plant foods by “eating the rainbow.” Plant foods, in general, are rich sources of vitamins and minerals, and the colors and aromas in plants signify the presence of phytonutrients.

To help ensure you get all the micronutrients you need for optimal health and performance, we gave colorful, nutrient-dense vegetables their own category.

How to eat the rainbow

Hard-training athletes should try to eat at least 1 cup of each color (green, red, orange/yellow, blue/purple, white) of vegetables every day.

A portion of vegetables—spinach, tomatoes, cauliflower—is 1 cup or equal to the size of your full fist. To make things easy, you’ll probably get enough if you simply eat around 1-2 fists of vegetables with each meal.

Use the food list below to guide your choices.

(Eating a variety of colorful fruit and starchy vegetables (like purple potatoes) also helps you “eat the rainbow,” though these foods live in the Carbohydrate category.)

Understanding athletes’ hydration needs

This isn’t the most exciting topic, but it’s incredibly important. That’s because if you don’t drink enough water—and become dehydrated as a result—your health will decline, your metabolic rate will slow, and your athletic performance will tank.¹²

In fact, when you lose more than 1-2 percent of your body water—which can happen from just one hour of exercise in the heat—brain function diminishes, endurance drops, and strength and power decrease.¹² What’s more, your heart can start racing during even relatively easy activities.

So, it’s critical you drink enough.

How much water do athletes need?

Aim for 96 to 128 ounces (3-4 liters) every day.

Here’s how:

► Step 1: Fill a 32-ounce (1 liter) bottle and drink it during workouts and competitions.

► Step 2: Fill another 32-ounce (1 liter) bottle and drink it right after workouts and competitions.

► Step 3: Each time you eat a meal, drink another 8 to 16 ounces (0.25-0.5 liter) of water.

For basic hydration, plain water is fine. But if you’re training hard, you could add a powdered sports or recovery drink to these bottles.

You can assess your hydration status by comparing your urine color to the chart below.

The colors above assume you’ve peed in a cup. If you don’t want to do that (who does?), just know that the toilet water will dilute your urine color by 1 or 2 shades.

Urine color isn’t your only indicator of dehydration, though. If you’re working out or competing and start feeling a little confused, get a headache, tire quickly, become dizzy or light-headed when standing up, or feel really moody, these are early warning signs of dehydration. You need to start drinking.

Meal timing, nutrient timing, and pre-workout nutrition

If you’re consistently nailing the essentials of sports nutrition, you may benefit from some additional attention to meal timing / nutrient timing and pre-workout nutrition / post-workout nutrition. Consuming the right foods and fluids anywhere from a few hours to right before and after your workout or competition can help you¹³:

• Sustain energy
• Boost performance
• Stay hydrated
• Preserve muscle mass
• Speed up recovery

In our FREE sports nutrition guide, we’ll tell you everything you need to know about:

• pre-workout nutrition / pre-game nutrition
• in-workout nutrition / in-game nutrition
• post-workout nutrition / post-game nutrition

You’ll get detailed recommendations for what to eat, how much to eat, and when to eat to optimize performance for your sport.

What to do next

When you’re just starting out, optimal sports nutrition can often feel overwhelming. But it doesn’t have to be.

Our advice: You don’t need to adopt every practice and strategy at once. In fact, most athletes probably shouldn’t.

Instead, just add one new nutrition practice every 2-4 weeks, get good at it, and then add another. That’s how you make progress.

For example, maybe your approach looks like this:

• Weeks 1 and 2: Drink plenty of water.
• Weeks 3 and 4: Eat plenty of high-quality protein.
• Weeks 5 and 6: Eat plenty of high-quality carbohydrates.
• Weeks 7 and 8: Eat plenty of healthy fats.
• Weeks 9 and 10: Eat a rainbow of vegetables (and fruits)

By mastering one of these practices every couple of weeks—in order—you’ll be a totally different athlete. And not only that, you’ll have turned your entire eating program around without much hassle or stress.

Now, if you want even more specific nutrition recommendations for YOUR sport…

Download Your Free Sports Nutrition Guide

We’ve created FREE nutrition guides for dozens of sports that you can use to better customize your nutrition.

To be sure, many of the sports have almost identical nutrition recommendations. That’s because the energy demands of those sports are similar to each other.

Other sports, however, differ significantly. For example, the nutrition recommendations for marathoners is a lot different from those for golfers.

Each sports nutrition guide covers the essentials of sports nutrition, along with meal timing and workout nutrition. But they’ll also show you:

• How to lose fat
• How to gain muscle
• The best supplements
• How to eat well on the go
• How to choose healthy snacks
• And more

Sports-Specific Nutrition Guides

(Click on the link to download your free PDF sports nutrition guide)

If you love our sports nutrition guides, and are hungry to learn more about coaching athletes (or yourself) to peak performance, check out our Advanced Certificate in Nutrition Coaching for Athletes.

This specialized program includes three in-depth courses—How to Coach an Athlete, How to Create Personalized Nutrition Programs for Athletes, and How to Solve Common Nutrition Problems for Athletes— that’ll take your ability to coach athletes to an elite level.

References

Click here to view the information sources referenced in this article.

If you’re a coach, or you want to be…

You can help people build sustainable nutrition and lifestyle habits that will significantly improve their physical and mental health—while you make a great living doing what you love. We'll show you how.

If you’d like to learn more, consider the PN Level 1 Nutrition Coaching Certification. (You can enroll now at a big discount.)

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Tell someone you want to lose weight or improve your nutrition, and this is almost always the first advice you get.

But that’s not, in fact, what the average person says they need the most help with. Not by a longshot.

We know because every year, we ask thousands of new Precision Nutrition clients about their biggest nutrition challenges.

“I don’t know what to eat” doesn’t even crack the top 10.

And year after year, people tend to have the same food frustrations, no matter what new “diet revolution” or “no-fail meal plan” comes along.

You might write that off as human nature. But we’d suggest another possibility:

Many nutrition coaches and diet programs don’t focus enough on solving the real food problems that prevent people from making progress.

Nor do they help people build the fundamental skills they need to sustain any changes they make.

That’s why we’re sharing these secrets from our own clients.

We’ve analyzed their answers and aggregated them into a snapshot of what truly troubles people. The data here are people’s own descriptions of their real-life nutrition struggles and stressors.

More importantly, we’ve also included real-life strategies—developed, tested, and refined while working with over 150,000 clients—that you (or your clients) can use to face and overcome your healthy eating obstacles for good.

The diet problems people really struggle with

As you can see, “I don’t know what I should eat” is near the bottom of the list. Yet that’s the nutrition challenge most people—including coaches—obsess over.

Of course, what you eat matters for all kinds of reasons: appetite control, proper nutrition, optimal performance, and so on. But “what to eat” probably isn’t the #1 thing holding you (or your clients) back.

Most people kinda-sorta know what they should be eating.

You’ve probably never said “I really shouldn’t eat this,” right before downing a big bowl of spinach. More likely, you utter those words as you dive headfirst into a bowl of salted caramel ice cream.

If you’re looking for a long-term fix to these top-ranking problems, more nutrition knowledge probably isn’t the answer. Neither is a meal plan. Or a new set of macros.

No, if you’re struggling with your food, eating, and exercise habits, you probably need help with your behaviors, especially being consistent with crucial fundamentals. (We call these “Level 1” practices, and we’ll introduce you to them throughout this article.)

According to our incoming clients, their most-pressing nutrition problems boil down to this:

How do they stop overeating and, at the same time, find convenient, practical, and satisfying ways to enjoy foods that best nourish their bodies?

Easy problems to solve? No.

Are they solvable? Absolutely.

With that in mind, here are the 8 biggest nutrition challenges*, along with proven strategies you can use to make better choices, and get better results.

Don’t try to tackle all these challenges at once. That rarely works.

Instead, choose just one. Focus on it for two or three weeks.

When you feel ready to take on more, select another area that needs some TLC, and give it your full attention.

You can make incredible, lasting progress this way. We know, because we’ve seen it happen with thousands of real clients.

Now it’s your turn. 

* We’ve combined closely-related categories.

Nutrition Challenge #1: “I can’t stop stress/emotional eating.”

More than 60 percent of our new clients list emotional/stress eating as a major nutrition challenge. What’s more, over 50 percent say they also “get intense cravings” and “snack when not hungry.”

If you relate, it might be a relief to know you’re not alone. Of course, that’s little consolation when your spoon’s scraping the bottom of a freshly-opened jar of cookie butter.

But what if you realized this behavior occurs…

• Every time your mom calls?
• On Sunday nights, when you’re dreading the start of a new week?
• Whenever you see, smell, or hear something that reminds you of your ex?

In our coaching approach, we call this “noticing and naming,” and it offers us great opportunities to regain control.

Emotional eating and intense cravings are typically part of a pattern of behavior that’s triggered by a specific experience—a thought, feeling, and/or situation.

If you can identify the trigger, you can disrupt the pattern of behavior and make different choices. 

We use what we call a “break the chain” worksheet that helps clients identify their emotional and stress eating triggers. Then, we apply a step-by-step strategy to build alternative actions.

For the complete instructions, read this article: Conquer your cravings and break the sinister cycle that makes you overeat.

Nutrition Challenge #2: “I don’t plan meals.”

Survey says… 53 percent of both men and women check this box.

But good news: Serious improvement in this area may not be as time-consuming and complicated as it sounds.

Think about meal planning on a continuum. 

At the far left: You put zero thought into what you might eat later today or tomorrow or the rest of the week. Most decisions are made after you’re already hungry and while you’re staring at the contents of your refrigerator—or looking at a drive-thru menu.

At the far right: You spend Sunday morning grocery shopping and taking the afternoon to prep seven days of breakfast, lunch, and dinner, packing it away in containers and leaving nothing to chance.

But in between? There’s real opportunity to progress, and it doesn’t require a complicated meal plan. You just need to do a little better than you are now.

A great place to start: 

Plan to eat one to two servings (think: an amount the size of your fist) of produce at each meal. 

Don’t worry about variety for now: If you like steamed broccoli or raw carrots or sliced cucumbers, you could have those at every meal, if you want. Just practice buying what you need and eating it at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

And if you find yourself at a restaurant, stick to the plan. That could mean getting a side salad with an order of broccoli instead of fries. (For bonus planning, try checking the restaurant’s menu online before you go.)

You’ll be amazed at how this simple approach can transform the quality of your meals, yet it doesn’t require a ton of effort.

For more ways to ease yourself into healthy eating, check out: Why meal plans usually suck.

Nutrition Challenge #3: “I eat too quickly.”

While this isn’t at the top of the challenge list overall, it was the #1 issue for men—with nearly 60 percent of guys raising their hand.

And turns out, these folks are spot-on. Almost everyone benefits from eating more slowly.

In fact, in our coaching method, slow eating is one of the first practices we ask clients to do. The reason is simple: It’s incredibly effective.

The act of consciously slowing down—even just taking a breath or two between bites at first—can help you eat less without feeling deprived.

And we’ve found it works for everyone from the most advanced dieters to those who’ve struggled with healthy eating for a lifetime.

To experience how you can use this practice to transform your body—starting at your next meal—see The 30-day slow eating challenge.

Nutrition Challenge #4: “I have a serious sweet tooth.”

Maybe you love cookies. Or M&Ms. Or anything that’s rolled in sugar.

That’s completely normal, according to almost 50 percent of our new clients.

However, it’s typically not just the sweetness that appeals to your taste buds, belly, and brain. It’s a diabolically delicious combination of sugar, fat, and salt that makes certain foods nearly irresistible. There’s even a special name for them: hyperpalatable.

In fact, food manufacturers use this flavor formula to create products you can’t stop eating. (It’s great for sales, after all.)

The biggest challenge with these foods is their availability: They’re everywhere, including your kitchen.

So, remember Berardi’s First Law (named for its originator, Precision Nutrition co-founder Dr. John Berardi):

If a food is in your house or possession, either you, someone you love, or someone you marginally tolerate will eventually eat it.

This also leads to the corollary of Berardi’s First Law:

If a healthy food is in your house or possession, either you, someone you love, or someone you marginally tolerate will eventually eat it.

We’re not saying you should make sweets off-limits. Instead, shape your environment to set yourself up for success.

What would happen if, next time you visit the grocery store, you bought some fruit for dessert instead of that jumbo pack of Oreos? 

Try it, and observe what happens.

To learn more about how to handle hyperpalatable foods, read Manufactured deliciousness: Why you can’t stop overeating.

Nutrition Challenge #5: “I eat out a lot.”

With so many temptations on restaurant menus, it’s natural to feel a little tortured about what to order. Once that mental back-and-forth begins, it’s all too easy to say, “Heck with it, give me the carbonara and pass the bread sticks.”

Along with planning meals or your food choices (as in Challenge #2), you can also plan how to show up.

• Is this a special occasion where you want the freedom to indulge? Is the food so unique and amazing at this restaurant that it’s truly worth it? (If so, slow down and really savor the experience.)

• Or would you prefer your choice align with your healthy eating practice? (If so, consider preparing in advance by reviewing the menu, or even setting a phone or calendar reminder to help yourself stay on track.)

There’s no right or wrong answer, but deciding ahead of time can help you stay focused and avoid being distracted by a mountain of pasta. 

Every time you follow through on your plan, notice how you feel after you’ve finished your meal.

Ask yourself: “Am I just as satisfied as I would have been otherwise?”

If yes, that’s a positive step to encouraging the same behavior next time. (With more practice, smart choices become easier and easier.)

If no, try following these steps:

• Order a plant-rich dish. (Shoot for half your plate to be vegetables.)
• Choose a lean protein. (Read: chicken breast or fish.)
• Avoid breaded and fried foods. (This eliminates a lot of poor choices.)
• Ask for dressings on the side. (And use responsibly.)
• Eat slowly. (See Challenge #3, above.)
• Stop when you’re 80 percent full. (See Challenge #6, below.)

These aren’t hard and fast rules, but a practical guide for when you’re eating out—no matter if you’re at a fine-dining establishment or a fast food chain.

Is this your top challenge? Make sure to read 25 ways to eat well on-the-go for additional insights and strategies.

Nutrition Challenge #6: “I eat larger portions than I need.”

In the weight loss industry, it’s popular to tell people, “It’s not your fault.”

And in this case, it’s probably true. Between your parents directing you to “clean your plate,” the abundance of hyperpalatable foods (see Challenge #4), and the mega-meals served by chain restaurants, eating more than you need can feel completely natural.

Which means eating an appropriate-sized meal can feel… completely unnatural. At least until you get you used to it. And that requires practice.

A simple way to start: 

Eat slowly (Challenge #3… again), and stop when you’re 80 percent full. Do this no matter how much is left on your plate or how uncomfortable it makes you feel. 

This won’t be easy at first, and you may wonder, “Am I at 80 percent full or 70 percent?” or “Did I just totally mess up and go over?”

Don’t worry about it. The point is to become a more mindful eater and pay better attention to your body’s satiety signals. That takes time, and like any skill, you’ll improve with practice.

We’re going for progress here, not perfection.

Of course, it helps to start with a reasonable portion size. But you don’t need to enter your meals into a calculator ahead of time. You can use your hands to estimate how you should eat, with our simple but effective portion and calorie control guide.

Nutrition Challenge #7: “I don’t have time to prepare meals.”

Are you seeing a theme emerge? Sure, this one’s related to “I don’t plan out meals” and “I eat out too much.” But it’s also slightly different because it’s specifically calling out the reason why: a lack of a key resource.

Now let’s be honest: There may be a lack of desire here, too, at least compared to activities you do have time for. And that’s okay.

After all, many people are on the move all day, making a living, commuting, and/or caring for others. You deserve some time to unwind, and if that means grabbing takeout so you can sink into your couch 30 minutes sooner, we get it.

But let’s go back to our continuum concept:

• If you’re making zero meals now, could you find time to make one meal each week?

• Or if you’re making three, could you find time to make four?

If you can make just one extra meal, you’ll be taking a positive action to change your behavior and improve your health. 

That’s how real, lasting transformation happens: one tiny step at a time, not by trying to change everything overnight.

So figure out what action you’re capable of now—even if it doesn’t seem like much—and try it out. Then practice it next week, too. As it becomes easier, ask yourself: “Could I add in another home-cooked meal?”

Remember: Progress, not perfection.

And for more ways to deal with a hectic lifestyle, check out 7 ways to make time for exercise and nutrition.

Nutrition Challenge #8: “I drink too much.”

If you’re nodding your head right now, we feel you. And so do more than 30 percent of our new clients who say they over-consume alcohol.

The question is: What does “too much” mean? It can be different for everyone.

Maybe you’re drinking two or three glasses of wine at night and wondering if you’re relying too much on alcohol to take the edge off. Or perhaps you don’t imbibe during the week, but drink to excess on the weekend.

Even if you don’t have what’s considered a “serious” problem, your drinking habits could be affecting your ability to lead a healthier lifestyle—by interfering with your sleep, affecting your judgement (“Hey everyone! Who wants late-night nachos??”), and stimulating your appetite.

Ask yourself: What’s one action you could take to feel a little better about your alcohol intake?

• Could you have two glasses tonight instead of three?
• Could you drink more slowly, so that one glass lasts longer?
• Could you have a glass of water between cocktails?

If your alcohol intake isn’t destroying your work or family life, you don’t necessarily have to slam on the brakes.

Ease yourself into it, and notice how you feel. Better awareness can result in better choices. 

For more help and how-to advice, check out: Would I be healthier if I quit drinking?

If you’re a coach, or you want to be…

You can help people build sustainable nutrition and lifestyle habits that will significantly improve their physical and mental health—while you make a great living doing what you love. We'll show you how.

If you’d like to learn more, consider the PN Level 1 Nutrition Coaching Certification. (You can enroll now at a big discount.)

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