More than a Resolution: What You Need to Know About Your Diet

Managing a healthy lifestyle in the United States is something that’s both very personal but very public in our lives. There are a million and one articles on “how to lose 20 pounds in two months” or debates over the effectiveness of keto, Mediterranean, and raw diets. Navigating which foods are the “right” ones and figuring out portions can be a lot on its own. Add that to the pressure of making progress, finding time to cook food in a busy schedule, and personal beliefs of how you look or should look, and nutrition officially becomes complicated. 

January 1 is the day where more Americans resolve to get fit than any other New Year’s Resolution. Especially after a month of cookies and cocoa, the desire to get healthier can be strong. However, exercise alone cannot help you reach your goals. 80 percent of our health is based around what we eat, with the remainder revolving around how much we move. So in order to have long-lasting results for our bodies, we need long-term changes to how we eat.

What You Need to Know About Diets
The biggest thing to remember about any diet is that like you, your body can be afraid of change. Wherever you are right now is what your body considers to be “safe.” That’s why we hear the term “yo-yo diets,” because fast progress can sometimes regress just as quickly when your hormones strive to maintain the status quo. This isn’t to say progress isn’t possible. Rather, that true progress comes from simple baby steps that lead to long-lasting results. New habits aren’t built overnight. For lasting change, we must extend ourselves beyond the two-week and thirty-day challenges to find foods and habits that we can use in our everyday life.

Precision Nutrition
In addition to guidance on health and fitness, i’move offers clients the opportunity to join the Precision Nutrition online nutrition program. This individualized program offers daily lessons or videos to help you target the bad habits in your life, plus the one-on-one support needed to change them. 

Outside of individual support and weekly email check-ins, you will meet with a nutrition counselor monthly to measure your body composition and discuss the progress/challenges you face, all lead by our incredible coach Samantha van der Lende. It’s one thing to instill a new nutrition regimen or have an accountability partner, but this kind of face-to-face communication is where she really customizes the program for you. Not everyone makes progress the same way, and so lessons are purposefully individualized for specific goals and results. While online resources set up the foundation for success, answering your concerns and helping you reach manageable goals is her number one priority.

Your Progress
As we mentioned, there can be a lot of pressure around getting fast results, and this can be unfair to your body. Rather than what’s on the scale or BMI, measuring your body composition takes into account how much of your body is made up of bones, muscles, fats, fluids, etc. 

Current culture can put too much focus on the scale. Assigning a number to our health can be great to help set goals and measure progress, but it isn’t the end-all-be-all of health. On a scale, numbers may not have changed when someone loses fat but replaces it with muscle. But with body composition, Samantha can more easily track what has changed and what kind of progress participants make. 

It’s More Than Food
Precision Nutrition focuses on more than what you eat, because a healthy lifestyle isn’t just a food thing. It’s a sleep thing. It’s a stress thing. It’s a “habitually-grabbing-a-candy-bar-after-work” thing. 

Committing to a healthy lifestyle doesn’t just mean throwing out junk food. It means looking at if and how you have used food as a punishment or reward in your life. It means taking time to minimize stress and prioritize sleep. The psychological side of our eating habits cannot be overlooked. This is something she will invite you to reflect on and manage as you work through the program. By setting individualized goals and continual reassessment of those goals, she gets to the root cause of unhealthy habits and will work with you to commit to the changes of a long-lasting, healthy lifestyle.

This year, we encourage you to take the time to prioritize yourself, to look at your own habits and strive for a lifestyle that’s healthy for you. If you’re interested in joining our Precision Nutrition program, please contact Samantha van der Lende at svanderlende@imovedaily.com. For the fitness side of health, take a look at our adult fitness classes and ask Noel at noel@imovedaily.com about a free two-week trial. Your lifestyle is more than a resolution. It’s the baby steps we make every day of our lives.