“Know Thyself”

In my sixteen month work placement in an engineering firm, I found myself with some spare time during the day. I decided to fill this time by filling in a food and exercise diary. This started out as just a list of every training session I did along with a list of the meals I consumed during the day. This was basically just a journal to look back on a few months down the line and see if I’d progressed in my training, and how my diet contributed to it. As time went on, I began to monitor how I felt after each meal, on a 1-10 scale. This completely changed the purpose of the diary, and it became a way of finding which foods best fueled me (and those that didn’t) for general life and training. I will run through how this worked and some examples of what I found out about myself.

The Self-Assessment Aood Diary

Write down each meal you have and at what time you have it.
On a scale of 1-10 rate your satiety level (how satisfied your appetite is) immediately after the meal and energy levels about an hour afterwards.
At the end of the week, look back at all the times where your energy levels were lowest and highest.
Remove those that most negatively affect your energy levels. It is important to not make too many changes at once, so that you can create long term changes.
Repeat this week by week.

You are likely to find that some of the foods you have been eating on a regular basis, may not be the best fuel for your performance, whether that be in terms of sports, body composition, work, or general life. After all, any of these endeavours will suffer if you aren’t feeling your best.
The main thing I got out if this method was to find foods that sent me into an energy slump for the hours following eating it (we’ve all been there, right?). Anything that contained a lot of gluten (pasta, bread etc) had me lying around with a pregnant looking stomach, feeling like I wanted to sleep, and I wondered why I hadn’t noticed before assessing myself. In fact, I had noticed it happening me, but never equated it to the food I was eating. I gradually began to stop eating these foods, and felt all the better for it. My performance in sports improved and I also noticed my mental capacity improving. I also found that I functioned much better if I had a breakfast that contained a good amount of protein carbs and fat, when I changed from eating just porridge with fruit (high carbohydrate breakfast) to some eggs with lots vegetables sauteed in coconut oil. This all came from getting to know myself and how my body worked.

This is the problem with most diets: They recommend a set of guidelines to suit everyone, not acknowledging that everyone is different and has different needs when it comes to how they fuel their body. We can look at something like a vegan diet and see that it does work for a lot of people, but if your heritage comes from the Inuit peoples (indigenous to Alaska and Northern Canada) who have thrived on hunting and eating seals and other arctic animals, without any access to fruit and vegetables, you may have a problem eating a vegan diet and will likely become unhealthy. On the other hand, if someone with a heritage of thousands of years of eating a vegan diet, (although there are very few) they will likely not do well on the paleo diet (mostly eating meat), for example. Living in today’s world of easy travel and migration, most people are likely to have a mixture of lot of different heritages. For this reason, it is very misleading to suggest that one diet would suit most people.
This is the reason why the best (and I would argue, the only) way to get into your best physical condition and best performance level, is to get to know yourself and how your body works, hence the name ‘Know Yourself Nutrition’. There are many ways to do this, but I would suggest one way is to use the self assessment method as I have suggested.
On my website (www.knowyourselfnutrition.moonfruit.com) are some diet food log sheets that you can use to start this process. You will need to be willing to set aside a few minutes a day to fill this in, but the results will be worth it. There is a lot more to it than I can put down here, so keep up-to-date with what I’m up to by following me online or emailing me with your questions.

Good luck!

Conor, Know yourself nutrition

Oh, if you found this useful, you can sign up for my newsletter here: http://eepurl.com/bHG5DH