Hey guys, before we get started with the intro, I just want to point out that the seven part miniseries on the nutritional pyramid of importance were actually the first seven episodes that I recorded for the podcast. So please bear that in mind when leaving a rating and review. My microphone technique was probably not quite up to scratch and I was still figuring out the process. So please bear that in mind, cheers guys. You know what is up guys, Welcome to the live train perform podcast. I'm your host, Sean cooper of performance functional training. I'm currently the head strength conditioning coach at the world renowned Tiger moisten mm A training camp based in Phuket Thailand. I'm a strength and conditioning coach, nutritional therapist. NLP master practitioner, a former Australian army soldier and combat veteran. This podcast is dedicated to bringing you the tools, knowledge, experience and expertise to allow you to live your life to your fullest, trained to your potential and perform at your best. I'm going to do that by providing three different styles of podcast style one is going to be 3-5 part miniseries, 15-25 min episodes, each covering a numerous topics including nutrition, lifestyle, sleep, stress management and training philosophies style too, is going to be me interviewing people at the top of their game, who they are, how they started out where they got to where they're at and what makes them tick.

Style three is all about you guys. I'm going to be answering your questions, you can find that on my Q and a memes, which I'll be posting on my social media platforms. My social media platforms are at instagram at K O B E s. Underscore Pft at codes underscore PFT facebook is performance functional training and Youtube is at performance functional training. Make sure you like subscribe and follow those platforms. Uh I will be referencing my Youtube channel throughout the episodes. So if you want your questions answered, go onto the men to the Q and a memes that will be posting on my social media platforms, pop in your questions and I will answer them for you on the podcast. Let's get it. Mhm Yeah, yeah. Catch, Welcome to this six part miniseries on nutrition. We are going to be covering the nutritional pyramid of importance. Energy balance, macro nutrients and water micro nutrients and fiber calorie, cycling, carb, cycling, diet, intermittent fasting, etcetera And supplements.

Now, why do I run my nutrition coaching like this? Well, it's because 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts. So we need to focus on what's actually going to give us the best results and allow us to make the biggest change with the least amount of effort. I'm going to be diving into each one of these topics in its own dedicated podcast episode which will follow up from the intro. But in this intra I'm going to give a pretty broad idea of an understanding of each one of these components. At the base of the pyramid. We have energy balance. This is measured through either calories or killer jules. What are calories? Ah It's essentially a unit of measure, just like a centimeter is a unit of measure. To measure distance. A calorie is a unit of measure. To measure energy. Now we have energy in, we have energy out. The law of thermodynamics states that if we want to lose weight we need to be in a calorie deficit meaning where burning more than we're taking in. If we want to gain weight, we need to be in a calorie surplus meaning where taking in more than we're burning.

If we want to maintain our weight then we need our energy balance to be equal. We're burning the same amount of energy as we're taking in throughout the day. Again, I'll dive into this in its own topic in its own episode and we'll figure out your basal metabolic rate as well as total daily energy expenditure. Next up on the pyramid of importance. Are are macronutrients. Now what are our macronutrients? Why are they important macronutrients? Are your big nutrients, macro meaning big nutrients are what your body requires to uh to thrive to essentially fuel all of our physiological processes that occur behind the scenes that you don't even have to think about. So each one of these macronutrients has a caloric value. Again, I'll dive into this in its own episode but basically our macro nutrients. Our body requires these for certain physiological processes. Carbohydrates, for example, are primarily used for our fuel source, it's our primary and preferred fuel source and our brain actually uses up 20-25% of our bodies glucose.

Which is basically what happens when you ingest carbohydrates, your body turns it into glucose or glycogen to use as fuel. We also have our proteins which are essential for restoration recovery, repair. All of our body cells are made up of proteins or sorry, of amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins. So one once you eat protein or meat protein sources, et cetera, your body's going to break them down into amino acids to fuel those cells. We also have fats which are essential for hormone regulation. Again, I'll dive into these in a lot more detail in its own podcast episode, also included in the macro nutrient portion. I'm going to look at alcohol and the effect that that has on the body and also fiber why that's important and what that does for us. The next component of the pyramid are micro nutrients. So, these are vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients. Again, our body requires these micro nutrients, micro meaning small nutrients that your body requires to fuel these physiological processes that occur behind the scenes.

So a lot of people look at the if it fits your macros diet and go, yep, sweet, I'm hitting my macros, I'm hitting my calorie numbers, I'm good to go. But at the end of the day, if you're not hitting your micro nutrient levels, your vitamins, minerals phytonutrients, then your body is going to be deprived of certain nutrients and that could turn up in your skin. It could turn up in your hair, you might get acne, um oily skin or um you know, your hair is not growing very well, you're now as a crack and things like that. So, if you have any of these signs, that's a good indication that you might have some micronutrient deficiencies. I'm going to talk about this in a lot more detail once we get to that portion. But what I'll also cover in the micro nutrients is the importance of water. Why is it important that we drink enough water? And how much should we be drinking per day? The next portion of our pyramid are our diets, our calorie cycling, carb cycling, intermittent fasting. All of these other different tools that people tend to make a lot of money on by selling these bullshit products and snake oil and all this other rubbish that really doesn't make as much of a difference.

I mean, at the end of the day, if you follow the nutritional pyramid of importance, dial in your energy balance, make sure you're getting enough fuel in the right amounts by race by macro nutrient ratios with correct um nutrients, vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients, then you're going to be pretty good. These tools, calorie calorie cycling. Carb cycling, intermittent fasting keto, all this sort of stuff. They're just tools. All right. So we can throw them in at times. But a lot of people don't really understand why these tools are important and when to use them. So when it comes to tools, think about using the right tool for the right job. The more tools I have in my toolbox, the more options I've got, the more people I can help, the more you know, I can I can really dial everything in, get a little bit tighter. So think about driving my car down the road if my car suddenly gets a flat tire and I get out, I jacked my car up, get the wheel off the ground. What I want to do is look in my toolbox and see what tools I have. Let's say I have a rattle gun, I have a wheel brace, I have a shifter, I have a spanner and I have a hammer.

Okay, which one of those tools am I am I going to use to change that tire ideally if I've got a rattle gun, I'm probably going to use that, it's going to be super efficient. However, if I've left my car overnight in a cold place and I've kept the door open and the lights on etcetera. If I walk out, my battery's flat. I'm not gonna be able to use that same tool. I'm going to need to choose a different tool to get that job done. So when we're looking at this portion of the pyramid, I'm going to be talking about different techniques that we can use at different times. As long as you have the prerequisites in place and you have, you know, the first part, the first, the foundation of the pyramid, Golden first. Only. Then these top two components of calorie cycling, carb, cycling diets, et cetera, and supplements going to make a difference. But we'll talk about that in its own episode. And right at the peak of the Pyramid, we have supplements. Now, supplements are a little bit of a contentious subject. A lot of people believe they need supplements too. You get the results that they want, you know, achieve the body of their dreams, et cetera.

But that's all marketing bullshit again. Or dive into this in its own topic. Uh Our supplements useful. Yes, as long as you have the prerequisites in place and you have everything else told in. So supplements can be used to fill gaps in the diet and that's exactly how I use them. That's exactly what they're supposed to be used for, supplements are too literally supplement your diet if you're maybe vegan or vegetarian or something like that and you're not getting enough protein and then that's exactly when you're gonna start throwing some protein powders in. Likewise, there's been good research showing that creatinine can actually improve cognitive ability and most of our career teen, our body makes it. But most of our career team comes from animal products, particularly red meat. So if we're not getting any red meats and then it might be worth getting, you know, some supplementing with creatine. Likewise with iron, if you're not getting any red meat and then your iron levels are likely going to be low. Again, we'll dive into this in its own topic. But supplements are essentially to fill in any gaps that you have. Any nutritional deficiencies or energy requirements that your body needs.

That's when supplements come into place. The reason I use this pyramid of importance as a framework is because it it really tells us what we need to be focusing on. We need to build the foundation of the pyramid first before we start moving on to the next portions or the next blocks. So again, that pyramid of importance is energy balance at the bottom. Okay, if we're not getting enough energy in to support our goals, then it doesn't matter if we're hitting our macronutrients and micronutrients getting supplements and intermittent fasting, Our body is either thriving or surviving. Now there are going to be times when you want to put your body into a little bit of a survival mode. This is when you're like a weight class athlete or you really want to cut up or you're looking for uh to get on stage or compete as a physique athlete or something like that. You know, there's gonna be time to really reduce your calories and put yourself into survival mode. But you need to be smart about it because you can create some metabolic damage, which I'll talk about in the energy balanced episode. But essentially, if you want to adapt in a positive way, you need to be healthy and a healthy organism is an adaptable organism.

So we need to set the foundation, make sure that our body is in a healthy place, then add the stress required to recover and then adapt in a positive manner Before we get into the energy balance episode, I want to recommend that people start tracking their food. Why do we track our food well? There's a number of reasons for this. Number one is so that we can get an understanding of how much food we're actually eating, where our metabolism is at, our metabolism is always adapting. That's what our body evolved to do to adapt to the environment. Think about this from an evolutionary perspective, during the colder winter months, where there's not much food around your body would adapt to that and slow down the metabolism. You see this happen with bears where they eat a shitload of food and they get fat in the summer and spring months when it's warm, then they go and hibernate their body by starts churning through there are stored energy, which is through body fat through the winter months, they come out, they're super lean, okay, they go through that process again and again again now as humans, we evolved to do the same thing essentially.

But this age that we live in, we have food so abundantly available. We've always got energy at our hands. The first thing I recommend doing before we start setting our numbers for our energy balance is to track your food. We can do this by downloading my fitness power or fat secret or lose at any one of these tools that are going to allow you to track your food. Now, how do we do this? I recommend setting up a profile. You'll put in your age, your weight, your height, uh, et cetera, et cetera. Then the app is going to use an algorithm that tells you how many calories you should be eating. Okay, completely ignore that. Because right now we don't want to be chasing numbers. The first thing we want to do is get an understanding where your metabolism is at and how much your body is actually requiring on a daily basis. So don't change how you're eating. Don't chase any numbers or anything like that. I'd recommend setting your calorie, uh, calorie goals to zero your macro nutrient goals to maybe 30 30 30.

Don't even worry about that. Just focus on eating the way you normally eat so that we get a good understanding of where your baseline is before we start making some adjustments. Now, this is super important to get a baseline because when you're hungry, you're going to eat when you're not hungry, you're not going to eat if you eat ice cream every night or drink beer or wine every night, do that because we want to see where you're at. I want to see you want to see what your body requires on a daily basis, energy wise and roughly what your macro nutrient ratios are. So then we can start making some adjustments. I'd recommend doing this every day for a week. So spend the first couple of days just kind of playing around with the app, getting a feel for it, getting an understanding of how it works Then for roughly 7-14 days track as accurately as you can without changing anything that will then give you an understanding of what your baseline is and then you can start making some adjustments, figuring out where you want to go from there. So that's the first reason I don't track my food. But that's because I can look at a plate of food and have an understanding of how much energies on that plate and what those macro nutrient ratios are.

But that's because I have tracked my food in the past and I have a really good understanding of that through prior experience and knowledge. Now the second reason I recommend tracking your food is because you can then start connecting the dots with how it makes you feel so fairly, fairly commonly. I get clients, you know, ask questions like how they slept, what the energy levels are like throughout the day. Do they have any crashes? Energy crashes throughout the day? Do they ever get any bloating or indigestion? And quite often they say yes, I get a little bit of an energy crash at two o'clock in the afternoon or get a little bit of bloating at 9 30 in the morning, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All right, cool. Now I can look back at my food diary and say, right, there's something maybe in the breakfast that's causing some bloating or indigestion. Maybe we can look at, you know, maybe there's some milk or some gluten or something else that your body might be a little bit intolerant to that's causing some information. Likewise, if we look at what people are having for lunch, if they're having energy crashes at two o'clock in the afternoon, then maybe lunch is fairly carb heavy, which is going to spike blood sugar levels, then it's going to crash them.

Then your body is going to want to crave more. You're going to get super hungry or you're feeling really tired, really fatigued, a little bit foggy. So then we can start connecting the dots with how food makes us feel what it does for us and how it allows us to or how it changes our energy levels? All right? And the other, the other reason for this is because then we can start identifying any nutritional deficiencies. If we're looking at hair, skin, nails, energy levels, sleep, um Sex drive et cetera et cetera. That's a pretty good indication if there's some issues there that you might have some micronutrient deficiencies. So then we can start looking at foods that uh you know, we're going to provide the right micro nutrients to balance everything out and get your body working correctly again. And this is again where, you know, we might be looking at these different tools of the pyramid, something that was quite common when I was working with a lot of clients back in Australia. And I still get this now, is that particularly guys trade these. They come to me and they're like, man, I'm not building muscle. My energy levels are a little bit low, blah blah blah blah.

All right, well look at that, look at what they do for a job and I asked them how many calories there eating. Quite often, they're like, I'm eating about 2002 and a half 1000 calories. I'm like, man, you're probably taking 15,000 steps a day working active job. Your body is simply not getting enough energy in for you to build muscles. So, you know, that's where energy balance comes into play. Then when we're looking at performance, then we're looking at macro nutrients. So our macro nutrients provide us with the service we want to be having certain macronutrients at certain times of the day depending on what we've just done and what we're about to do, then our micro nutrients are responsible for overall health. This is where we get the body to a healthy position and healthy organism is an adaptable organism. Then we're looking at all of these other tools, our calorie cycling, carb cycling, diets, intermittent fasting, etcetera. Alright, how can we work them in? And where can we um where can we implement the benefits of each one of these? An example of this is the ketogenic diet. If someone is super insulin sensitive, then it might be worth putting them on a reduced calorie diet and then start pushing them towards a ketogenic diet.

Okay, And that might take might reduce some of their inflammation symptoms and might balance out their blood sugar levels and they won't have as many crashes throughout the day. And again, I'll talk about how that affects the hormones in that uh podcast episode. We've got our supplements at the top of the pyramid and this is essentially where we're just looking to fill in the gaps wherever we can. Uh some people are going to require x supplements. Some people require, why supplements. Some people requires a supplements depending on who you are and where you're at. What I want to really drive home though is that I'm going to be providing pretty general information here. It's good quality, general information. But if you want to get the most out of this, you really need to pay attention to how your body works and how it adapts to each one of these changes and then really find what works best for you. Every single person is going to be different. So for everybody to eat the same amount, the same food and the same diet and get the same results, it's just ridiculous. Every single person has a different um fingerprint and our gut microbiome flora.

Our responses are hormone regulations are completely different. So we need to take that into consideration any time we're making any changes with diet, exercise, lifestyle, sleep, stress management, etcetera. But the biggest point that I can take, I can make sorry is to pay attention. We live in this world, We live in this age where we're constantly distracted. We're constantly looking for external things that take our concentration away from us. All right, Your body is constantly talking to. You're going to wake up, you can have a scratchy, scratchy throat, you'll have a runny nose, your joints are going to be sore, you're going to feel like napping throughout the day. This is your body talking to you. Just simply pay attention rather than going, I'm tired today, I'm going to have an extra fucking coffee or pre workout powder. Whatever. Pay attention your body is constantly talking to you. The only thing that I want out of this podcast is to help people cut through the bullshit in the health and fitness industry. There's so many snake oil salesman and magicians that promise everything for barely doing anything.

Well, I'm here to tell you that that's bullshit. And if you want to make changes, you need to make changes. If you enjoy the message that I'm delivering, please help me spread the word and like share safe and subscribe to my social media platforms, instagram is at K O B E S underscore Pft at codes underscore pft my facebook is sean Coba and my business page is at performance functional training. You'll also find performance functional training on Youtube. Go and check that out and please pass this on to your friends, family, anyone else who would benefit from hearing this message. And if you could also leave me a five star rating and review, that would be much appreciated. Anybody who does leave me a five star rating and review will have precedence when it comes to my Q and A sessions. I'm going to be posting on my social media platforms in the coming weeks of questions and answers you guys ask the questions.

I will answer them on a podcast episode. That's it for me today guys. Hopefully enjoyed this episode and I look forward to bringing you some awesome content. Moving forward piece