New Year’s Nutrition – 5 Steps to Take in the New Year to Dial in Your Nutrition

With the holiday season in full swing, we are getting closer and closer to the next season that follows the holidays. The ‘New Year, New You’ season.

Many like to use the New Year and the month of January as a time to re-set, create health and fitness goals for the year, and kickstart new healthy habits to help them achieve their goals related to improved health, fitness, and performance. It’s a great time to review the previous year and set intentions towards what you want to accomplish in the year ahead.

If your goals for 2024 include improving your nutrition to improve your health, assist you in losing body fat or gaining muscle, or to aid in optimizing your physical performance, we want to provide you with 5 principles and habits to help you in achieving those goals. Let’s get into it…

#1: Have a clearly defined short-term goal

It all starts with a well-defined goal. Most people have now heard the term ‘SMART’ goals when it comes to goal setting. The SMART acronym stands for ‘specific,’ ‘measurable,’ achievable,’ ‘relevant,’ and ‘timely.’

Let’s specifically dive into ‘timely’ from the SMART goal acronym.

It often works best with nutrition goals to have short-term goals that provide a stepping stone to the next goal with overall goals broken down into more manageable short-term time frames. For example, if you want to lose 50 pounds, you may start with a goal of saying, ‘In the next 12 weeks I’m going to lose 10 lbs.’ Viewing it as a 12-week block of focused effort towards weight loss, with an achievable and sustainable amount of weight to lose provides a mental framework that keeps the workload approachable.

Often making the changes necessary to overhaul our nutrition and gain momentum towards achieving our goals takes a lot of effort and work. High levels of effort can only be sustained for so long before we begin to fatigue. Set an intention to sustain a focused and high level of effort and attention for 12 weeks. At that point, you can gauge success, take a ‘cruise’ period to simply maintain what has been achieved and determine what steps need to be taken next for the next wave of progress to occur towards the overall goal.

#2: Principles over methods

Principles are defined as, “a fundamental truth or proposition that serves as the foundation for a system of belief or behavior or for a chain of reasoning.”

Methods can be thought of as the means to put a principle into action or to carry out a principle.

All too often, especially regarding nutrition, people get way too deep into the weeds on the methods being used.

Stick to principles.

For example, for weight loss, given the first law of thermodynamics, a guiding principle is to take in less calories than you burn. Caloric restriction is tried and true when it comes to losing weight. Whether you do this through intermittent fasting, counting calories and macros, skipping breakfast, not eating 3 hours before bed, it all boils down to adhering to the general principle of caloric restriction.

Guide your plan with sound principles and find the methods that work best for you as an individual.

#3: Protein as the key macronutrient to target

Protein is a vital macronutrient for all kinds of nutrition goals – fat loss, gaining muscle, improving health status, etc.

Protein provides the essential building blocks for building muscle tissue. It also helps fuel muscular function for performance during workouts and plays a role in regulating hormones that control feelings of being full (satiated) or hungry.

Counting all your macros – every gram of fat, protein, and carbohydrate ingested, may seem like a daunting task. A good start can simply be to track protein intake and ensure you are hitting a minimum level to help assist you in optimizing workout performance and aid in maintaining lean muscle if you are in a fat loss phase or gaining muscle if that is your goal.

Shoot for 1.8-2.4 grams of protein per kilogram of bodyweight daily, to support improving body composition and maintaining or gaining muscle. For a 100-pound individual, this would mean that their body weight is 45.5 kilograms and that they should shoot for eating at least 82 grams of protein per day.

#4: Staying properly hydrated to help manage hunger

Hunger is tricky and gauging when we are truly hungry and in need of food can sometimes be difficult.

Sometimes signals we interpret as us being hungry may be our bodies signaling a need for something else. One example being that we may, in fact, need hydration.

While it does not appear that water intake directly causes people to eat less, it does appear that staying properly hydrated can affect our perception of hunger throughout the day.

Sometimes drinking a glass of water initially when we receive a signal of hunger in our minds, might be just what is needed to allow us to decide that we really don’t need food or a snack at that moment in time and this may indirectly lead to less calories being ingested, overall, throughout the day.

Shoot for half your bodyweight in ounces of water each day.

#5: Manage your environment to set yourself up for success

If you took psychology 100 in college, you heard about the concept of classical conditioning.

This is the behavioral principle that states learned behaviors begin to occur when a neutral stimulus becomes associated with a learned response over time.

An example of this is a dog owner using a leash every time they take their dog outside for a walk. The dog begins to associate their owner grabbing the leash with going outside for a walk. So, every time the owner grabs the leash the dog gets excited and runs up to the door waiting to go outside.

Many of our behavioral patterns can simply boil down to classical conditioning, including nutrition behavior habits.

For example, if every time we watch our favorite show on Netflix we also grab our favorite bag of candy and eat it while watching the show. Over enough time, we may just grab the bag of candy and start eating it when we are watching our favorite show on Netflix without even considering if we are even hungry or want food at that time.

Do an inventory of some of your eating habits that you know are detrimental to your goals. Are some of these habits simply just automatic responses to a certain activity, place in your house, feeling/emotion, etc.? If so, create a strategy to change the pattern and break the habit. For example, in the scenario above, maybe you skip buying the candy during your next trip to the grocery store and replace the candy with a bowl of fruit while watching your show.

Closing Thoughts

Hopefully this gives you some ideas and strategies for getting off to a successful start with your New Year’s nutrition goals.

If you think it would be more helpful to have someone else guiding the process and helping you achieve your nutrition goals in the new year, we are now beginning to offer nutrition programming and coaching at Outlast Health and Performance. Ask us about setting up a nutrition consultation next time you are in for a visit, call our office to get more information, or book your nutrition consultation online through our website under the ‘schedule your appointment’ section after clicking the ‘Get Started’ link on the home page.

We hope everyone has a successful start to 2024 and a happy and healthy New Year!

Chris Stires, PT, DPT