will be able to perform at peak performance. But if one of the three components is missing, it is almost impossible to establish sustainable healthy eating habits and achieve food wellness.
Nutrition is the fuel you put into your body, and it impacts performance and mood. With the overwhelming amount of unscientifically based nutrition information available, it can be difficult to discern what is true and what is trendy. This is why having insight into sound nutritional information is a key foundation for obtaining food wellness.
Organized meal planning is essential for successfully executing and maintaining healthy eating habits. Meal planning reduces stress, saves money, and helps prevent consuming calorie-dense convenience foods.
Cooking your meals helps foster healthy eating habits. You may be incredibly organized and have immense nutritional insight, but you need to get all that wonderful knowledge onto a plate.
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What Can I Eat?
I’m often asked, “What foods do I need to eliminate on this program?” The answer is simple: none! This book is NOT a program, it is a lifestyle. One that does not label foods as good or as bad. Some recipes will include ingredients such as bacon, bread, and cheese; The Complete Plate does not demonize whole nutrients like fat or sugar. Nutrients work best in a food ecosystem. Eliminating certain foods, or single ingredients, prevents whole foods from doing their job. The Complete Plate promotes a balanced diet that does not deprive the user of specific foods.
Why It Works
This approach to eating works because it is not revolutionary—wait, what?! We have been conditioned to believe that a diet must be extreme, radical, and sexy in order for it to work. We do not give our bodies enough credit! Sure, there are situations that warrant a more creative approach, but for the general healthy population, our bodies are more than capable of handling the food we put into it within moderation. This plan is going back to the basics. It is not overcomplicating science, it is rooted in context and solid research, and it is fostering healthy relationships with food.
While other programs are prohibitive or eliminatory, The Complete Plate encourages balanced eating, which leads to optimal nutrition and satiation. And because you are eating a variety of foods, including the occasional treat, you never feel the need to cheat. This way of eating
celebrates delicious and healthy food consumed in moderation.
Best of all, The Complete Plate works because it’s sustainable. Since each meal plan is perfectly balanced for your dri values, you don’t have to follow the meal plans in order. If you are still becoming comfortable in the kitchen, keep it simple by choosing a few of your favorite meal plans and enjoy them over and over again. If variety is your spice of life, feel free to choose a different plan for every day of the week. With this book, I want you to feel empowered to make choices suited to your lifestyle needs.
Say Goodbye to Cravings
A little anecdotal plug. Once I started fulfilling my body’s daily micro- and macronutrient needs, my sugar cravings stopped. Essentially, by following my meal plans, my body is in a continually content state because it receives everything it needs to function at its peak performance on a daily basis. It is important to clarify that I would never label treats as bad, or a form of “cheating,” but when I get my dri values from food, I simply lose my desire for those foods.
Additionally, a balanced meal plan that provides your body with all its recommended intake values tends to reduce mindless snacking—a prime culprit for empty calories that add up quickly. But don’t worry, we don’t demonize snacking in The Complete Plate. Each meal plan provides a list of delicious and healthy snacks to curb hunger.
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nutrition 101
by Janine Elenko, RD
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I believe that everyone should have access to reliable nutrition information to help them make decisions about their health. What we eat impacts us throughout our lives, from our mother’s diet during our fetal development to our golden years. My interest in nutrition started when I met my husband, back when we were still kids. He was diag-nosed with type 1 diabetes mellitus at the age of 12, and I was fascinated with how food had such an immediate impact on his health. This sparked my journey to become a dietitian so I could help equip people to meet their health and nutrition goals.
Making a change is not a simple process because not only do we eat for physical nourishment, but also for social, psychological, and cultural reasons. Time, busy schedules, and finances impact our food choices, as well as the myriad of dietary preferences and requests of the people we are cooking for. Then, there is the flurry of information about nutrition from television, the Internet, and social circles (social media anyone?) that we try to sort through to make the best choices we can. What a process! Everyone should have access to trustworthy nutrition information; however, one of the challenges in the Information Age is being able to navigate, interpret, and trust the overwhelming amount of information at our fingertips.
Our body is a complex system of organs (large scale) made up of many types of individualized cells (small scale).
The foods that we eat provide the essential building blocks for these cells and organs to function, of which our understanding continues to evolve. The body relies on macronutrients—carbohydrates, protein, and fat—along with micronutrients—vitamins and minerals—to carry out life-giving func-tions. The Complete Plate is in no way a comprehensive lesson on nutrition, but I hope to clarify some of the founda-tions of nutrition as you embark on your healthy lifestyle adventure.
Macronutrients
Carbohydrates, protein, and fat act as the main building blocks in our body and are the components of food that contri-bute calories. Now here is a significant question: how much do calories count? When looking at weight management, the number of calories you consume makes a difference, as this is the amount of energy we are feeding our body, and that energy either needs to be used or stored. However, it is more important to put the emphasis on choosing foods that are “nutrient dense” versus “calorie dense.” This means your calories should come from foods that provide many nutrients important to our health (nutrient dense), rather than foods that have few nutrients but are high in energy (calorie dense). The body needs energy to function, but as with other concepts in nutrition, moderation is key—we want to give our body the energy it needs, not a lot of extra energy to store.
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Carbohydrates are the primary fuel source for our body, in particular for our brain, and provide fiber and multiple vitamins and minerals.6 A healthy diet should get 45–65 percent of its calories from complex carbohydrates,7 not refined (highly processed) carbohydrates and free sugars (see next paragraph). Whole grains, starchy vegetables, and legumes are considered complex carbohydrates, meaning they are high in fiber and require more work for our body to digest, helping us feel fuller for longer and stabilizing blood sugar and cholesterol levels. Refined carbohydrates are grains that have been processed (think of turning grain kernels into flour) and have had most of the fiber removed. Examples include white flour and white pasta. These foods are digested faster by our body, which impacts our hunger, blood sugar, and heart health. If you enjoy refined carbohydrates, try to make a shift to include them as treats, not as a staple part of your diet.
Sugars that are found in whole fruit and dairy products are also part of a healthy diet in moderation, as these foods are nutrient dense.
