How to Achieve Maximum Health Through Nutrition - Part 2
Last week we covered Part 1 of 3 in the quest for Maximum Performance, by achieving maximum health. We discussed the importance of determining which nutrients you need. If you missed it, read it here. This week, we will cover the importance of timing your nutrition
The goal of this series: Is to help you achieve maximum performance. Only when you achieve maximum health can you achieve maximum performance.
So Let's dive in. To achieve maximum health through nutrition, you need to ensure you provide your body with these two things:
1. Provide your body with every nutrient it needs.
2. Ensure it has those nutrients available for use, exactly when you body needs them.
In last week's post, we gave you an overview on the importance of the essential nutrients the human body needs daily as well as the lesser-known phytonutrients. To get these two nutrients you need to have a mixture of both a healthy daily nutritional eating program along with the need for nutritional supplementation.
This week we dive into why getting those nutrients at the right time is beyond critical to your health and your bodies performance!
Having the nutrients when you need them.
Everyone has heard the historical way to obtain optimal health, that is to eat “3 balanced meals per day”. These balanced meals are breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The goal behind this was pretty straight forward - to ensure that the nutritional value of those three meals collectively provided the needed nutrients for the body over a 24 hours period.
This is however no longer accurate, especially given today's fast-paced and competitive lifestyle. As an athlete or just someone wanting to be healthy, getting complete nutrition is even more difficult these days with GMO foods, and just the price of food becoming so expensive, where fast food has become the cheaper option, but is way less nutritious. Therefore the fact here is there is now an actual need for a 4th balanced meal, one taken right before bedtime takes on a special focus. That focus is complete nutrition through a highly nutritious meal, with the correct amount of vitamins, minerals, proteins, while making sure it's lower on the calorie side, so your body gets that highly important need for obtaining optimal health.
Let's explain further below why this is a growing requirement for everyone, not just athletes.
There is now a need for a 4th "Pre Bedtime nutritious meal". One that's highly nutritious while making sure it's lower on the calorie side.
We will use a typical aspiring athlete as an example to help us explain why this 4th meal has become so important.The average athlete here has two workouts a day a couple of times a week. They typically wake up around 5 am for their morning workout, which lasts 1-2 hrs. Most of those athletes at this point will not have a balanced meal before a workout, they might throw in a small snack, like a protein bar, which is usually good with calories and some protein, but hardly a nutrient-rich meal. Then after a workout, they might then have a solid breakfast at say 8 am of before school. Eventually, they grab lunch around 12-1 pm with a workout scheduled in the late afternoon. Somewhere between 3-6 pm, and have dinner shortly thereafter, say 6-7 pm. Most athletes will then be in bed around 10 pm getting ready for the next day. Rinse and repeat.
If this sounds familiar to your schedule, then also take a deeper dive at the timings here. They eat dinner at 7 pm, go to sleep a couple of hours later, then are up at 5 am, train, and hopefully then have a nutritious meal at 8 am.
That's a 13-hour gap between meals. Worse yet, this is occurring at the most critical time for recovery, during sleep! Sleep is a critically important, about 6 -10 hour of the day when there are no physical demands on the body, the perfect time to recover, repair, rebuild and rejuvenate for the next day. If the body does not have the nutrients it needs when it's trying to recover (during sleep), it's putting itself at a massive disadvantage, as it now needs to "find" what it needs to recover. Also, another factor to take into account is the nutritional value that dinner gives the body is often reduced by the immediate needs taken by the afternoon training.
The Ideal 4th Pre Bedtime Meal.
This is one of the major reasons we strongly believe in the 4th bedtime meal. Please remember, however, this is not a typical meal, more of a specialized low caloric, high in nutrition meal. It's the perfect time for a fully balanced and complete nutritional “milkshake”.
Again the simple goal here is to make sure the body has all it needs during sleep to fully benefit from the previous day's training and recover as much as humanly possible in preparation for the next day's physical demands.
What our 4th pre-bedtime meal should have:
- High amounts of essential macro-nutrients (must contain casein proteins).
- Higher in as many micro-nutrients as possible.
- Low in calories.
- Protein source must not be just Whey, it needs to contain the critical "time release" protein Casein.
It is in your best interest to start having that 4th meal and see how much better you will feel in the morning, waking ready to take on the world. We at P2Life have had countless athletes and people take the P2Life 14-day - 4th meal challenge by taking either of our sports shakes at bedtime. The results have been outstanding and everyone is telling us how amazing on how much better they feel and perform. So give it a try, there is nothing to lose.
TAKE THE 14 DAY CHALLENGE!
Start having that 4th meal and see how much better you will feel in the morning, waking ready to take on the world.
Finally, it is not just at bedtime that a nutritious milkshake might prove important. It is anytime your daily routine does not allow you to have both a timely and nutritious breakfast, lunch or dinner.
Think of the milkshake as “nutritional insurance” for the body. Filling the gaps anytime you cannot have a nutritious meal.
Remember we stress about the importance to maximize performance and to do this you must maximize health first, and you can only maximize health when your body is provided with every nutrient it needs, when it needs it.
In closing, The body can only tell us when it has a calorie/energy need. It cannot tell us exactly what nutrient it needs nor when it needs it. A complete and balanced Nutritional Milkshake like our NutriBoost, Ultima Performance and/or Ultima 1 can help alleviate that important problem, making sure you always have what you need, when you need it.