Additive Nutrition 101

How-to basics for nourishment that prioritizes wellbeing.

TL;DR

• Additive Nutrition is when you focus on getting more healthy things in, instead of limiting and restriction

• Additive Nutrition follows a few basic guidelines including:

  • Listen to your body and aligned self

  • Learn evidence-based information, but also use common sense

  • Progressive behavior change wins over quick and dirty every time

  • Mainly focus on what you’re doing right

• For paid subscribers: the exact change sequence I use with my clients and why

What is an additive nutritional strategy:

Additive nutrition is a nourishment strategy that focuses on additive habits. Meaning, instead of focusing on restriction and removal the individual or coach/client pair focus on what to do (over what not to do).

For example, most diets or “healthy eating programs” focus on what to exclude. Sugar, dairy, gluten. Processed foods, preservatives, certain chemical compounds. It’s not uncommon for that strategy to promote restrictive & disordered eating, feelings of want, food aversion, and even orthorexia or cravings and binges.

Instead of this diet-culture driven mindset, additive strategies focus on what we know nourishes the body, mindset, culture, connection, and other positive experiences for the holistic self. Strategies that align with the individuals goals and believes, but also with solid nutrition and health science.

Additive Nutrition Basics

An additive nutrition strategy follows a few basic pillars:

• Listen to your body and aligned self

• Learn evidence-based information, but also use common sense

• Progressive behavior change wins over quick and dirty every time

• Mainly focus on what you’re doing right

Let’s break each of those down a little.

Listen to your body and aligned self

Your body is giving you a wealth of information about your experience. For some people learning to listen to that information is a long and rich process. At the end of the day YOU are the expert on YOU. Yes, there’s a lot of good technical information. But not everything works or applies to everyone all the time. You are going to have more information about your life and what will work in your life than anyone else.

Learn evidence-based information, but also use common sense

Nutrition science is relatively young and scientific consensus moves slowly. At the same time the diet and supplement industries spend big bucks to convince us they have a magic solution. They bank off of sewing confusion, claiming they’re somehow new and different. Find sources of information you can trust and remember that if it sounds like a quick fix it’s probably snake oil.

Progressive change over quick & dirty

You, your body, your health - all of that is the result of a lifetime of behaviors. Meaningful, lasting changes take time, consistency, and right action. Quick & dirty solutions often result in short term changes that snap back like a rubber band.

Focus mostly on what you’re doing right

Additive behavior change strategies focus on what you want to be doing to build health. While yes, mitigation matters, often we can gain confidence, efficacy, and wellbeing from building with what’s right. Through that momentum it’s easier to let the less-healthful behaviors fall away when you’re ready to change them.

Mindful Consumption (Article & Workbook)

Get Started - Additive Nutrition 101

There are certainly many ways you can go about additive nutrition. If you haven’t yet, you may want to review the best practices for behavior change. Below is the sequence of habits I use with my own clients to prioritize their health and wellbeing.

1. Are you consistently eating enough?

This is one of the hardest things for clients to wrap their heads around. In a world that constantly tells everyone to “eat less and move more” the idea that people could be not eating enough seems out of place. However, there’s a common pattern many people are stuck in:

Friday comes and you go nuts after another crazy week.
You indulge in a few cocktails or beers, grab some wings and burgers while you’re at it.
Heck, why not dessert?
No shade; but Saturday you’ve got a date and Sunday there’s brunch.
Monday rolls around and you tell yourself you’ve got to “eat clean”.
So the first few days of the week you restrict, limiting calories.
Maybe you’re skipping breakfast by “fasting”.
Maybe you’re only having a salad for lunch.
By Wednesday you’re ravenous, so you indulge on dinner.
But you “fast” again on Thursday, which makes you grumpy and tired.
Friday rolls around and you repeat the cycle.

Sound familiar?

3 days a week of caloric restrictions with 4 days a week of caloric loading is not a sustainable metabolic pattern. Then, a few times a year maybe you go on a “diet”, caloric restricting for a few weeks in a row while also doing intense cardio or HIIT classes. That progressively damages and slows the metabolism, causing rebound weight gain.

So the first additive thing 90% of my clients do is stabilize their intake within 20% variance according to their BMR. BMR stands for Basal Metabolic Rate.

I follow this exact process:

1. Write down a few days worth of eating - one mid week, one Friday, one weekend

2. Calculate the calorie value of all three days

3. Calculate BMR (using a calculator like this one) along with level of activity

   1. To clarify - if someone works out 4 days per week I use that adjusted number for every day

4. Gauge if the client is consistently eating within 20% of their activity-adjusted BMR

If you find that you’re not within that “Goldie Locks Zone” of 20% off the activity-adjusted number, that’s the first habit my clients start with.

Paid subscribers have access to the rest of the sequence I use with my clients.