4 simple steps for better nutritional compliance

When you’re training hard to change your physique it is even more important that your nutritional quantity is reflective of your goal.

Staying compliant with your nutrition over a long period of time can be challenging and uncomfortable, for example, being in a sustained calorie deficit over weeks or months has the potential to bring about hunger, low energy levels, poor recovery and poor sleep. 

Here are OSF Head Trainer JJ’s 4 strategies to minimise this as much as possible and keep you on track with your nutritional compliance:

Create your vision

When you create your vision, there is a much smaller chance of you deviating from the plan created to get you to your goal.

For this it is important to look at your own personality. Are you someone that likes and thrives off ‘all or nothing’ efforts and cutting out any obstacles (trigger foods) straight away? Or someone that requires you to take their time to make gradual changes over time? For some people it may even require a blended approach of these strategies. 

Which method do we see the best results from more often? A lot of our best transformations have come from the ‘more manageable over time’ method.  We find that sustainable results often arise from a higher level of compliance over time and not the ‘hard and fast’ approach as it allows for more flexibility surrounding  lifestyle factors and nutrition which leads to higher enjoyment levels.

Identify your limiting factors

When starting any diet, it is important to identify your limiting factors as these will come up a lot and have the highest potential of holding you back from achieving your goal. 

Ask yourself:

• Will your lifestyle and social life affect your efforts to achieve a consistent calorie intake over the course of 7 days for a long period of time, potentially even a few months?

• Are you willing to make sacrifices with your nutrition to achieve your goal? For example, reducing the amount of ‘take away’ meals and alcohol you consume.
• Are you someone who gives up easily when things get tough, or do you fight through it?

To create the best success with nutrition, you have to have an honest discussion with yourself aboutwhere you need to improve and what’s holding you back to achieve your goals.

Plan out your food variety

One of the main deterrents with dieting is the common thought that going through the dieting process will be bland and lack variety of foods. At OSF, we focus on two main areas with nutrition: 

• Nutritional Quality (the most nutrient dense foods), and 
• Nutritional Quantity (the energy density of food). 

We try to match a high nutritional quality with the appropriate nutrition quantity that is specific to your goal and allow you to still consume the foods you love.

Dieting doesn’t have to be bland and boring. Eating a broad range of foods (think eating the rainbow – lots of colours!), protein with each meal and approximately spend 10% of the time having your treats and living your lifestyle!

It’s okay to have flexibility

This is probably one of the most important factors for having higher levels of  nutritional compliance. You need a degree of flexibility with your daily nutrition choices. Cutting out foods from your diet only creates stronger urges for that particular food, leading to a higher chance of over consuming it when you do give into these urges. For best results, 90% of the time you are consuming high nutrient dense foods that fit within your daily calorie goal, but also have the flexibility to eat the foods you love whilst keeping with the same calorie target.