Welcome To Essential Nutrition

Congratulations on making the CHOICE to be here and taking control of your relationship with food.

Official Guide

Healthy Soups & Stews

Heavenly Smoothies

Food List Table

Motivated in winter

High-Protein Recipes

Essential Nutrition Recipe Book

Mindset guide

Flexibility In Your Diet

A diet that you can adhere to long term needs to allow for the inclusion of some of your favourite foods.

We give you a general guideline, a typical pattern of how we incorporate our favourite foods. However, this pattern is not a prescription, you will learn how to make your own adjustments, and how to let loose and relax more during occasional special events such as birthdays or holidays, whilst remaining on track with your fat loss goals.

Please note that these foods are not optional extras, they are a requirement. Any diet that makes these foods bad or off limits is completely unsustainable. Therefore, when you sit down to consciously enjoy one of these you are not off track, you are not eating a “bad food”, you are not breaking your diet, you are not being naughty or bad.

Adding your favourite foods - small extras

Here we are looking at small servings of processed foods that you might include in addition to a meal, such as dark chocolate, popcorn, sweets or ice cream.

Be mindful of picking trigger foods as your small extras. Trigger foods (or drinks) can be defined as foods you may love, BUT you know consuming them just leads to you to wanting/craving more and can leave you feeling out of control.

As a starting guideline for fat loss, we recommend incorporating a small serving of these approximately 3 times a week.

As you on a fat loss plan you will remove some calories from one of your baseline meals when you include one of these foods, as follows:

    • Firstly identify if a favourite food you want to include in your diet is a predominantly fat-based food (e.g. extra dark chocolate), carb-based food (e.g. popcorn, sweets), or both (e.g. milk chocolate or ice cream). It’s unlikely to be predominantly a protein-based food!
    • For example, if your last meal of the day is fish, vegetables, rice and a little butter but you fancied some dark chocolate, remove the butter (fat) and you can have your dark chocolate.
    • If you were having the same meal but fancied some popcorn (carb) instead of dark chocolate, then you would remove the rice to allow space for your popcorn.

Things To Consider...

Eggs

    • The average egg is roughly 6g protein and 5-6g fat. So you’d need approx 4-5 eggs to match a portion of meat or fish. Consequently, the fat content would be very high.
    • Eggs have a lower satiety level, therefore we recommend you only have an egg-based meal a maximum of 3-4x per week - this could be 2-3 eggs + 2 egg whites to boost protein intake.
    • If you're using eggs this is your fat covered for this meal - you may just need a very small amount of fat to cook eggs.

Fruit

    • It is best to include fruit/berries as part of your overall carbohydrate serving, along with something like potato. As fruits are so low in carbs (with the exemption of bananas), if that’s your only carb source for that meal, then you risk being hungry or craving carbs/sweets soon after.
    • We recommend that fruit be something you include with/after your carb-based meals as and when you fancy some, but ideally not as a matter of routine. You will get all the vitamins and nutrients you need from fresh veg, provided you include raw veg as described above.

Yogurt

    • Yogurt has low satiety, and is relatively low in nutrients too (yes even the FAGE one). Calorie for calorie, yogurt has significantly less satiety and lower nutritional value when compared to a baseline meal of the same caloric value.
    • In addition to this, high dairy intake can also sometimes increase water retention.

Coffee/Tea

    • Have two coffees/teas per day, preferably black. However let's not be obsessive here. If you really like a dash of milk in your tea or coffee then, by all means, include it. However, do not let this then creep up to 3 coffee and 3 teas, all with milk.
    • If you really like cream, cappuccino or latte, then this needs to be as part of your 10% flexibility instead.
    • Switch to decaf options after 12-noon to ensure you have the best change of a good nights sleep.

Goal Setting Exercise

Research suggests that you are 42 percent more likely to achieve your goals if you write them down.

Writing your goals down not only forces you to get clear on what, exactly, it is that you want to accomplish, but doing so plays a part in motivating you to complete the tasks necessary for your success.

With the above in mind, we would like you to fill in the short questionnaire below so that we can understand what the driving is force behind your motivation to progress.

Click Here To Complete The Goal Setting Exercise

Mindset habits

Use evenings as a chance to reflect and recharge, ready for tomorrow.

Celebrate your wins every day, no matter how big or small.It’s important to record our positive moments to help us improve our relationship with ourselves and others.

This habit can also encourage us to feel grateful for the events of our day.

What went well today?

When we focus on positive thoughts, there is less room for negative thoughts.

This can actually help improve our sleep quality as we are less likely to wake up during the night with worries and niggles.

Are there any things that didn’t go so well today?

Reflect on these things - you can always aim to improve on this next time.

Remember don’t beat yourself up 🙂

A couple of great apps you may want to download to help you with this are called WinStreak® and Gratitude Happiness Journal - these are a simple tool for making sure that at the end of the of every day, you feel positive about you accomplishments and are excited for the next day.

Eating Out

The following guidelines are to empower you to make positive choices and still enjoy eating out 🙂

    • Decide ahead of time what sorts of things you will look for on the menu and what questions and requests you may want to make to the staff.
    • Build your meal around the protein first. So choose a steak, a piece of fish, poultry, or something similar. Ideally we want to select a meal where we know what has gone into making it (unless it's your open meal).
    • Beware of sauces/dressings that will add calories in the form of sugar and/or fat. The best strategy is to ask for the sauce or the dressing on the side. If you are happy with sauce/dressing you choice to add what you want and know how much you are having.
    • Ask for veggies to be made without butter or oil - once again so you know how much goes into your food.
    • If it is a non-carb meal, then simply ask the waiter to replace the carb (e.g. rice or fries) with extra veggies.
    • If it is one of your carb meals then do not opt for carb sources with other ingredients added such as chips of sticky rice (unless it is your open meal for the week).
    • this environment because they don’t want to upset people and are afraid of what others might think, or of being judged or criticised.

Enjoying Special Occasions

Once in a while, there will be a big birthday celebration or a holiday where you’ll want to relax a little from your usual nutrition plan. But the principles remain the same - make smart, big picture decisions.

Consider the general trend of your behaviour over the last month. This calls for brutal honesty!

- Have you stuck to the essential nutrition plan? Next, consider the results you have achieved.

- Are you making progress?

If yes to both of these questions, then letting loose at a big party once every 2-3 months isn’t going to make a difference in the grand scheme of things. See it as a blip on the radar.

You may notice some water retention for a few days after an event, but this is natural and completely fine. Go back to essential nutrition plan as normal, and your body will be back to where it was after a few days.

If you lead a lifestyle where there is always “something” - birthdays, leaving drinks, holidays, and other special events, it’s going to impact your results, and something has to change if you want a body transformation.

It's important that you are completely honest with yourself about the long term average of your behaviour, and the long term average of your results.

Long-term, if you've established a pattern of eating based on the essential nutrition plan we provide - then are occasional, infrequent deviations at special events here and there acceptable.