Your diet is composed of nutritional elements. When you choose a particular diet, it is important to look at what type of nutrition you are getting. When you adopt a new diet or eating lifestyle make sure that you scrutinize areas in your new diet that may not be providing you with optimal nutrition based on your lifestyle and activity level. Also, make sure to factor in any health problems that you may be experiencing and the nutritional requirements for treatment of that disease.

Any diet should provide you with as many nutritional elements as possible that meet your individual needs. But, the reality is that most diets are not nutritionally optimized and require some form of supplementation. While supplementation is not a bad way to receive your nutrients, it is not the best way. Our body responds better to nutrients that it receives through food. No amount of supplementation will make up for nutritionally poor diets.

How do you know if you diet is nutritionally deficient? Some of the most common signs of a nutritionally deficient diet are: fatigue, headaches, aching muscles, brittle nails, lack-luster hair, inability to concentrate, poor skin quality, and unplanned weight gain or loss. If you have experiences some of these symptoms and are currently disease free (please check with your health care provider), you diet may be to blame for the way you feel.

Our recommendation is to start at square one. For those of you planning on changing your eating habits, start by settling on a diet or nutritional lifestyle that you plan on following for at least thirty days. Before you begin practicing this new diet, take a baseline of yourself. Measure you weight, BMI, blood pressure, cholesterol and glucose levels. You can use the Nutrispot Nutrition tracker to help you gather and store this information. Then record the physical symptoms that have been bothering you. One idea is to take a picture of yourself and write a note on the picture describing the way you feel.

Once you have taken your baseline, input what you currently eat (no change from normal) for seven to fourteen days. Remember: do not take vitamins or supplements during this time unless they are medically necessary. After seven to fourteen days, run a report on your self. Use the Nutrient Tracker to examine where you are nutrient deficient based on the way you currently eat. Also take note of how many calories you are consuming and the how many of those calories are composed of fat, carbohydrates and proteins.

Getting this initial assessment is critical! It will tell you what is working and what is not. Instead of just subscribing to the next diet craze, take some time to get to know and critically understand your eating behaviors and your ability to provide your body with nutrition. This is important for one reason: nutritionally optimized bodies perform better and feel better. Getting your nutrition optimized may be the only solution you need to lose weight, feel better and live a more active lifestyle. You can compare yourself to where you would like to be and adjust your diet accordingly.

Here's an example to get you started:

Tom is a 35-year-old male who works a full time desk job. He eats out two meals a day and does regular little exercise outside of walking from the subway to his office. He knows he is overweight and often suffers from extreme tiredness during the day. He has tried the Atkins and other ways of losing weight. While he lost weight on every occasion, he still felt tired and always gained the weight back.

Instead of relying on the next diet idea, he decided to change what he eats and the way he eats it. First he tracked a normal week of eating for himself, just so he could really know what he was doing. After reviewing the first week, he found out that he was consuming about 2700 calories per day. This was about 1000 more than he thought he was consuming!! When he ran the nutrient report, he also found that he was only getting about 50% of his daily requirement of complex B vitamins. He also realized that his diet was a bit protein deficient and that most of his carbohydrates were coming from simple carbohydrates. Instead of crash dieting, Tom decided to slowly make changes to his diet and activity levels and track them overtime. Over the course of six months, he was able to cut back his calories to a level that allowed him to permanently lose weight and re-stabilize when he was finished losing weight. He also used food-substitution to increase the nutrient value of the foods he was eating. How did he do this? By carefully tracking what he was doing on a daily basis and through a little trial and error. He would conduct eating experiments on himself, whereby he would try a variety of foods and see how his body reacts. Overtime, he was able to settle into a diet pattern that accomplished weight loss and increased energy during the day. When he ran a report for the last month, he noted that his nutrient levels were up to where they should be and that his weight had stabilized at an appropriate level. He also noticed that when he consumed more of a specific nutrient on the days that he exercised that he was able to sustain his activity for longer periods. What Tom did was track and adjust his nutritional lifestyle until he found a lifestyle diet that accomplished what he set out to achieve.

See here's the problem: We, the American public, are too dependent on other people giving us guidelines for how to eat. And, when we arent following their guidelines, the way we eat and the physical effects it is has on our bodies often surprise us. We need to learn to understand the way we eat and change those habits on our own, for the long run. Otherwise, we just get caught up in the yo-yo diet cycle. Tracking is the ideal way to do this!

The reason we invented Nutrispot was for the primary purpose of empowering people to take back their nutritional health. We want to give people the tools to understand and identify their problem areas. Then, we want to encourage people to address their problems by making changes overtime. We want people to use the feedback they get from their own bodies as a measure of their nutritional success!

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