Every season, new popular “diets” seem to pop up and be the new hot take on nutrition. Diets like Keto, Paleo, Whole 30, juice cleanses or a detox diet.
I have tried a few of these myself but they’ve never seemed to fit. But how are we supposed to know which one is best from all the social media that we see?
The big secret: There isn’t ONE.
Everyone is different! Each one of us has different needs based on our body type, fitness level, body composition, preferences, budget and age. We also all have restrictions based on our schedules or cultural norms.
What might work for me, might be terrible for you! So how do we simplify nutrition into something we can all strive for?
The simple meal plan: use our hands!
The easiest way to wrap our head around our basic nutrition needs is to build our meals using the hand method. We can use our hands to measure portion sizes and build our plates to simplify our meal plans. Our hands are portable and are always with us, so they make for an easy measuring tool!
We want to make sure were getting at least one palm size of protein at each meal. Getting a palm size of protein at each meal helps to build and recover from the workouts and strain we put on our bodies.
The next thing we want to add is our veggies! We want our vegetable serving to be about a fist sizes of vegetables. Vegetables help to keep us full through the day and give us crucial vitamins and minerals that we need.
The last two are the favorites, carbs and fats! We want to use a cupped palm to measure the amount of carbohydrates. Our carbohydrates help to give us quick energy throughout the day. For good carbohydrates we can use rice, sweet potatoes, baked potato, whole wheat pasta or fruits.
To top our meals off we also want to build in some healthy fats using a thumb portion. These can be avocados, almonds, cashews, olive oil or butter used to cook veggies or meat with.
There is no perfect meal plan other than the one that works for you. We can help make it easy by using the hand method to help build our plates with good nutrition.
It is import ant that you be aware that this is a good starting point to use to help you easily meet our protein, vegetable, carb and fat calorie needs without doing any complicated kitchen math!
Written by nutrition coach Heather Blosser