A third pillar of wellness is nutrition. We can’t be well without proper fuel. Today I’m going to go over macronutrients and tomorrow I’m going to talk about actual food.
There are three macronutrients: protein, carbohydrates, and fats. When we eat food, we’re ingesting some combination of these three.
Protein is crucial for building and rebuilding our bodies. If we don’t get enough protein in our diets, we have trouble healing from injury. Those of us who would like to change our body compositions toward more lean tissue also need protein in order to do that. Vegetarians and vegans need to be careful to ensure that they are getting good sources of protein because most non-animal proteins don’t have all the essential amino acids we need to get from our diets, but it’s not that complicated.
Carbohydrates get a bad rap these days and a lot of them don’t deserve it. Unless we have celiac disease or a gluten sensitivity, there is no reason to avoid our friends the whole grains. Carbohydrates are a good source of energy for us. Also: veggies! We love veggies! Quality matters in carbs, though. There’s a big difference between getting carbs from vegetables and whole grains and from a box of donuts. When in doubt, choose the carbs with more fiber.
Fat is also essential for our bodies to function. It is a dense source of calories, which is important when we are doing lots of exercise. Quality matters here, too. In general, the best fats for us are the ones that are liquid at room temperature. Those are the unsaturated fats. Saturated fats are solid at room temperature. Focusing on getting our fats from healthy whole food sources like nuts and seeds, oily fish, and the like is a good way to get what we need without overdoing it.
We don’t sit down to a nice plate of protein, carbs, and fat, though. We eat food. I’ll talk about that tomorrow.
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