Andrew Heming's Blog: Week 38 Nutrition Habit: Emergency Nutrition Plan

Take a lesson from the boy scouts

If you are familiar with the boy scouts, you will recognize this this fundamental moto: always be prepared. Based on this famous motto, Dr. John Berardi offers this important piece of nutritional advice: be a nutritional boy scout. Anyone trying to do performance nutrition in the real world finds that life can be crazy at times and when something unexpected happens and you easily find yourself in a very non-ideal situation for following your performance nutrition plan. If you find yourself hitting a fast-food joints, vending machines or popping a store-bought protein bar on a regular basis, then it likely means that you are not planning ahead and being prepared. This week in our 52 Weeks to Better Nutrition and a New You, it is time for that to change. It is time to develop and emergency nutrition plan.

Nutrition Planning Strategies
Here are three strategies that you can adopt to help you make high-performance nutrition work in the real world.

Strategy 1: Meal Prep
For most people, regular meal prep will eliminate most restuarant stops, drive-throughs and vending machines. If you are serious about your health, performance and body composition, you need to be cooking and eating your own food. As Chris Shurart says: the more you cook, the better you look! If you are not currently doing meal prep, check out Week 16 Nutrition Habit: Meal Prep and Meal Prep 101 for details and strategies.

Common work meals for me: chicken, baked yams and
steamed veggie sit-down meal and 2 pre-blended
power shakes.

Strategy 2: Pre-Blended Power Shake
For those times when you cannot sit down and eat a real meal, having a pre-blended power shake will help you out tremendously. Here is my Power Shake Template.

Strategy 3: Emergency Snack/Travel Pack
If you adopt strategies 1 and 2, you will likely have very few times when you are not able to eat according to plan. However there still can be time when unpredictable things happen that prevent you from executing your nutrition plan. Also in cases such as travel, you may not be able to most foods or liquid with you. This this case, an emergency snack pack is ideal. Here is a great example:

Small shaker cup with a lid
1-2 scoops protein powder (already in the shaker cup)
1 scoop of greens powder (also already in the shaker cup)
Handful of nuts (e.g. raw almonds) in a sealed container
1 piece of fresh fruit (skip if fat loss is your goal. You can use dried fruit if fresh is not possible and muscle gain is your goal or to use after training)

Note: When it is time to eat, all you need to do is add water to the cup (that already has the protein and greens powder).

To end this post, allow me to leave you with the familiar but wise and fitting words of Benjamin Franklin: