The Nutritional Recovery Pyramid

4 Pillars of Recovery - Part 3

We need nutrition to recover.

The building blocks that make up our body and our mind depend on adequate fuel.

So when we're feeling rundown, stressed, or completely burnt out, one of the first places you can turn to for recovery that's completely in your control is your nutrition.

You've probably seen pictures of food pyramids, representing the food groups that are hotly debated as to what "should" be in our diets.

When it comes to being a pillar of recovery, nutrition is built upon a pyramid as well.

Nutritional stress mostly comes from eating the wrong foods in disproportionate amounts and from not eating enough to fuel your recovery needs.

If you want to perform your best, let alone adequately, you need to eat in a way that supports your mental and physical performance.

So at the base of our pyramid, the foundation is total calories.

Next up comes macronutrients (macros), the proteins, fats, and carbs that provide us with calories.

Micronutrients follow macros, generally the more the better for the broad range of vitamins and minerals we need.

Finally, at the top of the pyramid, are supplements that can be the icing on the cake of your high performance by aiding in recovery.

You need to start at the base of the pyramid to make a meaningful difference in this pillar of recovery.

Calories First

Have you ever seen a group of bodybuilders posing on stage at a show?

At low single-digit body fat levels, they look like what we believe is the pinnacle of human performance

Being in a caloric deficit is stressful to our body.

There are times when we need to or want to face the stress of a caloric deficit for survival or for health goals. But don't get it wrong, a caloric deficit does not equal high performance. We need enough calories to perform our best and to recover well without overdoing it.

A very rough starting point for this for most people will be 14-16 calories per pound of body weight as your daily calorie goal. So if you weigh 200 pounds, you'd need between 2800 and 3200 calories per day to hit your recovery needs to function your best mentally and physically.

While we may sometimes want to control calories for weight loss, it is helpful to know that doing so will add to the allostatic load and can impact the immune system.

From this starting point, you make small changes and test the effectiveness based on where you want to go.

But if there's one thing that's for sure, if you don't also get macronutrients right, total calories alone won't produce high performance or great recovery.

Macronutrients - Enough of the Right Stuff

Getting enough of the macronutrients that our bodies require with proteins, fats, and carbs to support our recovery comes really close to being as important as hitting your calorie needs.

Since you can't get calories without macronutrients, think more about how much protein, fats, and carbs you'll need for recovery.

Start With Protein

Protein is such an important macronutrient for recovery, and people are also pretty bad at getting enough protein in their diet.

And it's important because it also satiates us more and allows us to avoid eating more empty calories or junk foods.

But more than that, in recent years, researchers have shown that protein is the primary driver of our overall food consumption and sense of hunger. Protein dilution, or a relatively lower ratio of protein to fats and carbohydrates. This is an important consideration not only because not hitting daily protein requirements means under-recovering but also can increase the risk of going overboard on calories by eating more fats and carbs than you need.

Aim for 1 g per pound of bodyweight of protein per day and the rest takes care of itself pretty nicely. This is a lot to ask for protein but it is the basis for recovering

Micronutrients

Many micronutrients play an important role in maximizing our ability to recover well. The good news is when we’re focused on eating mostly whole, unprocessed foods we will be doing a lot of the groundwork for getting what we need.

Eating whole foods and a variety of foods in our diet is the best way to make sure that we are covering all of our micronutrient needs.

Choosing fresh foods that are in season also helps to support this.

5 Colours Per Plate

Aim for the rainbow. Make sure that if you eat 3 main meals each day they have 5 colours on the plate. This will get you most of the way to hitting these daily targets without having to measure anything.

Brightly coloured foods have tons of micronutrients to support your health and recovery.

But if you only eat a bite at a time, it's not going to be nearly enough total volume to get your nutrient needs.

Going a step further, we should be getting 800 g of fruits and vegetables per day. This looks like about 8 hand fulls.

So if you imagine you're playing the claw machine game at the arcade and grabbing the biggest prize you can, that's how you want to grab up your servings of veggies with your meals.

Be honest with yourself, are you actually eating that amount?

Very few people actually are.

So that's where we climb to the top of the pyramid next.

Supplements and Adaptogens

Drink Your Greens

For general good health, we should eat about 800 g or roughly 8 cups of fruits and veggies daily.

It's a very worthwhile goal to work towards so if you are ready to set it as a recovery goal to take action on, by all means, go for it.

But since the vast majority of people do not hit this goal consistently, supplementing with a greens powder can help.

A greens supplement is usually a great idea to include in our regular routine as nutritional assurance that we're getting a couple of servings of high-quality vegetables packed into a quick shot or smoothie to drink each day.

The plant-based power of greens helps to promote recovery and fight off the physical effects of stress.

And there are a few other supplements to consider for optimizing your recovery.

Omega-3s

Fish oil is another beneficial recovery supplement. Most people are not getting enough omega-3s in their diet. These essential fats are important for heart and brain health and help to reduce inflammation. Omega-3s will help you to recover from workouts and improve focus and memory at work.

Protein Power

Protein should be our primary macronutrient priority.

Unless you're a gym rat you're probably not getting enough protein. So it's also helpful to take a protein powder - whether that's an animal-based protein like whey or vegan source.

You don't need to overdo it but a scoop or two of a protein powder each day will give you a very cost-effective and high-quality boost to this essential nutrient for recovery.

One easy way to work these supplements into your routine is with a superfood smoothie. Either for breakfast or as a great afternoon energy boost, mix your greens and protein powder together with water in a blender and take the omega-3s with it. For extra points, add a handful of spinach and berries or other fruit and blend it all. It'll turn the smoothie green but you won't even taste the spinach in there.

Other Recovery Supplements

In Part 1 of this series, we talked about sleep for recovery and touched on some recommended supplements that can help if you're struggling with sleep, which you can read more about here:

Only if you've already got the rest of the nutrition pyramid complete is it going to make a difference for you to look at other supplements to help give your recovery a boost.

While eating whole, minimally processed foods will get most of your mineral requirements, magnesium is one thing you can look at supplementing next, especially if you are very physically active or facing high stress.

Creatine and glutamine can both also help with aiding recovery a bit, particularly from the physical stress of exercise.

We want to start at the base of the pyramid and work our way up to effectively promote recovery. The further up the pyramid we go, the less overall impact it's going to have on our recovery and if we don't have the base set first, the difference might not even be noticeable.

There's one more pillar of recovery to go in this series on stress mindset and change adaptation. Until then, look at where you are at on the nutritional recovery period and what next action you're going to take.