1. ’Eat From the Land’

Forget all the nonsense you read online, diet doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, there’s a golden rule of thumb we preach to all of our clients at Ultimate Performance – that’s ‘eat from the land’.

If followed, this simple but powerful mantra can change most people’s health, productivity, body composition, digestion, sleep and sex drives profoundly for the better.

Don’t fall into the trap of following complicated diets that restrict entire food groups – just consume foods that come from a farm, not a factory.

Processed foods are not evil in moderation, but every single person would look, feel and perform better if the majority of their meals comprised of ‘whole’ foods and nutrient-dense ingredients that came from the land.

2. Exercise Portion Control

A big problem in advanced societies the world over is that we eat too much, move too little.

There is now an overabundance of tasty, cheap and convenient foods at our fingertips, 24 hours a day.

Portion sizes have increased and so consumption has increased along with it – where we used to eat until satisfied, we now eat until we are stuffed.

The bottom line is that calories count when it comes to health and fitness and as portion sizes increased, so too do calorie counts.
While for most people there is no need to count calories (unless you have a very specific body composition goal) most people would do best using portion control.

4. Prep Your Food

Body transformation success and sustainable weight management comes from putting a bit of planning and preparation into your diet.

If you have a diet or meal plan, prepping your meals for the day well in advance is a cornerstone of success.

By having your meals prepared ready means you’re less likely to be left stuck without a go-to healthy meal when hunger sets in when you are more likely to grab the nearest takeaway convenience food which won’t benefit your fitness goals.

caught short without a healthy meal, where it’s likely you will grab the nearest convenience food which often won’t benefit your weight loss goals.

It’s so much harder to lose sight of your goals and eat something sub-optimal if you have all your healthy meals planned, prepped and ready to go when you’re hungry.

Two simple tips to help you become a food prep master are:

• Buying food in bulk means it is often more cost-effective and you can portion it out – whether that’s your protein, vegetable or things like bags of nuts.
• Batch cooking your food in one go means you save loads of time in the long run and can portion out meals for the week, or even freeze for later.

6. Be More Active Every Day

Being more active doesn’t just mean going to the gym for an hour. If you want to lose fat, you need to increase your activity levels throughout the day.

Most people think all they need to do is a quick hour in the gym to get in shape, but if they are sedentary the other 23 hours a day, their overall energy expenditure (calorie burn) will be low.

How active you are daily is a huge determinant of whether you successfully lose weight or not, and whether you keep it off.

One of the biggest weight loss tools in our arsenal with clients at Ultimate Performance is something called ‘non-exercise activity thermogenesis’ (NEAT).

Put simply, this is the energy expended doing anything active that isn’t formal exercise, so anything from shopping and cleaning, to walking the dog or playing with the children.

Boosting your NEAT levels can be a game-changer when it comes to weight loss.

NEAT can actually account for anywhere between 15-50% of your total energy expenditure throughout the day – and can be the difference between you being in calorie maintenance or calorie deficit.

We always advise clients to aim for a minimum of 10,000 steps per day and build in activities like walking to work, taking the stairs and carrying the shopping home to their routine which boost the calorie burn far more than a quick session in the gym.

8. Focus on Sleep Quality

Improving your sleep quality is the best free performance-enhancing tool we have at our disposal.

Research shows that sleep quality is very much linked to weight loss and weight gain time and time again in the research.

Studies show that shorter sleepers tend to have higher Body Mass Indexes, higher body fat percentages and higher amounts of central (visceral) body fat.

Sleep deprivation also reduces our ability to control hunger and satiety and increases the likelihood that we will reach for higher calorie foods that make managing our weight more challenging.

There are many cost-free things we can do to improve sleep, such as setting a regular bedtime and wake-up time which helps better regulate your circadian rhythm, aiming to stop using technology and screens at least an hour before bed which can impact sleep onset and quality, and setting a cut-off time for stimulant consumption 6-8 hours before bed.

10. Track Your Progress

One of the main things that kills off motivation and causes 99% of people to give up on fitness goals is not seeing any tangible progress.

But most people are not closely tracking key metrics of progress. And so, if you are not tracking progress, how do you know if you are making progress at all?