How To Make The Most Out of Nutrition Coaching

You’ve probably seen stuff on social media about the nutrition program and the benefits of doing nutrition coaching. 

You may be motivated to participate in nutrition coaching to lose weight, gain confidence, improve performance, or to decrease your risk of developing chronic diseases. 

Whatever your WHY… HOW can you get the most out of your nutrition coaching experience? As you contemplate getting started with nutrition coaching, here’s a list of the top 10 ways you can get the most out of your nutrition coaching experience:

  1. Sign up for a long term approach – be ready to commit to at least 3 months of improving your nutrition from the beginning and roll into a wellness membership for accountability to really learn healthy habits.
  2. Show up for your monthly nutrition appointments and participate in your regular virtual check-ins with your nutrition coach via the TrueCoach app. Staying connected with your coach helps you to recognize all the great things you are doing with nutrition, and to strategize other difficult areas to help you stay on track with your goals. 
  3. Be Honest. Honestly logging your food helps your nutrition coach highlight bright spots and areas for improvement. Log your food – the good, the bad and the ugly!  
  4. Enlist help from an accountability partner – your nutrition coach is not your only support person- Who’s your workout buddy that will call you up if they don’t see you at the gym? Who can support you at home or at work to keep you on track with healthy eating?
  5. Keep it simple– don’t overthink things. Putting too much emphasis on meal plans or macronutrient goals can be stressful! If you balance your plate with healthy carbs, proteins, and fats, and reduce the amount of sugar consumed, you are setting yourself up for success and reduced risk of chronic diseases.
  6. Adopt one healthy habit at a time and make this a part of your foundation to avoid the quick-fix mentality. Your nutrition coach will help you identify just a few action steps each month to help you avoid the temptation of making too many changes all at once and getting overwhelmed and burnt out.
  7. Don’t isolate. You can still have fun with friends and participate in gatherings, eat out, and be social. Your nutrition coach has many resources for you to make healthy choices while traveling, attending an event, or eating out. 
  8. Meal prep. Pick out a time each week that you can prep a couple of simple things to deal with busy times of the day. Going into the week with a plan, and ready-made meals is a great way to stay consistent with healthy eating. 
  9. Don’t stress over your food. You don’t have to be a gourmet chef and make fancy recipes. Your coach will give you some simple recipes from the https://www.crossfitangola.com/recipes/ website to help get you started on balancing your plate, and help give you tips for finding the whole, real foods at the grocery store. 
  10. Commit to your health. Follow us on social media and send us a DM to get started!

Gain Accountability With Nutrition

  • The #1 guaranteed way to improve your overall health (drumroll, please) – is to find someone to be held accountable to!
  • If I had a dollar for every person who has said to me “I know what I’m supposed to be doing, I just don’t do it,” I’d be rich. VERY rich. Unfortunately, just because we know what we should be doing, doesn’t mean we magically start doing it.
  • Sometimes all we need is someone to be accountable to in order to create new habits and start building that integrity with ourselves in order to achieve our health goals.
  • One tip I’ve seen good success with is to tell someone close to you about your specific goals. This could be a spouse, parent, co-worker, gym buddy, or anybody else that you have a good relationship with. Telling someone helps keep you working hard because you don’t want to let them down. 
  • That’s also a vital role of a nutrition coach. Your nutrition coach acts as your personal cheerleader rooting you on every step of the way, they’ll be checking in with you regularly, and helping you overcome any obstacles in your way. This really can be the difference maker between reaching and sustaining your health goals – and falling short. 
  • You need to decide that you’re worth it and make the investment to get you from where you are now, to where you’ve always wanted to be. 
  • Send an email to ken@crossfitangola.com for more information about nutrition coaching, or send us a DM on our FB or IG page!

Eat Like An Adult

For many of us, the question becomes where do I start? With so much information out there it can get overwhelming, to say the least! We hear it all the time, “I don’t even know where to start…” While it may be kind of true its really just a convenient excuse to not start at all. Above is one of my favorite explanations of how to eat healthy from Dan John.

It is more than a little on the nose, but hey let’s stop coddling ourselves. It is 2020.

We hold a few simple guidelines as a basis of the Nutritional Coaching Pyramid.

  1. Eat REAL Food- If it ran, swam, grew, or flew… eat it!
  2. Avoid food products that contain more than 5 ingredients
  3. Eat foods that contain ingredients only a 3rd grader can pronounce
  4. Do the above MOST of the time
  5. Drink more water

Basically, do what the guy with 2 first names said above and you will be on the road to nutritional success! So what does a healthy day of eating look like? Boy am I glad that you asked! What I can do is show you what it looks like to us.

Is it perfect? Nope. Does it have dairy and wheat? Yup. Is it a great place to start? Yup. Can it be tweaked? Sure. Is there room for improvement? You bet. Does it meet most of the criteria of our guidelines? Yup. Is it 99% better than the dumpster fires that are most people’s current nutritional practices? Hell Yes.

Good nutrition should be simple. We all get so caught up in wanting everything to be an orgasmic experience for our taste buds that we sacrifice our own happiness for another pint of Ben and Jerry’s. Enough is enough, its time to start being honest with ourselves about what we really need, not what we want.

Nutrient Timing

Nutrient timing means eating specific nutrients (carbs, fats, and proteins) in specific amounts at specific times (normally before, during, or after exercise).

Having proper nutrient timing will enhance athletic performance, competition, and daily life expectations. Having the right timing will help your body use the food that you eat as fuel instead of turning it into fat.

When exercising a great starting point is to eat most of your daily carbs and proteins before and after exercise and NO FAT. Eating fats before and/or after your workout will slow down the digestion of the fuel you put in your body. This means that our body will not get the fuel that it needs in time to either fuel or recover for exercise.

What should I eat and when?

This all depends on when you workout. If you’re an early riser/exerciser, eat something small like a banana or half the servings of 1st Phorm’s Ignition and 1st Phorm’s Phormula-1. If you are a macro guy/gal, 25 grams of carbs and 25 grams of protein for breakfast. Then, eat more carbs during your dinner (the night before early exercise) and during that day’s lunch.

If you workout out in the evening, you may benefit from a higher fat and protein breakfast. Then, you would eat mostly carbs and protein at lunch and dinner. For you evening warriors, don’t eat a giant meal an hour before your workout and not expect to see it again. Keep your pre-workout snack small and compacted full of carbs and protein.


How soon should I eat after exercise?

This brings us to a term the metabolic window. Often referred to as the “window of gainz”. There’s no hard and clear threshold for when the opportunity to re-feed passes, but typically, you should have a carbohydrate and protein-rich meal down within 30-60 minutes of your final repetition of the day. Eating that meal right away maximizes the number of carbohydrates stored in the muscles as glycogen, instead of fat. This is when your insulin sensitivity and capacity for proper carb utilization and storage are at their highest. During this window, proper nutrition will shift our body from a catabolic state to an anabolic state increasing muscle mass and improving recovery.


How much should I eat after working out?

After working out, we need to have both carbohydrates and proteins. Without carbs post workout, our body will break down the protein as energy instead of using it to rebuild our muscles. A good post workout shake would consist of about 25 grams of carbs and 25 grams of protein. For us, this looks like ½ a scoop of 1st Phorm Ignition (carbs) and 1 scoop of 1st Phorm Phormula-1 (protein).


Eating the right food before and after a workout is very important. However, what you eat the rest of the day plays a huge role in what your body uses as fuel. If you have any questions about how to get your nutrition back on track, ask any of the coaches at the gym. We are here to help!