Our nutrition habits develop when we’re young. They are often passed down from generation to generation. You could see a family that looks alike in their health and assume genetics, but a lot of that similarity comes from the nutritional habits they follow together.

Whenever I begin coaching a new client, I like to start with logging and tracking all of their food intake. Writing down everything we eat and drink. Quantities of food and timing of day when we eat certain foods are important too, but not required in this practice.

Several times a year I will perform this practice on my own. Each time I do it, I find some things I need to “tighten up”. This most recent trip into logging was a little bit alarming.

There was only one word I thought of to describe the way my eating habits were looking…

IMMATURE.

What does that mean to have immature nutrition?

Well, it means pretty much exactly what you think it means. I was starting to eat more like my kids. Or better stated, I was starting to resort back to old habits I had when I was a kid.

Remember when you were a kid and you could go all day without eating and just get caught up in all the fun activities you were doing.

And when you did get hungry, Mom always had a packaged snack for you from her Costco end-of-the-world stash. Somehow my brother and our friends would clear out a bunker’s worth of food in a busy weekend. Sorry mom.

Remember the sweet taste of a bubbly soda or sports drink as your rosy red cheeks soaked up every ounce. Whatever liquid spilled down the front of your shirt just cooled you even more. You wanted to drink the stuff the pros drank, and you never saw an athlete you looked up to advertising plain water.

And as every dinner ended, my brother Andrew always asked our parents if he ate enough to have dessert? I did this too, possibly asked him to ask on my behalf a few times, but I don’t want to steal what became an infamous tagline in our family.

Now that my wife Shannon and I have a 7-year-old boy and 5-year-old girl, their eating habits are starting to look more like ours every day, which is outstanding!

But then…our habits start to look like theirs and that’s not so outstanding.

From my experience with working with all types of different clients, you DO NOT need to have kids in your household to have immature nutrition.

Let’s recap the biggest faults of immature nutrition.

• Undereating in relation to your daily activity level.
• Forgetting to eat.
• Choosing convenience over cooking.
• Grabbing packaged snacks that offer little nutritional value.
• Drinking too many flavored/carbonated drinks.
• Skipping Water.
• Opting for salty and sugary, over the truly satisfying and satiating.
• Earning dessert through dinner. Having a dessert/reward (could be alcohol not that your 21+) every night.
• Eating because you’re bored, not because you’re hungry.
• Eating late at night too close to bedtime.

These are all faults I struggle with and need to “tighten up” from time to time. It’s great to take inventory often to see which direction your habits are heading before they go too far off track.

Focus on only a few to fix at a time. Don’t try to grow up overnight. (As I tell my kids the same thing.)

The older I get, the more I realize how much the foods you eat keep you young.

In order to stay young, and keep our bodies from an early aging and (very bluntly) dying process, we have to get our nutrition to grow up.

That’s what your parents were there to help you do, and that’s what your coaches are here now to help you do. If you need help send me a message.

What’s something from the above list that you can change to help mature your nutrition over the next month?

-Coach Tony