Front Loading Nutrition – How to Be Healthy While Eating Unhealthy Food

October 15, 2018

What is Front-loading?

I’m often asked whether I eat healthy all the time. Good nutrition. The answer is emphatically – NO! I like my junk as much as the next person. I eat crisps, chocolates, biscuits, chips and cakes especially. Granted the cakes and chocolates will be vegan and gluten free, but still not the healthiest food choices.

And I don’t go too crazy obsessing about how healthy my food choices are during the day. Again, yes, they will be plant-based but there might not be tons and tons of nutrition involved. It might be cooked in a way I wouldn’t normally want it to be either.

I don’t worry though because of “front-loading”. It’s a term I use to describe to people how I strategise my nutritional intake each day. So that I maximise the amount of nutrition I get each day.

The idea being that at the beginning of the day – i.e. my breakfast – I load up with nutritionally dense foods. Typically I have a juice and smoothie for breakfast. The juice is usually just veg and some fruits like bell peppers. See more detail on that here. And the smoothie is similar in veg content to the juice, but with added things like coconut oil, avocado, berries, gogi berries, nuts and seeds, green powders and more. Again, check out this blog for more details on my Superhuman Smoothie.

Portions of Veg

The result is that I estimate I’ve had around 10 – 15 portions (or more) of vegetables by the time I’ve had that all. It’s around 5 portions of veg in the juice, and 5 in the smoothie. Plus the green powders amount to around 9 portions, then you’ve go the avocado and berries and everything else. Perhaps it’s more like 20 portions! Plenty of nutrition for the day!

That means that even if for the rest of the day all I eat is chips, I would still have got in me 4 days worth of vegetable intake (going on the woefully poor advice to get just 5-a-day in). As the average person is supposed to only get two portions of veg in a day, I guess I’m having for breakfast what others would take 10 days to consume.

And chances are that for the rest of the day there will be plenty of veg in too. Not always, but usually. I might eat another one or two ‘eating’ meals that day and they would typically have at least 3 portions of veg in each, and often 5. Even one meal of 3 portions would still put me right up there.

So “front-loading” is simply getting your daily nutritional intake stacked at the beginning of the day. It means I can worry less about what is to follow as often it’s difficult to control that. It also makes me feel energised and SUPER!

What are your tactics to ensure you get nutritionally optimal meals in? Let me know below.