3 Ways to Improve Nutritional Success
3 Nutrition Habits That Grow With You
When it comes to improving your nutrition, it’s easy to get caught up in where you think you should be—eating perfectly, meal prepping every Sunday, hitting all your macros and eating food with perfect ingredients all the time. But that mindset can lead to burnout fast. Real progress starts by accepting where you are right now and focusing on what’s next—not everything at once. A complete overhaul is much harder to sustain for lasting results. A better approach is focusing on taking one solid step forward and sustaining that until you are ready for another solid step. These three areas of nutrition are great places to start cultivating, and keep improving for the rest of your life.
1. Cooking Skills
Why it matters:
If you can cook, you control what goes into your food, spend less, and avoid relying on takeout. We will be eating food for the rest of our lives so any investment in your cooking skills will have immediate return.
Ways to improve:
Learn 1 new recipe and cook it this week.
Pick one new vegetable at the grocery store and learn how to prepare it.
Spend a few months only cooking with ingredients that are "in season" and grown locally.
For Coach Austyn:
"YouTube university" has been a huge help to me in my cooking skills. There are so many high quality and easy to follow videos on YouTube. I learned how to cook a steak on a cast iron, grill, or Blackstone entirely by watching YouTube videos and practicing. Other examples can be knife skills like, "how to dice an onion?" or "how to cut a pineapple?". Learning skills from professional chefs on YouTube can save a lot of time, a lot of headaches...and a lot of fingers!
2. Planning Ahead
Why it matters:
When you’re busy, stressed, or short on time, you default to what is easy and convenient not to what is best. This hurts us mainly because all of the convenient and easy options are not the greatest options but we can flip the script if me make the best things the most convenient and the unhealthy things less convenient.
Ways to improve:
Plan one week of meals and go straight to the grocery store to pick them up.
Meal prep vegetables and fruit so that a healthy snack is always “easy” and “convenient”.
Write out 1-3 go to meals that you can make quickly in a pinch and weekly buy those ingredients.
For Coach Austyn:
I started out by finding a few go to meals that I could eat at anytime even if things were busy. A go to for me to this day is Greek yogurt with a handful of nuts and some fruit. Another thing I have done is worked on perfecting 3 meals for breakfast that are quick, but I enjoy enough to eat every day/week and then I make sure to get those ingredients every week. Lastly, selecting a prep day for the week has been a game changer. Instead of waiting till things are out and then going to the store we go every Sunday after deciding some meals for the week and I rarely run out of the essentials.
3. Ingredient Awareness
Why it matters:
Knowing what’s in your food helps you avoid unnecessary sugar, additives, or chemicals. It also teaches you to spot what fuels you—and what drags you down. This one can be frustrating and overwhelming but the hard work does pay off.
Ways to improve:
Start with understanding “macro” ingredients (protein, carbs, and fats) and the importance of each. Then begin to read food labels to understand some breakdowns for food.
Download the “Yuka” app, scan the food you eat, and try to find an alternative that’s a little bit healthier. (This can be overwhelming at first but once you find better choices shopping becomes easier).
Get a blood test to find out about any micronutrient deficiencies you may have and how those are effecting you.
For Coach Austyn:
Like most people, my journey started by just reading food labels to gain an awareness of what is in the food I eat. I took another step learning about macronutrients and what I need to live and perform optimally. Now the goal is to try and take steps towards having the right macro and micro ingredients with the fewest extra additives in them. This of course requires better cooking skills and better sources for the ingredients I use, but for me, it’s the next step of my journey.
Final Thoughts
Nutrition isn’t about perfection—it’s about preparation, awareness, and intention. With just a little bit of effort in the kitchen, at the grocery store, and in how you plan your day, you can make big improvements that last.
Start small. Stay curious. And keep building.
-Coach Austyn