These benefits combine to improve longevity, reducing premature death from all causes by 16% and from cardiovascular disease by about 25%.

Looked at another way, lack of physical activity is estimated to be the 4th leading cause of death and the principal cause for approximately:

• 21–25% of breast and colon cancers
• 27% of diabetes and 
• 30% of heart disease burden

(Reference: Global health risks: mortality and burden of disease attributable to selected major risks. Geneva, World Health Organization, 2009)

These benefits come from relatively minimal efforts:  20 minutes of exercise and the avoidance of prolonged sitting every day.

Twenty minutes a day to feel better and live longer - not a bad trade-off!

This strategy will get you started and help you progress.  Master each principle before working on the next.  If you are new to exercise, start at the beginning.  If you currently exercise, review each principle and begin with the lowest one you are not yet doing.

By following this strategy, you will develop habits that incorporate aerobic, resistance and functional movement activities, allowing you to accrue the benefits of exercise sustainably forever.

We categorize exercise behaviours into two levels and encourage mastery at Level 1 to maximize physical activity enjoyment while minimizing injury.

Level 1
At this level, you meet the WHO standard and accrue most of the health benefits from exercise.

• 150 minutes per week of moderate to vigorous physical activity
• Avoidance of prolonged sitting or standing > 1hr - moving throughout the day

After 6-8 weeks of consistently hitting these targets, you have mastered Level 1. You will have the foundation to progress your exercise to the next level, getting even more benefit in the process.

Level 2
This next level expands on the foundational behaviours by incorporating a portfolio resistance, aerobic, and functional movement training into your routine.

• 150 minutes per week of moderate to vigorous physical activity
• Avoidance of prolonged sitting or standing > 1hr - moving throughout the day
• Consistently performing ≥two days of resistance training for all major muscle groups
• Performing and maintaining full functional movements 

After 6-8 weeks of consistently hitting these targets, you have mastered Level 2.

We hope that everyone can become Level 2 athletes, progressing their fitness and enjoying the benefits for the rest of their lives.

Next week: Move throughout the day - the first step to an active lifestyle.

Need help applying this to your busy life?

Get a personalized fitness plan to help you get started, progress or improve your enjoyment of physical activity
​
The  TARGET Fitness Plan  gives you expert advice to transform your exercise habits - whether you are getting started or want to improve your current program.  Our exercise  physiologist will assess what you are currently doing and provide you with a personalized fitness plan based on the LEVEL Up Your Fitness Strategy.
​

The EAT Better Strategy:

1. Build your meals around a healthy protein package
2. Load up on veggies, fruits, legume, and whole grains
3. Balance your meals with healthy fats
4. Avoid ultra-processed foods
5. Only drink the calories you love - learn to love water
6. Stop eating when you are 80% full
7. Go 12 hours without eating

Putting It All Together

Need help applying this to your busy life?
Get a personalized nutrition plan to gain clarity and improve your health:
​
The  TARGET Nutrition Plan takes a personalized, evidence-based approach to help you make better choices.  Our nutritionists assess what you are currently doing and provide you with a personalized plan (including meal plans).  Everything you need to transform your diet.​

Substituting water for calorie-laden drinks not only eliminates the extra calories, studies show Increasing your intake of water can contribute to weight loss via two mechanisms:

1. Decreased feeding - replacing liquid calories with water leads to a decrease in overall caloric consumption.  Being fully hydrated leads to early satiation, that feeling of fullness that decreases your appetite.  Many people do not adequately distinguish between hunger and thirst and eat when thirsty.
2. Increased fat burning - though not completely understood, many animal and human studies show that increased hydration can increase your metabolism by expanding cell volume, fat breakdown, and energy expenditure.

Of course, water does so much more - it is vital for virtually all body processes, including digestion, energy metabolism, blood pressure regulation, immunity, muscle and bone function. 

Getting enough water should be simple - drink when you are thirsty.  Many fail to heed their thirst and forget to drink, becoming chronically, mildly dehydrated and prone to weight gain.

So if you cannot remember to drink, let your urine be your guide.  Drink to maintain your pee at a light yellow colour.  Dark yellow and orange urine tells you your body needs more water.

How to get more water?  
Start your day with a glass of have and carry a water bottle with you all day and make drinking it a habit.

If water seems boring, try infusing your water by adding:

• lemon
• lime
• grapefruit
• orange
• cucumber
• ginger
• mint
• crushed berries

to a pitcher or even directly to your water bottle.

Missing the carbonation of pop, then carbonate your water before infusing it.  Carbonation, while lowering pH, has no detrimental effects, and if it gets you to drink more, it is worth the effort.

What about coffee and tea? 
It is a myth that the caffeine in coffee and tea dehydrates. The only thing you have to watch out for is what else is in your favourite drink.  Many of the beverages from Starbucks and other cafes are amongst the most calorie-laden, sugar-packed concoctions ever created.

Alcohol is a double whammy -  not only does alcohol itself have calories, but most drinks also are loaded with calories from fast carbs.

Bottom line - only drink what you love; learn to love water.

​Need help applying this to your busy life?
Get a personalized nutrition plan to gain clarity and improve your health:
​
The  TARGET Nutrition Plan takes a personalized, evidence-based approach to help you make better choices.  Our nutritionists assess what you are currently doing and provide you with a personalized plan (including meal plans).  Everything you need to transform your diet.​

The EAT Better Strategy:

1. Build your meals around a healthy protein package
2. Load up on veggies, fruits, legume, and whole grains
3. Balance your meals with healthy fats
4. Avoid ultra-processed foods
5. Only drink the calories you love - learn to love water
6. Stop eating when you are 80% full
7. Go 12 hours without eating

Putting It All Together
​
​If you were to design food to make you fat and sick, you would create ultra-processed food.

Ultra-processed food is defined as “formulations mostly of cheap industrial sources of dietary energy and nutrients plus additives, using a series of processes” and containing minimal whole foods (Monteiro et al., 2018). 

In other words, food companies manufacture ultra-processed foods by combining substances extracted from whole foods with additives for taste, texture, shelf life and other factors that enhance the product’s profitability.

Strip the food of fibre, load it with sugar and fat, then add salt for taste, and you have food that will 

• Be digested and absorbed rapidly (no fibre)
• Spike insulin (lots of refined carbs, quickly broken down to glucose)
• Stored quickly as fat (that’s what insulin does - it stores glucose, protein and fat)

And in 2 hours, you will be hungry again - although, given the salt, you may have kept eating anyways!

In other words, ultra-processed foods hack our appetite control mechanisms, making us fat in the process.

In 2019 Dr. Kevin Hall demonstrated this effect of ultra-processed foods in a study showing that eating ultra-processed foods results in increased calories and weight gain.

Hall took ten men and ten women into an in-patient metabolic ward where they were randomly assigned to receive an ultra-processed or unprocessed diet for 14 days followed by another 14 days on the other diet.  The subjects were given three daily meals and could eat as much or as little as desired. The two diets matched total calories, energy density, macronutrients, fibre, sugar, and sodium but differed widely in the percentage of calories derived from ultra-processed versus unprocessed foods.

Hall’s study found that subjects ate over 500 calories a day more and gained about two pounds of fat in 14 days on the ultra-processed diet.  The overeating was almost evenly divided between excess fat and excess carbohydrates while protein intake was unchanged.

Not only did subjects eat more ultra-processed foods, but they also ate faster, and bloodwork showed the effects of this diet on essential appetite control hormones.

Compared to eating whole foods, subjects showed:

• Decreases in the appetite-suppressing hormone PYY
• Increases in hunger hormone ghrelin
• Increases in the storage hormone  insulin

Along with

• Increased glucose levels
• Increase insulin resistance - the process underlying Type II Diabetes

Ultra-processed foods make people eat faster, eat more and gain weight while altering critical appetite and hunger hormones and disrupting insulin function.

Now you may be thinking, “I get it - it’s junk food, but I don’t eat that much of it.”  

But collectively, we do: 50% of the calories Canadians consume comes from ultra-processed foods!

Here is our take - it is all about balance:

1. Balance your energy
​Think about fats and carbs as providing your energy, with protein for repair and maintenance. If you have followed the guide so far, you have built your meals around healthy protein packages and filled out your plates with healthy veggies, fruits, legumes, and whole grains.  Now balance out your meal with healthy fats for taste, satiation, and of course, to meet your energy needs. 

2. Balance your types of fats
​​More than half of your fat should be monounsaturated. 

• Eat plenty of seeds, nuts, and nut butter (peanut, almond, etc.)
• Make olive and avocado oil your default cooking oils.
• Balance the remainder equally from:
  • Polyunsaturated fats - including Omega 3 and Omega 6 essential fats
    • Enjoy fatty fish (salmon, trout, sardines, mackerel) unless, of course, you are vegetarian!
    • Avoid chemically processed seed & vegetable oils - choose expeller-pressed, cold-pressed, virgin, and extra virgin oils.
  • Saturated fats
    • Healthy meats - choose lean cuts, grass-fed, organic if possible.
    • Full fat or partially skimmed dairy (choose grass-fed if affordable)
    • Coconut oil (choose virgin)

3. Balance your Omega 3’s and 6’s

• Be conscious of how much Omega 3’s you are eating.  From an evolutionary perspective, the ratio of Omega 6 to Omega 3 in the diet was 1:1.  Since the introduction of cheap, industrial vegetable oils - corn, soybean, safflower, etc. into the Western diet - this ratio has sky-rocketed to 25:1.  At these levels, Omega 6's act as pro-inflammatory agents and likely is a significant contributor to obesity, insulin resistance, and heart disease.
• Alpha-linolenic acid (ALA) - is the essential omega-3 fatty acid.  ALA can be derived from plant sources - flax, chia seeds, green leafy vegetables, soybean oil, canola, and notably from fish.  ​
• From ALA, we can synthesize the other important omega-3 fatty acids: eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic (DHA).  There are some challenges to relying on ALA alone:
  • The efficiency of this conversion is low (especially in the presence of high Omega 6’s)
  • The conversion is lower in men as compared to women. 
  • There is also a common significant loss of function genetic variation with the FADS enzyme that converts ALA to DHA and EPA.  
• As a result, you should obtain EPA and DHA are obtained from your diet (fish) and supplementation (fish or algae oil).

Healthy fats come from whole food sources with minimal processing.

• Avoid trans-fats (now banned from foods) due to the increased health risks.  Everyone agrees these are not healthy and increase your risk of cardiovascular disease.
• Avoid ultra-processed food - these are more likely to be high in saturated fat or trans-fats from hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated polyunsaturated fats. 
• Avoid any oil labeled as hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated.
• Avoid fried foods - heating destabilizes the oil resulting in the formation of unhealthy trans fats.  Deep frying fat in restaurants is reused repeatedly, further increasing the likelihood of eating harmful oxidation by-products.
• Avoid chemically processed oils - the top four vegetable oils consumed are soybean, canola, palm, and corn oil - all are refined, bleached, and deodorized. The refining process uses chemical solvents, usually hexane, to separate the oils.  The heating process results in the creation of some trans fats.

The EAT Better Strategy:

1. Build your meals around a healthy protein package
2. Load up on veggies, fruits, legume, and whole grains
3. Balance your meals with healthy fats
4. Avoid ultra-processed foods
5. Only drink the calories you love - learn to love water
6. Stop eating when you are 80% full
7. Go 12 hours without eating

Putting It All Together

Following the first step, "Start with a Healthy Protein Package” your next step in thinking about healthy meals is to load up on veggies, fruits, legumes and whole grains.

I know, this might sound like your mother.  “Eat your veggies - they are really good for you”, but there are some solid reasons why eating more fruits, veggies, legumes and whole grains makes good sense.

Here are 7 reasons why loading up on veggies, fruits, legumes and whole grains makes sense:

1. They taste really good

• Veggies provide an unlimited of flavours and textures - cooked right, they are simply delicious.  Depending on how you classify them, there are 8 or 9 different categories of veggies, hundreds of individual veggies to choose from, many different preparations and infinite combinations.  Combine a bit of kitchen skill with the variety of veggies and you will never be bored.

​
2. They fill you up​

• ​Veggies are full of water and fibre, providing your meal volume with minimal calories.   Their bulk triggers stretch receptors in the stomach and intestine to signal satiation, while the fibre slows digestion allowing you to feel full longer.  Being full does more than willpower when it comes to weight loss!

3.  They provide sustained energy

• Food provides the energy we need to live primarily from the breakdown of carbohydrates and fats.  (We eat proteins mainly for growth and repair of our own proteins).  For the most part, veggies, fruits, legumes and whole grains take time to digest, are slowly absorbed and provide sustained energy.  This feeling of sustained energy translates into less hunger, less craving, and less snacking.

4.  Some veggies are essentially free

• Some veggies contain so few calories that the energy required for digestion is almost the same as their energy content.  These veggies provide us with flavour and nutrition and make sense to fill up on.  Some examples: green leafy veggies, celery, cucumbers, tomatoes, snap peas, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, asparagus, and Brussels sprouts.  Still feeling hungry at dinner - add more veg!

5.  They are loaded with micronutrients 

• Vegetables are excellent sources of micronutrients - vitamins and minerals essential growth and our body’s key key bio functions:  energy production, cellular protection, immunity, inflammation & anti-inflammation, blood clotting, stress response & recovery, bone and muscle strength, neurological health, vision and more.  Veggies are nature’s supplements, so save your money and get your vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients in a package your body is ready for.

6.  They feed our microbiome

• While there are 10 trillion cells in our bodies, we also host approximately 10 times that many microbes (bacteria, fungi, protozoa and viruses) on or inside our bodies.  Bacteria in our gut, not only help us digest food, they also help regulate our immune system, modulate our energy metabolism, including nutrient absorption and fat storage, protect against other bacteria that cause disease, and produce vitamins including B vitamins B12, thiamine and riboflavin, and Vitamin K.  The more we learn about the microbiome, the more evidence there is that feeding them properly - with adequate fibre (at least 30 g per day) - is one of the keys to good health.

7.  And finally they are really good for you 

• Mom was right! Fruits, veggies, legumes and whole grains keep you healthy.  There is overwhelming evidence to support their role in decreasing disease risk and improving health.  Diets rich in fruits and veggies can lower BP, reduce cardiovascular disease, prevent some types of cancer, decrease risk of diabetes, help manage weight, preventing obesity and even help your vision.

Convinced you need to up you improve your game when it comes to veggies, fruits, legumes and whole grains but not sure where to start? 
​ 
Here are 12  quick tips to get you started:

1.  Have a fruit bowl

• ​Place it somewhere you will see it every time you enter the kitchen.  Stock it with the fruit you love - washed and ready to eat.  Do the same with berries in the fridge.  Feeling like something sweet - grab some fruit.

2.  Eat the rainbow

• ​On most days try and eat a variety of different coloured veg - green leafy, yellow, orange, red fruits and veggies, dark beans and legumes.  The more colour the better!

3.  Try new veggies

• ​Every week look to try something new from the green grocer that you can either add to a salad, chop up and snack on, or prepare with your nightly meal.

4.  Load up your freezer with frozen veg

• ​Frozen veg are flash frozen at peak freshness and maintain all of their nutrition - they are also incredibly useful as a fall back when you haven’t got to the grocery store.  Keep several bags of you your favourites - spinach, mixed veg, broccoli, artichoke hearts, etc.)

5.  Double up on veggies with your nightly meal

• ​Add a couple of veg side sides to each meal - pair something familiar with something new - look for new ways to prepare your veg.

6.  Prepare a whole week’s worth of vegetables on the weekend

• ​Wash, clean and chop up your veg in one session - store in the fridge so that dinners are even easier to get on the table when the rush of the week begins.

7.  Substitute raw veggies for crackers or chips

• ​Take some of your chopped veg (carrots, peppers, cucumber, broccoli, cauliflower, etc.) and serve with a healthy and tasty dip - like hummus or baba ghanoush.

8.  Use green leafy veg in place of bread or wraps

• ​Collards, kale, lettuce all can work well.  Not only do you get more greens, you also eliminate some refined carbs!

9.  Up your whole grain game

• ​Ditch the white rice - shift to brown rice, wild rice.  Try other whole grains that deliver their energy more slowly - quinoa, bulgar, spelt, amaranth, and don’t forget oats.  

10.  Eat a salad at every meal

• Be imaginative or keep it simple.  Make having a salad a default option for every meal.

11.  Eat more veggie soup ​

• Always good on a cold afternoon or night. This is a great way to load up on veggies and studies show people eat fewer calories when the eat soup.  Remember to have a healthy protein package - think beans or legumes in the soup.  Thicken with canned pumpkin or squash.

The EAT Better Strategy:

1. Build your meals around a healthy protein package
2. Load up on veggies, fruits, legume, and whole grains
3. Balance your meals with healthy fats
4. Avoid ultra-processed foods
5. Only drink the calories you love - learn to love water
6. Stop eating when you are 80% full
7. Go 12 hours without eating

Putting It All Together
​
When we eat food - it is broken down into 3 macronutrients:

• Fats
• Carbohydrates
• Protein

Our bodies are designed to use fats and carbs for energy and we have two different systems to manage the use and storage of these fuels.

When we eat proteins, they are broken down into amino acids - essentially the building blocks for new proteins.
These amino acids are absorbed into the bloodstream and distributed around the body to tissues that need them.

Dietary protein is predominantly used by our bodies for structure and function and not for fuel.  The most important functional molecules of the body - hormones, neurotransmitters, enzymes and antibodies are proteins, as are our structural components - muscle, collagen, connective tissue, and even cartilage and bone.

Our bodies need 20 amino acids to be able to create all the proteins that we need for life.  Of these 9 are considered to be essential - meaning that we need to get them from our diets.

• Histidine
• Isoleucine
• Leucine
• Lysine
• Methionine
• Phenylalanine
• Threonine
• Tryptophan
• Valine

And another four are conditionally essential

• Arginine
• Cysteine
• Glutamine
• Tyrosine

Proteins in our bodies are continuously being recycled, degraded back into amino acids and re-synthesized.  

The body is very good at reutilizing amino acids, but is not fully efficient as some amino acids get damage and broken down.  As a result, we always need a to eat some new protein just to maintain our existing proteins.

Unlike fats and carbohydrates, we cannot store excess protein, so we are also  dependent on our diets to provide enough protein for any growth and maintenance.

Excess dietary protein, beyond levels required to restore amino acid balance, are degraded, the amino groups are broken down and excreted as urea, creatinine, uric acid or other nitrogenous metabolites.  The remaining carbon skeleton which are keto acids are either utilized as fuel in the liver or converted into glucose or more likely fat.

That’s right - excess protein will be turned into fat!

This may seem surprising given the popularity of high protein diets for weight loss, but there are two other attributes of protein that may explain their benefit in a weight loss diet. 

First, of the macronutrients, protein is the most satiating.  Meals with high protein feel more filling and decrease hunger for a longer period of time, and a result you will consume fewer calories overall. 

The other attribute of protein metabolism that helps with weight management is the fact that the process to convert protein into fat is inefficient and about a third of the energy in the protein is consumed in the process.

A small percentage of protein is used to maintain blood glucose levels during fasted states.  This process, gluconeogenesis, runs at a fairly constant rate throughout the day using multiple substrates including lactate (released from muscle glycogen) and glycerol (from fat breakdown).  The amount of protein required for this is very small. 

Summary

• Daily intake of protein is essential for growth and maintenance of structural and functional components of our bodies.  
• Protein is not a major source of energy for us; unless we eat too much, in which case it turns into fat.
• Eating extra protein will help make us full sooner, potentially resulting in fewer overall calories consumed.

How much protein do we need a day?
The official answers from the Institute of Medicine are 

• Between 10 to 35% of our daily caloric intake or 
• Or 0.8 g/kg per day is the Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA) set in both Canada and the US

Let's break this down a bit more.

0.8 g/kg is meant to be the minimum amount of protein we require without becoming deficient.  This is the amount of extra protein our body needs for repair and maintenance or as we discussed above the amount of protein that is lost each day as we recycle our amino acids.

As we are more active we need more protein - however the best evidence we have is that these requirements are still rather modest - with up to 1.6g/kg for strength/power athletes who are training to gain muscle mass.  There is no evidence that we need beyond 2 g/kg per day.

Why is nutrition so hard to figure out?
Why is it so confusing to know how to eat well and be healthy?
When did eating become nutrition?

This is our attempt to cut through the noise and help you learn foundational habits that will make eating better easier. 

The EAT Better Strategy:

1. Build your meals around a healthy protein package
2. Load up on veggies, fruits, legume, and whole grains
3. Balance your meals with healthy fats
4. Avoid ultra-processed foods
5. Only drink the calories you love - learn to love water
6. Stop eating when you are 80% full
7. Go 12 hours without eating

Putting It All Together

This is not about diets.  Diets do not work.

Diets are temporary, highly restrictive programs of eating to lose weight and are unfortunately damaging exercises in futility. (Diets are also about selling books!)

• Low fat-high carb
• Keto
• Low carb-high fat
• Zone
• Atkins
• modified Atkins
• South Beach
• Paleo
• the list goes on.  

These dietary approaches differ dramatically in their macronutrient breakdown, yet hold that their system is the one right way towards weight loss and better health.

Inherent in the ‘diet’ approach is a reductionist mindset that the precise nutrient composition of one’s diet matters most.

Since we cannot see nutrients, we as consumers have to rely on experts to tell us what to eat. These experts have wildly different views that lead to a dogmatic, almost religious element to food advice that divides food into good and bad, demonizing some foods and elevating others to superfood status.

Michael Pollan calls this nutritionism, a term he popularized from the work of Gyorgy Scrinis.

Nutritionism is an ideology, not science - a view that specific nutrients in food determine whether a food is healthy or not. “This focus on nutrients has come to dominate, to undermine, and to replace other ways of engaging with food and of contextualizing the relationship between food and the body," wrote Scinis in 2008. This ideology has even come to overtake nutritional science and government advice, easily co-opted by industry to market questionable food as healthy. “Twinkies now with Omega-3!”

Nutritionism allows the food industry to market highly processed foods as healthy when they add specific nutrients back to the product and market accordingly - think of vitamin-fortified cereals.

Nutritionism may even be one of the causes of the current rise of diabetes, obesity and chronic disease we see in the Western world.  Specifically, the recommendations in the late 1970s and early 1980s for consumers to lower their intake of saturated fats led to profound shifts in Western diets with refined carbohydrates replacing fat in industrially produced food.  This shift is thought by some to be the single most significant causal factor responsible for the epidemic of obesity in the world today.

Pollan counters nutritionism with his simple advice (that we have borrowed):
​"Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.
This simple advice is the antidote to nutritionism; a holistic counter strategy focused on whole foods.

Ready for the EAT Better Strategy?
EAT Better is our attempt to cut through the noise and help you learn foundational habits that will make eating better easier.

The EAT Better Strategy:

1. Build your meals around a healthy protein package
2. Load up on veggies, fruits, legume, and whole grains
3. Balance your meals with healthy fats
4. Avoid ultra-processed foods
5. Only drink the calories you love - learn to love water
6. Stop eating when you are 80% full
7. Go 12 hours without eating

Putting It All Together
​​​
​Need help applying this to your busy life?
Get a personalized nutrition plan to gain clarity and improve your health:
​
The  TARGET Nutrition Plan takes a personalized, evidence-based approach to help you make better choices.  Our nutritionists assess what you are currently doing and provide you with a personalized plan (including meal plans).  Everything you need to transform your diet.​