What to Eat to Feel and Look Your Best

When we think about eating healthily, rule-based diets come to mind. You know the type: "Don't eat this!" and "Do eat that". Often, these diets focus on macronutrients (prescribing how much fat and protein to have versus how many carbs), or they focus on specific foods groups (say, telling you to load up on veggies and avoid grains).

These prescriptive, restrictive diets aren't inherently bad. But they focus on the crowd, not the person, says Brian St. Pierre, a coach at Precision Nutrition, a company that designs wellness programmes for elite and everyday athletes. "Rule-based diets work for some people, but not for everybody", says St. Pierre. He and the experts at Precision Nutrition advocate a different, personalised approach, called the red-yellow-green system.

Red represents the stop-and-consider foods—maybe they're super indulgent, or they make you feel physically or mentally bad after eating them. Yellow represents foods with some kind of contextual condition. You only eat these when you're celebrating, or during the festive season. Green foods are any-time, anywhere, these-foods-will-always-make-me-feel-good fare.

"The colour designations are different for everyone", says Krista Scott-Dixon, Director of Curriculum at Precision Nutrition and a nutrition educator with 20 years of experience. "For instance, I have ice cream in my freezer, and it's been there for six months; I don't crave it. But someone else might crave ice cream so much, they can't control themselves around it. Just having it in the house means it's going to get gobbled up in five minutes, and the person will likely feel guilty afterwards. That's a red light".

Don't worry, if you love cookies and chips but know they're fire-engine red for you, no one expects you to stop eating them completely. "We only see no-reds for people who are paid based on how they look or perform", St. Pierre says. "For the rest of us, you don't need to be indulgence-free to be healthy, fit and strong".

St. Pierre and Scott-Dixon have used the red-yellow-green method with hundreds of Precision Nutrition clients and found it does multiple positive things. Firstly, it's empowering. You decide what foods go in what category, without anyone telling you that you can't eat one thing or that you have to eat something else to be healthy. "This allows for self-exploration and discovery—what are your personal nutritional needs and what works best for you?" says St. Pierre. While we might know it subconsciously, we rarely take a moment to define the foods that make us feel at our best. "This takes nutrition out of the realm of abstract magical formulas about superfoods and makes it based in real life—your life", says Scott-Dixon.

What many people don't realise is that the majority of nutritional recommendations are based on calculated averages that come from research—the average response for the average individual. So, while we know that wholegrains can be good for our bodies, that doesn't account for the coeliac who has a terrible reaction to eating wholegrain sourdough. If you're someone who struggles with a particular food group, be it grains, cruciferous vegetables, or nuts and seeds, and you see those foods included on a diet's "must-eat" list, it can make you dismiss the whole plan, says St. Pierre.