Supplements

Now you know how many calories your body burns every day in order to maintain the life you need now. Much like your budget, you can now decide to make changes based on A) Lowering your calorie input, or B) Increasing your calorie output. Since we've been on this journey for almost 8 weeks, it's my hope that you've already done one or both of these things. Now that you have an understanding of how many calories your body uses every day, you can fine tune what you're already doing.

Calories aren't all that counts about your food, though. Nutrients are key, and they become even more important when you are exercising! Unfortunately, it's not physically possible to get everything your body actually needs in order to be healthy without supplementing. Today's food simply doesn't contain the right levels of nutrients. You can get your daily minimums from your food, but as far as what your body actually needs if you're trying to be optimally healthy - that's just not possible.

Don't believe me? Take a look at this video. It's a commercial for one of the supplements I use (and also sell, because the brand and the products have proven themselves to me). You don't have to pay any attention to the particular product or brand it's advertising, just watch the part where this couple is loading up their grocery card with all of the foods one person would need to eat in a single day to meet the average adult human body's real nutritional requirements, and the part where they explain why those foods are important. It's 6 minutes long, but worth the watch!

Do you think you could eat all of that? Even if you could, and you had the time to prepare it all healthfully and the money to purchase that amount of food every day, the number of calories represented there is....super high. You'd have to run a marathon every single day to burn off what you'd be consuming just to get your proper nutrition from your food.

Or, you can supplement.

How do you choose the supplement that's right for you?

1. Pick a supplement that meets all of your nutritional needs. This begs the obvious question: without being a doctor, how am I supposed to know what my nutritional needs are? Good question! You're smart for asking that! Here's your options:
1. Learn. Do a lot of in-depth research to learn what the average human body needs beyond the FDA stated minimums to be truly healthy. This will require a lot of time and effort on your part, a lot of sifting through garbage and rumors, and a LOT of coming to your own conclusions only to have them proven wrong.
2. Recruit someone who knows. This means hiring a nutritionist or dietitian and also doing a lot of your own research so that you know if what they're telling you is the truth.
3. Find a company who has been checked and re-checked by various third-party consumer and medical organizations throughout the world, and put your faith in their products. 
2. Pick a whole-food supplement. Most supplements on the market today are created with synthetic materials. Scientists sit in a lab and create Vitamin C based on it's chemical makeup. Those types of vitamins are far less useful to your body and put unnecessary chemicals into your system. Instead, what you want is a supplement that's made by extracting the vitamins from food, or breaking down food to make the vitamins accessible to your system.
3. Pick a supplement that's been tested and approved by credible third parties. Since supplements are not regulated by the FDA, there's no one looking over the shoulders of supplement companies to make sure that what they write on the box is what they're putting in the pill (and nothing more). In place of regulation, reliable third party testers have stepped up to the plate to hold these supplement manufacturers accountable. One such company is consumerreports.com, where you can find reports on most of the major brands. 

Today, look into the type of vitamin that's going to work best for you.