What is Nutritional Literacy?
I am of the opinion that there are many paths to sustainable health and body you feel proud of - but there are some common threads along all of those paths. Certain things that just can't be skipped over or substituted for another way. One of those things is Nutritional Literacy.
I define nutritional literacy as having competence and knowledge surrounding nutrition such that you can make the best choices for your body, that align with your goals, while navigating your day to day life. Just as literacy is the ability to read and write, nutritional literacy is the ability to nourish yourself physically and emotionally with food.
I came to this idea and created my personal definition on my own... but when I started looking into it, it turns out that a lot of other people have had this thought before me!
The formal definition of nutrition literacy is “the degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand nutrition information and skills needed in order to make appropriate nutrition decisions". In fact it's been studied and there is even a "Nutrition Literacy Assessment Instrument" (NLit for short) that is used to determine how well a person can make appropriate nutritional choices. Allegedly this test is typically used in primary care settings - but I've never heard of any primary care provider using the NLit. (But that's a whole different can of worms we'll save for another day.)
We All Have To Start At The Beginning
When a child first begins their journey to read and write, we don't throw Shakespeare at them and expect a brilliant dramatic reading. We start with the alphabet. The most basic level of understanding and building the skill.
From there we start to teach words, and sentences, and parts of speech. We encourage them to sound out words when reading and start to figure it out through practice and experience. There is simply no substitute for trial and error and putting in the time. We have to get stuff at least a little wrong before we can get it right.
Starting you nutrition journey with the basics is something that many women think is below them. They've tried every diet out there and it gives them a false belief that they know more than they actually do. I personally believe that this is because when you follow a specific diet you often times learn a lot of rules. You learn the rules, and you follow the rules. And sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. (Sometimes it works great for your husband and does nothing for you so you want to round house kick him behind the knees!)
But learning the rules of a diet is like being illiterate and then listening to an audio book until you have it memorized. You might be able to recite the story, but if someone handed you the book you wouldn't know how to read it. You wouldn't even know it was the same story!
Knowledge is great. But it's your ability to apply that knowledge that actually gets you where you're going.
What Does It Take?
Fat loss requires two things.
A calorie deficit
Sustaining that calorie deficit
It's the second part that's most important. It's not terribly hard to create a calorie deficit for a day or two. But it is going to take you weeks and months to make lasting progress. Maintaining a calorie deficit for weeks or months is not easy to do.
It can only be done if you have a working knowledge about what you're putting into your mouth. This is why I teach macros to my clients by way of hand portions. This gives them a working knowledge that they can rely on for their entire life and it doesn't require any special tools, stuffing food into containers, or skipping out on all the fun foods they love.
For some people looking to achieve very high levels of leanness or who have tight timelines there are other tools such as myfitnesspal and more precise tracking that can be employed. But if you ONLY ever learn how to eat well and nourish your body when you're scanning barcodes and eating precise grams of macros you're probably not going to have a really solid relationship with food because you are relying solely on EXTERNAL information to drive your food choices. This brings me BACK to the importance of nutritional literacy. You must be able to make informed and appropriate decisions under normal life circumstances (like birthday parties or vacations) without relying on anything other than your brain.
The Most Common Mistakes
Of course, I wouldn't have a job if sustaining a calorie deficit were easy. If you're putting in the work and keeping track of your macros (through hand portions or otherwise) but you're seeing lackluster results these are the common pitfalls that are most likely keeping you stuck.
Under Estimating Portions: It's been proven time and time again that humans suck at estimating how much food we are eating. We always think it's less than it really is. The only way to get past this is to calibrate your understanding of portion sizes.
Hidden Calories: When we eat simple foods, they're easy to classify. Sweet potatoes are carbs, chicken breast is protein. But what about when we're eating something like french fries - sure, the potatoes are a carb but there's tons of fat in there too. What about foods with heavy condiments or sauces? More often than not there's a lot more calories in these foods than we think.
Focusing Solely on Food Quality: Eating nourishing healthy foods is important for our longevity and overall health. But ruling out ALL processed foods and regarding them as "bad" for you usually has one end result. Overeating all the "healthy" foods OR eventually binging on the "bad" ones.
Focusing Solely on Food Quantity: "If it fits your macros" became popular for allowing people to eat any food they wanted to as long as it "fit their macros". "Want chocolate cake for dinner? Well, if it fits your macros then you can have it!" But there's a better approach to this - REAL FOOD fits your macros. Overdoing it with lots of processed foods will leave us with more hunger, more cravings, and some really weird food combinations in an effort to "tetris" our macros out of all the franken-food. I don't think I need to go into detail on why this approach is NOT going to improve our long term success with fat loss or improve our nutritional literacy.
If you go through this list you'll see a very common thread - all of these common mistakes can be solved by improving our nutritional literacy.
Understanding portion sizes
Recognizing the main macros of a food and knowing which foods have a solid mix
Knowing what foods you need and how much of them make you feel your best
Having a food environment that supports your goals, lifestyle and values
Knowing how to nourish yourself with BOTH indulgent foods and nutrient dense foods so you can achieve and maintain your personal body composition preference
Let's Get Literate
If you truly want to master your relationship with food so you can feel confident and proud in your body once and for all - there's just no way around it - you NEED nutritional literacy. There is no substitute for competence and knowledge surrounding nutrition such that you can make the best choices for your body, that align with your goals, while navigating your day to day life.
It takes patience and practice to build that up, but in the end, it will be SO WORTH IT.
Ash