Real Food with Real Simple Ingredients Creates a Healthy Lifestyle

By:  Matt Weik

Listen, we all don’t have the cooking skills of a Gordon Ramsay – and that’s ok.  Hopefully, none of us has his temper either, but that’s neither here nor there.  The fact of the matter is, we are no master chef in the kitchen.  In fact, for many of us, we have a hard time even finding the tools we need in the kitchen to whip up a healthy meal.  Well, I have good news.  You don’t need to be all fancy to improve your healthy lifestyle and make dishes that are over-the-top.  Keep things simple and you’ll be just fine.  Let me explain.

How Do You Pronounce That?
You grab an item off the shelf at the grocery store because it looks healthy and delicious.  You flip it over to the back and start reading the nutrition panel and ingredients.  As you are scanning you notice half of what’s included in the ingredients list you can’t even pronounce.  Look, you shouldn’t need to ask Siri how to pronounce an ingredient found on a label.  More than likely if you can’t pronounce it, the ingredient isn’t the healthiest of items listed.

​Keep it simple!  You don’t need to throw the kitchen sink in food or meals in order to make them taste good or make them fit your healthy lifestyle.  Sure, add herbs and spices to bring out more flavors in your dishes, but most of the stuff you are consuming that you can’t pronounce are additives, preservatives, fillers, or for a lack of better term… JUNK.

Stick with minimalistic products and profiles with real simple ingredients that are made from real food.  It was this very thought process that helped Brotein Candy create the planet’s first fitness jerky to fit your active and healthy lifestyle.  Real ingredients like organic grass-fed beef, brewed coffee, organic blue agave, pink Himalayan salt, cayenne, black pepper, cinnamon, and cloves to name a few.  There’s nothing in the ingredients that you can’t pronounce or that you haven’t heard of.  It’s CLEAN and DELICIOUS.

​What Do You Actually Need?
There are three macronutrients that we all need in our diet – protein, carbohydrates, fat.  Each of these nutrients serves a different purpose from helping build muscle, to improving recovery and energy levels, to ensuring we have a balance of hormones and nutrients to feed our brain.  

Real food options will always give you the best nutritional profile over any product that has been refined or modified in any way.  When food companies try to get fancy by adding all of these extra ingredients along with the kitchen sink, it changes the natural and savory flavor profile of the item.  Whatever happened to the KISS principle?  Keep It Super Simple (I cleaned up the phrase a little).  

How do you know if a product is of good quality and something to consider adding to your healthy lifestyle?  It’s simple.  Eat as many whole foods as possible.  From there, look for items that do not contain preservatives, trans fat, MSG, added sugar, or added nitrates (to name a few of the big no-no’s).  

​It honestly doesn’t get much simpler than that.  Real food with real simple ingredients creates a healthy lifestyle.  Use that principle in your own nutrition program and you will find you are better able to reach your health and fitness goals.