Project Description
Straight Talk – The Fight Dietician
Mark Bouris has long said that one of the key attributes of successful people is that they “generally look after themselves physically, they don’t drink too much grog and they think about what they put in their bodies.”
So Mark decided to ask an expert in nutrition and performance, Jordan Sullivan, to join him on Straight Talk to break down the basics of feeding yourself the right things to optimise performance.
Jordan’s area of speciality lies within Performance Nutrition, recently celebrating his two year anniversary with “The Fight Dietician”, a Nutrition and Dietetics company that focuses on Combat Sports Nutrition and Performance.
TFD is responsible for the Nutrition of over 85% of Australia and New Zealand’s Professional Combat Athletes including two current UFC World Champions.
Particularly focused on combat sports nutrition, Jordan shares some insight in the difference between dieting and fuelling for performance, as well as how he applies science and technology to improving diets for not only fighters, but everyday people.
Six principles to live by
“The same six core principles that we use with some of Australia & New Zealand’s elite athletes…everyone can apply them, because really, 90% of the work is done if you put these six principles in place.”
These six core principles are embedded into the program of every person The Fight Dietician works with. Jordan says the extra ten percent is made up of stuff high level athletes need to worry about, like fuelling between training, calorie counting and so on. “For everyday folk like you and me Mark, there’s six principles:
The first three are about balancing your macronutrients.
- Carbohydrates – Focus on eating good, complex, unprocessed, no-added sugar carbohydrates. That’s your wholemeal, oatmeals, your brown carbohydrates.
- Good sources of highly bioavailable protein – Plant based protein is absolutely fine, just make sure you’re getting enough of it to fulfil your needs. But animal proteins are very highly bioavailable and you need to be getting that regularly throughout your day.
- Good sources of fat – “With your fats, make sure you get it in. Plant and marine based fats, these are things like your salmon, nuts, even oils, like getting in your olive oils, minimally processed fats.”
- Sleep – make sure you get your eight hours of sleep. Sleep can be very individual so Jordan says, “Find out what your most optimal sleep is and make it a priority, because without that those other three principles are not going to work.”
- Stress – manage your stress. “That doesn’t have to be yoga every morning at 6:00AM. Whatever it is that works for you in managing stress everyday, work that in for 10 minutes a day.”
- Hydration habits – you lose a lot of fluids over night and over the day. “Our body and our human metabolism needs fluid to work…Keep a bottle of water next to your desk everyday.”