Ep #186: The Only Nutrition Basics That Matter (and Why Most Diets Fail Without Them)

This is the Strong Is a Mindset podcast, Episode #186. Most people don’t need a better nutrition plan. They need one that works on their best days and their worst days. So today, I’m going to share the nutrition basics that actually matter. Nail these and you are on your way to consistency.

This is the Strong Is a Mindset podcast, where you’ll learn how to build both a strong body and a strong mind by eating, moving, and thinking. I’m your host Physician, Personal Trainer, Certified Health Coach and Certified Life Coach, Carrie Holland. 

Hey, how are you? What’s new? What’s good? So, what’s good here? Today, we’re going to take it back to the basics and talk about the nutrition foundations that actually matter. So it’s January, and this is the time of year when many of you and many of my clients are thinking about their diets. This is what I think of as clean it up season. There’s a collective urge to tighten things up, rein things in, and get back on track now that December’s over.

And what I often see so many people do is choose a way of eating that requires a lot from them. So it might be a super specific calorie and macro target that you’ve calculated out for yourself, or maybe you wrote yourself a specific eating schedule or gave yourself all kinds of rules and dos and don’ts. And you tell yourself, I just have to follow this. This is how I’m going to eat. I just have to do this.

And that all sounds great in theory, but here’s what I also run into every year. The intention to clean it up that feels doable on January 1 totally collides with real life by January 14th, and then things get messy. That means work gets busy after you’ve had time off over the holidays. Kids’ sports are ramping up now that school’s back in session. Schedules are full again, and instead of January feeling like a fresh start, it very quickly turns into, there’s a lot going on and I’m trying to hold it all together and revamp my eating and stick to my macros and my eating window and not break any of my food rules.

And here’s the big idea I want to offer you today. Most people are trying to optimize their nutrition before they’ve stabilized it, and that generally does not work. And that order, stabilize first, optimize second, matters way more than you think. Because what I see so many people do in January, especially high-achieving women, is they respond to feeling out of control at the end of the holiday season by aiming higher now that it’s the new year. They get stricter, they add rules, they overcompensate, they raise the bar, they get super specific on macro targets or an intermittent fasting window or other details that do not matter. And they decide that this time, they just need to execute better. But what they often don’t stop to ask is whether the plan they’re trying to do actually works in real life. Because real life comes with stress and unexpected hiccups and late days and times when you don’t have the energy or the bandwidth you thought you would.

And when those days happen, it’s a lot harder to stick to your 128 grams of protein and 64 grams of fat that you calculated out. It’s a lot harder to be done with your eating window by 7 p.m. when you’re walking in from work at 6:55 starving. And so what do you do then? And the point here is that if you jump straight into optimizing your nutrition with perfect timing or strict macros or a rigid plan, if you do all of those things to your diet without stabilizing it first, it doesn’t really matter how sophisticated or well-designed your plan is, it’s not going to work, which is why we have to talk about the basics.

If you want to change the way you eat this year and actually have it last, let me offer you this. Your first mission or your first focus is to get really, really good at the basics. Your first goal is to nail the basics of your nutrition before you go tinkering to find the exact right macro split or system. Basics first, always. And here’s the key distinction I want to make before we go any further. Basic does not mean easy. It also does not mean insignificant. Basic means foundational. Okay?

So the basics of your nutrition are the simple habits that everything else is built on. They’re not flashy, they’re definitely not exciting, but they’re also not optional. And most importantly, when you have the basics in place, everything else gets easier to sustain.

And this is the part that most people miss. Before you optimize, you have to stabilize. So what does that mean? Your eating habits have to be steady before you go and tinker with exact macros and timing and precision for your physique goals. And when I say that your nutrition needs to be stabilized, I mean that your eating habits mostly hold up. They are mostly steady and reliable, not just on your best days, but on your worst ones too.

These are your eating habits that work when life is calm, sure. But more importantly, these are the eating habits that work even when your life is a hot mess, because that is when it matters. Because here’s what I want you to know. Trying to fine-tune something that isn’t steady yet will always feel hard. It will always feel fragile. And it will feel exhausting, no matter how good your plan sounds. So the best analogy I can think of is that it’s like trying to do calculus before you’ve taken algebra. You have to have the basics in place before you can get more sophisticated or else it is just not going to hold up.

So today, we’re not talking about fine-tuning. We’re not talking about dialing in your macros or perfecting your meal and nutrient timing. Instead, we’re talking about the basics that are simple, but not necessarily easy, but they make everything easier. These are the basics that support consistency in your very real, very busy life. And once you have these basics in place, everything else will become a whole lot simpler. All right? So let’s go.

Let’s get really clear from the start. When I talk about stabilizing your nutrition before you optimize it, I want to be really clear what I mean, because stable, that word can sound kind of vague, and I don’t want it to be. So very simply, stability is not about how good your plan looks on paper. So instead, stability is about how your eating actually plays out in real life. Stability means that your eating pattern is predictable, even when your days aren’t. And so notice what I said here, it’s predictable, but not perfect.

So stability means you know what breakfast looks like. You know how you handle lunch. You know how dinner usually goes even on busy nights. There’s a default you come back to without having to spend a lot of time or mental energy on it. And here’s an important point that often gets overlooked. When you are stabilized, your eating does not require constant decision-making and it doesn’t require loads of emotional bandwidth to maintain it. So your way of eating operates in the background. That means you’re not white-knuckling through the day. You’re not spending hours thinking about food. You’re not relying on motivation, willpower, or being good in order to make it work.

And this is where I want to talk for a minute about optimization, because I think this word gets thrown around a lot, but it’s important to understand what it actually means. To be totally clear, optimization isn’t bad and it’s not wrong. Optimization is about fine-tuning, so things like macros, meal timing, food quality, supplements, precision. I think of optimization as where you start adjusting details to get much more specific results. And here’s why it’s so appealing. Optimization feels productive. It feels focused. It feels like you’re really doing something. It feels a little fancy.

But stabilizing, on the other hand, it feels kind of boring if I’m being fully honest here. Stabilizing is repetitive. It’s very unsexy. It’s doing the same basic things over and over again, like having a default breakfast, centering your meals around protein, having a handful of go-to lunches and dinners that you don’t have to think about, and making decisions once instead of re-deciding them every single day. And for high-achieving women, those boring behaviors, they can feel suspicious or even inadequate, like you’re not doing enough.

But here’s a key concept I want you to hear, and here’s the connection I want to make crystal clear for you. Optimization only works on top of stability. So optimization assumes that your eating is already consistent, that your meals are predictable, that your hunger is managed. And optimization also assumes that your eating does not completely fall apart when life gets stressful. So this is key.

And when those things aren’t true, optimization does not help. In fact, it actually backfires and adds pressure. Because now, instead of just trying to eat in a way that works, you’re also trying to hit numbers, follow rules, get the timing right, and execute precisely, all on top of a system that’s already fragile. And that is why optimized plans often work for a week or two, and then they collapse. Not because you lack discipline or because you don’t care, but because you’re asking a finely tuned system to operate on an unstable foundation.

And that difference between optimization and stabilization, it doesn’t show up when everything is going well. It shows up when your day goes sideways. That’s when you’ll see whether your diet is stabilized or not. Because stability, it is not proven on your best days, like the days when you slept well, had plenty of time in your kitchen, or you felt motivated. Most eating plans work on those days. So instead, stability is actually proven on your worst days. Stability shows up when work completely blows up and you’re at work way later than you planned. Stability shows up when you’re exhausted, when you’re stressed, overwhelmed, tapped out, or just done, and you still do the thing. You still eat mostly the way you intended and your nutrition doesn’t fall apart. That is when you know you found stability.

And this is the part that many people skip over because we tend to build habits with our best version in mind. We plan for what we can do when we’re at our best and have the energy, time, and the patience to follow through on our plans. But that’s not the version of you that needs the habit the most. The version of you who really needs the habit and the stability is the version who’s had a really long, hard day and has nothing left to give. When you didn’t plan ahead perfectly, when you’re tired and hungry and irritated and just want your day to be over. That exhausted, tapped-out version of you is the one who needs a stable habit first and foremost before focusing on an optimized one.

If you’re not operating on a stable foundation and then you run into stress or an unexpected setback, that’s when things fall apart. That’s when meals get skipped during the day and everything unravels at night. Or structure disappears altogether and you eat a bag of M&Ms for lunch. Or you have the thought, I’ll just deal with this later, followed shortly after by feeling like you failed and need to reset or start over or compensate tomorrow. And that’s not from lack of discipline, it’s also not a character flaw, it’s a stability gap.

And let me pause here for just a second because I know this can feel a little abstract. I want to make this really simple and practical. If you want to know if your diet is stabilized but you’re not entirely sure, here’s the simplest way to tell. When you’re stabilized, you can miss a workout, have a stressful day, oversleep, or get thrown off schedule, and your eating does not completely unravel. You don’t immediately swing into screw it mode. You don’t blow off the whole day and then feel the need to start over tomorrow or Monday or next week. So stability means your eating has some resilience to it. There’s something to come back to even when your day didn’t go as planned.

So now, on the flip side, if you’re not sure whether that stability is really there, here’s a simple litmus test. If your eating requires constant effort to maintain, if it feels mentally loud or super fragile like it could fall apart at any minute, if it depends on strict rules to stay intact, or if it collapses the second you get stressed, then you know you’re not stabilized yet. And that’s not a problem, it’s just information. And no amount of macro tweaking, number crunching, or tightening of your rules will fix that because the issue is not precision. The issue is that the plan you’re trying to execute cannot survive in the stresses of your real life.

And so here’s the reframe I really want you to hear. A good habit is not one that you can execute perfectly on a good day. A good habit is one that you can still pull off, maybe imperfectly, but at least consistently, even on a terrible day. So when it’s your absolute worst day and you can still follow through on your habit, even in some small meaningful way, that’s when you know you’ve got a winner. And that follow-through matters more than you realize because it builds self-trust and it builds belief in yourself. And it feels good to keep a promise to yourself even when things aren’t going well.

And that is how consistency actually gets built, not through heroics and grand sweeping gestures done once in a while, but through reliability. And this is exactly why we have to talk about the basics, because the basics, the one we’re about to dig into, those are the habits that are designed for your real life. They’re the behaviors that hold up when things are messy, not just when everything in your life is lined up exactly so. And once you have these basics firmly in place, consistency stops feeling so hard.

So here they are. Here are three fundamentals or really three nutrition basics that I want to offer to you. So the first basic I want to encourage is this, eat enough food, especially earlier in your day. So this is huge. One of the most common ways I see women remain unstable in their eating is by undereating, whether that’s by trying to hold out and skip breakfast or by barely eating anything until later in the day, only to totally overdo it later when you’re starving by 3:00 in the afternoon and eventually ravage your kitchen when you finally get home from work.

And I get it, I really do. Not everyone is hungry first thing in the morning and that’s fine. At the same time, I think there are a lot of peri and menopausal women out there who are holding themselves to this idea that if they want to get rid of their menopausal belly, they have to fast and stick to a rigid eating window in order to do it. So they lock themselves into the idea that they’ve got to do intermittent fasting. And I call BS on that. I have not seen a single client manage intermittent fasting without it backfiring on her later in the day. What I see instead is a very predictable pattern, eating very little during the day, white-knuckling through the afternoon, then getting to the evening completely depleted, followed by overeating.

And again, it’s not because of lack of discipline, it’s because your brain is screaming for fuel from not eating enough. It’s repeatable, it’s predictable, and most importantly, it’s preventable. So to be clear, does this mean that intermittent fasting is a bad choice? No, absolutely not. I’m not trying to talk you out of intermittent fasting if that’s what works for you, but I do think that so many women convince themselves that they’ve got to do it when it really doesn’t work for them, and it often ends up backfiring and leading to more overeating than what it was meant to prevent. So this is not meant to say don’t do intermittent fasting, but instead, it’s to say, you don’t have to do it if it doesn’t work for you. You have not failed if intermittent fasting didn’t work for you.

Intermittent fasting aside, here is the basic I want you to master. Eat enough food during the day. You do not have to save up your calories and your food for the evening when you get home. I’ve had so many women tell me they don’t want to eat too much during the day because they’re afraid they won’t have enough calories left when they get home and have dinner. But if they were to practice eating enough throughout the day and keeping themselves satisfied, not stuffed, not full, but satisfied throughout the day, then maybe they wouldn’t feel so hungry when they got home. Maybe they wouldn’t feel compelled to eat everything in sight because they’re starving from eating so little during the day.

So I will spell this out and try to make it as clear as possible. It’s okay to eat throughout the day. It’s okay to eat a legit breakfast. It’s okay to not have a prescribed eating window. Eating earlier in the day is not a failure and you do not have to save up all of your calories for dinner. Okay?

The next foundational habit to get really good at is prioritizing protein. And I’ll add a caveat here. I’m encouraging you to prioritize protein without obsessing over it. I’m not going to tell you to eat a ridiculous amount of it or start counting grams of protein or anything like that. But what I am encouraging you to do is prioritize protein at your meals. And then let me add another caveat in here as I’m talking about all this. I know I harp on protein, but I don’t want to neglect fiber either. So fiber is super important and does not get enough attention, and I want to be clear that I’m not telling you to prioritize protein at the expense of other things in your diet like fiber.

So what I have found after coaching women on this for over five years is that many of you do not get adequate protein and instead get a lot of processed carbs and fats, and that’s shooting you in the foot. So again, it’s not that other things aren’t important, but I want to highlight protein here because hands down, it is one of the most useful changes my clients implement in their diets and it makes a huge difference. And if you need a reminder as to why protein in your diet matters, it matters because it keeps you fuller longer, which can reduce your appetite and cravings. It is essential for building and preserving muscle mass, especially as we get older, and it also reduces nighttime snacking. So for all of these reasons, we need to be taking a closer look at the protein in our diets.

And most women, even those who are genuinely trying to eat well, are not eating enough of it. I see it all the time in my clients. They’re eating salads, they’re choosing healthy foods, they’re watching portions, but protein is often an afterthought. And that gap has real consequences for hunger, energy, and follow-through later in the day. And this is why one of the first basics I’ll work on with clients who want to change their diets is bolstering the protein that they eat. And if you don’t want to track, that’s totally fine. You don’t have to. I often encourage clients to just look at their plate and aim for at least one-quarter of it to be lean protein, and even better if it’s closer to one-third.

So no math, no apps, just paying attention and focusing on putting more lean protein on your plate at every meal, especially breakfast if you eat it. So I’ve had so many clients make this one change, especially at breakfast, and they notice the difference. They notice less snacking, more sustained energy, and less hunger between meals, and less overeating overall, especially later in the day.

So I had one client in particular I can think of, she was a high-level ballroom dancer and she made a commitment to shift her breakfast to one that was more protein-centered, and you can bet it made a difference. She felt better. She was less hungry. She had more energy for her dance practices and that was really important to her. And she is not alone. I have tons of client examples where they increase the protein in their diet and it made a big difference. And the science backs this up. This is not bro science, okay? This is real, this is legit, and it’s a habit I would really encourage you to pay attention to. So this one, it is a no-brainer. If you’re not prioritizing lean protein at your meals, now is the time to start.

All right, and last, the last nutritional basic that I want to offer here is to build meals that don’t require willpower. So of the three foundations I’m sharing today, this one might be my favorite because this is where so many plans quietly fall apart. Your meals should not require hero-level discipline to maintain. If eating healthy or eating in a way that supports your goals, if it feels like something you have to constantly brace yourself for or push through or be good at all day long, then that’s a sign that the structure itself isn’t doing enough of the work.

So here’s an important takeaway. A sustainable way of eating shouldn’t feel like a daily test of character or self-control. And this is an important reframe. When eating feels hard all the time or it feels like an uphill battle, it’s usually not because you’re lazy or unmotivated or lacking discipline. It’s most often because the plan you’re trying to follow is asking too much of you, especially on days when your energy, time, and patience are already spent.

And here’s the truth. If your plan only works when life is calm, your schedule is seamless, your sleep is perfect, and your stress is low, then that is not a real plan. You need something that’s going to hold up no matter what is going on in your life. You need a real plan that’s built for your real life. Your plan should account for busy weeks, late meetings, unexpected stress, emotional exhaustion, and days when you just want to be done. A real plan that works makes the default choice the easiest one, and that is exactly what we’re aiming for.

And this is where simplicity becomes a strength, not a weakness. So for me personally, I am super boring with my food, and that is by design. I rotate through a small set of meals. My breakfast and lunch, they don’t really change much. I eat one thing until I get sick of it, and then I switch. My dinners, they’re a rotation of a few different proteins, always with an enormous salad. And my food tastes good. I don’t eat things I don’t like. It’s just easy and it does the job. I don’t need my meals to entertain me. And because of that, my eating works both on busy weeks and calm weeks. I don’t have to think about it anymore. I’ve practiced it enough that I just do it.

And I see this over and over again with clients who have done this. I’ve coached so many women through this exact approach, creating simple protein rotations, prepping just a few things ahead of time, repeating a collection of meals. And often, there’s a lot of resistance to it at first. It feels too simple, too boring, like it can’t possibly be enough. But remember, simplicity is what creates stability.

So when your meals are easy and familiar and satisfying, you’re not relying on willpower to eat them. You’re not constantly negotiating with yourself. You’re not making hundreds of food decisions on top of everything else you’re managing. You’re just eating. It’s not such a big deal. And that is what allows consistency to take hold. It’s not because you’re trying harder, it’s because your system finally fits your life, whether it’s calm or chaotic. You don’t have to force anything.

Okay? So now, some of you might be hearing these nutrition basics and thinking, yep, I’ve got it, Carrie. I already know all of this stuff. And you might. A lot of the women I work with are super knowledgeable. They know macros, they know protein targets, they’ve listened to the podcast, they’ve read the books, done the programs. So on paper, they look very dialed in. But here’s what I see over and over again. They’ve optimized instead of stabilized, meaning they know the numbers, but they struggle with consistency. Follow-through feels way harder than it should. Stress eating is still an issue. And when life gets busy, which for many of my clients is most of the time, everything starts to feel a lot more shaky.

And this is the part that often gets missed. The right macro split does not remove your humanity from the equation. The perfect eating window does not change the fact that you’re still a human being. You still get stressed, you still have emotions, you still have long days, unexpected schedule changes, and times when you are totally fried. And no amount of nutritional knowledge changes that. And what I see happen is that people assume if they just get the numbers right, the perfect protein target, the ideal split, or the exact plan, that things will finally feel easier. But knowledge doesn’t automatically create stability.

So it really doesn’t matter whether you calculated 112 grams or 124 grams of protein if you end the day overeating cookies because you were underfed, depleted, or overwhelmed. And I see people get lost in the minutia all the time when what would actually help them is something much less glamorous. What would really make more of a difference here is stability and consistency that holds up even when life is messy. And that is not lowering the bar, and it’s definitely not being lazy. That’s being strategic. Because until your eating is stable, meaning it works on your worst days and not just your best ones, optimization just becomes another thing you’re trying to manage, control, and execute with perfection. And that gets exhausting really fast.

If nutrition feels harder than you think it should, or if you feel like you are constantly starting over, or if you keep telling yourself, I know what to do, I just need to do it. There’s a good chance that the issue isn’t that you need more information, a different eating window, or a better macro split. The issue is more likely that you skipped over the basics that actually create stability. And those basics are things like eating enough food, especially earlier in your day, prioritizing protein, and keeping your meals simple and repeatable. And I’m highlighting these not because they’re exciting or impressive. I’m highlighting them because they work in a real, busy human life.

When your eating is stable, consistency stops feeling like something you have to fight so hard for. And once that consistency is there as a foundation, then optimization has a firm base to sit on. So if this month has you feeling like it’s time to clean it up, I want to offer you a different approach. Instead of tightening things up, focus on steadying them with simple habits that you can do over and over again. Build habits that work on your worst days, not just the days when everything goes right. Because when your eating holds up there, everything else starts to feel easier. All right?

And if you want help figuring out exactly what stability looks like for you, not in theory, but in your real life, that is exactly what we do in coaching. Check out my website, head to www.CarrieHollandMD.com/contact and let’s talk about how to make your habits feel simpler, steadier, and sustainable, no matter what kind of day you’re having. All right? Thank you again for hanging out with me and I’ll catch you again next week.

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You’ll also find strength training tips to help you train smarter and see real results. My goal is to help you get strong and this strength-training guide will help you do it. Go to CarrieHollandMD.com/build strength and check it out.

Thank you for listening to the Strong Is a Mindset podcast. If you want to learn more about how to build both a strong mind and a strong body by eating, moving, and most importantly, thinking, check out CarrieHollandMD.com.