Diet Planning & Supplements – Reasons to take (or not take) supplements
As promised in Part 1 of Do I need Supplements? Here are few reasons for and against the use of Supplements in your diet planning.
Reasons for:
- If you are an individual that wishes to truly excel with body composition results, then you will probably need them. At this stage, a lot of nutrients need to be in-taken throughout the day to support your training and through diet alone, this is very difficult.
- If you are a regularly competitive athlete, you will benefit from the right supplement use. If significant muscle mass is beneficial to performance like in rugby, american football, weightlifting and more. Then consuming whey protein, casein, BCAA’s and creatine are likely to be handy additions as a start. Dependant on their quality.
- If you are a particularly picky eater and won’t eat your greens then good quality vitamin and mineral supplements may be your only option. But this should be considered your very last resort! Try to get to like them first, if you can’t do that, try blending them in with things you do like and if still no luck, ask a dietitian or fitness pro that can provide an unbiased view for you on which supplements to pick.
- If you need extra money and want a piece of the supplement pie, have some pre-existing muscle gains or have a noticeable body transformation, then find a brand you can become a distributor or an affiliate of and be seen using it and claim your successes were all down to that! There will be many people that will buy into that. Sometimes there are in fact some decent brands out there that will genuinely produce results. They are largely outnumbered by those that are essentially a tub of lies though!
Reasons against:
Not considering yourself to be or wanting to be an athlete or the next mr or mrs olympia.
- Health conditions that may be adversely affected by the use of certain supplements. I am no specialist in this realm however if you do have long standing conditions that need a degree of management then before you go buying any supplement, it’s likely to be a prudent decision to check with a doctor or diet and/or exercise specialist first.
- Many supplements will never match the nutritional profile of actual food. If you could obtain the amount of nutrients you need from real food, then do so.
- For those that do not truly need supplementation, it’s an unnecessary expense.
- There are many snakey salespeople out there simply looking to make a fast buck from the blissfully ignorant. Do your homework before committing to buying into any supplement.
- You are content with yourself in terms of body composition and are able manage what you have with real food.
In the third segment to the topic of Supplements, I will outline what you want to look for in good supplements and what you want to watch out for in potentially bad supplements. To get started in looking for good supplements, a couple of resources I would recommend would be; naturalfoodfinder.co.uk, evolution organics and genetic supplements.