You are what you eat. Every piece of food you eat is used to rebuild new cells in your body. 2 million cells per second are being regenerated based off the foods and liquids you eat. Do you really want your cells and you to be made up of low quality processed foods?
Here are some tips on identifying processed foods: If you can’t pronounce ingredients on the label of a food item, don’t eat it as it’s probably chemical. If it wasn’t on this planet thousands of years ago, don’t eat it as it’s processed and manufactured. If it’s white don’t eat it as it has probably been bleached and processed (table salt, white sugar, flour).
Everything that goes into your body has an impact and changes the way your body looks, feels and reacts. Just avoiding processed foods alone for a month will have a huge impact on the way you look and feel.

Eat Breakfast. If you skip breakfast not only are you missing the first opportunity of the day to get your metabolism fired up, you are also setting your day up for low energy (will directly effect your performance), weight gain (fat) and cravings. Eat a balanced breakfast (protein, fat and carbs) and continue to eat small frequent meals about 3ish to 4ish hours apart throughout the day for optimal performance, energy and fat loss.

Stay Hydrated. Drink half your body weight in ounces each day to be properly hydrated. This simple trick will make a big difference with your strength, performance, body fat, skin complexion and energy. Interesting facts: The human body is made up of more than 60% water, your brain and muscles are 75% water, blood is 92% water and bones are around 22% water.

Get Your Sleep. According to specialists the optimal sleeping pattern needed to fully repair is getting to bed by 10 and rising no earlier than 6 a.m. If you want to lose weight and have the best energy throughout the day get your 8 hours! You don’t get bigger, leaner, stronger and faster in the gym. Those things happen outside of the gym during actual repair time. Less repair time, less progress.

Stress. You stress your body through exercise and it changes (if you’ve given it the right nutrients and repair time). That is a good type of stress. Putting your body through un-needed types of stress from bad nutrition, lifestyle habits and negative thoughts throws off the ratio of anabolic (build hormones) to catabolic (break down) hormones in your body. Those anabolic hormones are what keep you lean and strong. So remove as much negative stresses from your life as possible to see positive changes in your body.

Remember that you are unique. Don’t assume just because your friend or spouse can eat a specific way and feel good so can you. You will have to experiment with what feels best for you. If you eat a meal and shortly after you feel spaced out, shaky and your energy is crashing you probably didn’t eat enough protein at that meal, or the type of protein was too light for you. If you feel quite sluggish and heavy then you probably ate too much protein or the protein was too heavy of a type for you. An example would be salmon vs. halibut or Turkey leg vs. breast. Everything you put in your body will have a reaction, pay attention to your energy throughout the day and fine tune your diet accordingly.

Enjoy life. Follow this simple rule. If you live right 80% of the time, you can absorb the other 20%.
At least 80 percent of the time you should be focusing on eating whole foods such as animal proteins and or plant based proteins (hemp), nuts, fruits and veggies, with as little packaged, canned, processed and frozen foods as possible.
That is called the 80/20 rule my friend. Live by it and enjoy life…don’t stress about it.