APEX PWR | Nutrition Nook
Ask most people what derailed their last stretch of progress and you will rarely hear "the workouts." You hear about the trip. The wedding. The four days at the in-laws. The stretch between Thanksgiving and New Year where the gym was the easy part and the kitchen was the problem.
The standard advice for those weeks is some version of be mindful, fill half your plate with vegetables, and do not go hungry to the party. It is not wrong. It is also useless at 8pm on the fourth night of a vacation when the table has already ordered and you are three drinks into a conversation you are enjoying.
Here is what the alternative looks like, taken from a plan one of our one to one clients received before a week away. We have his permission to share the structure. His name, his family and the property are all staying out of it.
Eight restaurants. Breakfast, lunch and dinner options at each one. Every entry written as an order he could place out loud, with the modification attached and the macros already run.
A representative entry, verbatim from the plan:
Grilled Pacific Catch plus Tortilla Bean Soup. Grilled Pacific catch with the cauliflower rice and roasted broccoli, romesco on the side and use 1 spoon. Start with a cup of the tortilla bean soup, no tortilla strips or cheese on top.
Protein 48 | Carbs 35 | Fat 21 | Fiber 11 | 521 calories
That is not a tip. That is a sentence he can say to a server without thinking about it, and a number he can enter into his tracker in four seconds.
Multiply that by roughly forty plates across eight venues, add a separate section pricing out every drink he might have, and you have the week handled before the plane lands.
Make the decisions in Tigard, where it is easy. Not in Cabo, where it is not.
The restaurant list is specific to one trip. The thinking behind it travels anywhere, including to a Thanksgiving table in Beaverton.
Open the plan and the same instructions repeat in different clothing, which is the point. They are already habits, and the document just applies them to unfamiliar menus.
Notice what is absent. Nothing is forbidden. Tacos are a yes. Fajita night is a yes. Steak night is a yes. The plan bends the plate rather than banning it.
Several dinners in that document land between 600 and 750 calories. The note beside them says that is normal for a dinner out and it is fine, and that the way to handle it is to build the rest of the day a little lighter around the meal you already know is coming.
That is different from skipping meals to bank calories, which mostly guarantees you arrive starving and eat past the plan. Lighter means a protein-forward breakfast and a moderate lunch, with a protein snack in the afternoon if dinner is running late.
At each dinner the client picks one extra: an appetizer, a drink, or a dessert. One of the three, chosen on purpose.
This is the rule we would hand to anyone walking into the next eight weeks of holiday parties. It removes the all-or-nothing choice between having nothing and having everything, and it gives you something to decide on the way in rather than something to regret on the way out.
The plan tells him to set his drink number before the trip and write it in his notes app. Then it prices out every option so there is no guessing.
| Drink | Logged as | Calories |
|---|---|---|
| Tequila, 1.5 oz neat or on the rocks | 13 carbs, 6 fat | 106 |
| Glass of wine, 5 oz | 16 carbs, 7 fat | 127 |
| Beer, 12 oz | 19 carbs, 9 fat | 157 |
| Margarita, 8 oz | 32 carbs, 14 fat | 254 |
| Margarita, ordered skinny | About half the above | ~127 |
Alcohol is its own macronutrient at roughly 7 calories per gram, and almost no tracking app has a field for it. Splitting it as half carbohydrate and half fat is a working around that puts the calories in roughly the right place, and it means a drink gets logged instead of ignored. Water between each one.
Two margaritas a night for six nights is a little over 3,000 calories that most people would never enter into an app. That is the gap this closes.
Written into the document in exactly those words, for the night that goes bigger than planned. Because one will.
This is the single highest-value line in the whole plan and it has nothing to do with food. The difference between a trip that costs you a week and a trip that costs you a month is almost never the size of one dinner. It is whether the dinner becomes a reason to stop tracking entirely until you are home.
Most progress is not lost at the big meal. It is lost in the four days after it, when someone decides the week is already blown.
The last section of the plan tells him to keep water going all day, because sun and salt dry you out fast, and that is what makes the scale jump for a few days once he is home.
Heat, salt, alcohol and higher carbohydrate intake all shift fluid, and stored carbohydrate holds water alongside it. A few pounds on the first morning back is water, and it leaves on its own. The weekly average once you are settled is the number that means something.
One more detail worth stealing. Breakfast on this trip was handled at the house, the same plate every morning, built off a grocery run on day one.
That is a deliberate structural choice. Lock one meal a day that never changes and never requires a decision, and you have removed roughly a third of the week's chances to go off plan while spending zero willpower. Everything in the document is then aimed at the meals that actually vary.
The same move works at home during December. One repeatable breakfast, built around protein, and the holiday calendar suddenly has far fewer open questions in it.
A week of restaurant meals is a question about energy balance, and energy balance has more inputs than the plate.
We wrote this week about the movement portfolio and where your daily burn actually comes from. The short version: most of it is your resting metabolism plus all the incidental movement you do across a day, which is called NEAT. Formal training is a smaller slice than people assume.
That is relevant on vacation and at the holidays for a reason people usually miss. Travel often raises incidental movement, with walking the property, beaches, markets and stairs. Sitting at home through a long holiday weekend usually lowers it. The December problem for most people is a little more food paired with considerably less movement, and the movement side is the easier of the two to defend.
Keeping two strength sessions on the calendar through a holiday week, plus a daily walk, does more for the first week of January than any amount of restricting at the table.
We are going to be direct, since the point of this article is to show you the inside of the service.
Most people who hire a nutrition coach already know that grilled beats fried and that vegetables are good. Information is not the gap. The gap is the specific week, the specific menu, the specific situation where the general knowledge does not convert into an order.
One to one coaching with Jennie Carolan, MS, who holds a master's degree in Food Science and Nutrition, means the week you were dreading gets built for you in advance. Clients send her a menu or a photograph of a plate and get an answer. The plan adjusts around a trip, a race, a holiday, a work dinner, or a stretch of travel, rather than sitting there as a set of rules you quietly stop following.
Coaching runs remotely, so it works whether you train with us in Tigard or live somewhere else entirely.
Thanksgiving is three weeks out and the calendar after it fills quickly. One to one nutrition coaching with Jennie builds the plan around your actual life, including the weeks that usually undo it. In person in Tigard and Beaverton, or remotely from anywhere.
Work With Jennie 12-Week Nutrition ChallengeIf you would rather start with data than with a coach, a DEXA body composition scan tells you what you are made of, and a one-time macro count gives you targets to work from without an ongoing commitment. Plenty of people start there and add coaching once they know what they are aiming at.
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