Mar 5, 2015 5 min read

We are a month closer to warm weather, vacations, and (my personal favorite) baseball season. March brings with it plenty to look forward to.

March brings with it a food celebration worth noting. I mentioned it one of my columns last month just so that everyone is completely ready to celebrate March being National Nutrition Month.

I’m not a nutritionist; however, I do take a keen personal interest in nutrition. While I was cooking in a professional kitchen I gained a lot of weight. Go figure, right? Anyway, I generally felt tired and agitated and was just not in a good place most of the time.

I started doing research and talking to doctors and nutrition experts and learned that nutrition really is that important. Food is the most powerful drug that we put into our bodies, and the type of food that we consistently put into ourselves has a profound effect on every aspect of our lives.

Nutrition is a touchy subject in the food world. Topics like politics and religion generally make great topics for talk radio because the differing opinions can cause tempers to flare and because people have such strong opinions about them.

I’ve hosted a food/cooking themed talk radio program for the past three years and food is generally a much tamer subject. For the most part, the show is a lot of fun and listeners like to call in and talk about nostalgic foods or foods that really enjoy to cook and/or eat.

If there is one topic on my show that does cause a bit of a stir, it’s nutrition. Everyone has their own ideas of what is and isn’t good for you and they feel very passionate about those ideas.

I try to do all that I can to stay at the forefront of what is going on in the world of food and nutrition so that I can put the best possible fuel into my body.

It pains me as a chef to admit it, but our food supply is so nutritionally bankrupt that we can no longer eat ourselves to good health. You can eat all the kale you can find and it still won’t be enough nutrition for your body to function at its highest level.

If you’re looking for proof, just taste a generic carrot from the supermarket and then taste a locally grown carrot from a local farm. Nutritionally, organic foods are no different than nonorganic foods; however, locally grown foods that are grown on land that is less over farmed and not sprayed with harmful herbicides and pesticides do taste very different in a good way because they are different in a good way.

I eat organic as much as possible because it provides an added layer of protection against some potentially harmful practices. However, eating organic isn’t the entire solution if you are looking for optimum health and wellness.

When I began eating cleaner foods, taking supplements to make up for the vitamin and mineral deficiency in foods, and utilizing intermittent fasting, I not only lost the extra weight I gained, but I also felt like a new person. My energy went through the roof, which led to me actually feeling like exercising again. I got back to the gym, which led to a whole new set of health benefits.

The point here is that the nutrition came first. The proper nutrition made exercising fun instead of something I dreaded looking forward to. Eat less and exercise isn’t in my opinion sound advice. In my personal experience it was increase my nutritional intake while eating cleaner foods and then exercise when my body was properly fueled.

Health and wellness has no one size fits all solution and just because you aren’t overweight doesn’t mean you are necessarily healthy. If you aren’t getting the proper nutrition for your body to function at its highest level you aren’t at the peak of wellness regardless of what your scale says.

How you lose weight matters. Simply reducing your caloric intake isn’t the answer. If we are already nutritionally deficient then reducing the amount of calories we consume will only make us even more nutritionally deficient.

This will then lead to putting your body into starvation mode where it will actually store fat, have a more difficult time releasing impurities, and worsen your health or chances for wellness.

My advice is to do the research. Find the best supplements you can to incorporate into your lifestyle. The answer is to increase your nutrition intake while keeping your caloric intake as low as possible. Supplementing helped me to achieve this goal.

Learn how to incorporate more nutrition into your diet in fun and delicious ways. Make it something that you can’t live without so that you won’t have to worry about living without it or regressing back into old habits.

Mario Porreca of Belle Vernon is an entrepreneur, author, lifestyle solutions expert, and the host of Just Cook It Radio. He can be reached at: www.MarioPorreca.com. Twitter: @MarioPorreca