To make the most of your dietary supplements, you need to pair them with a nutritious diet that fuels you for exercise and everyday activities alike.
While breakfast, lunch, and dinner occupy the majority of your daily food intake, research suggests that 25% of the calories in the average person’s diet come from snacking.
To make sure these calories support your nutritional goals, physical and mental performance, and supplementation, read on for Ultimate Nutrition tips on building supplement snacks:
Identify Gaps in Your Nutrition
Harmonizing your supplements with delicious, easy-to-make snacks can be a great way to account for nutritional deficiencies in your diet.
The best way to start this process is to thoroughly analyze your dietary needs and the supplements you currently take to address them, searching for missing links between the two.
While the CDC finds that ~57% of Americans regularly take dietary or gym supplements, the organization also estimates that 10% of us still struggle with nutrition deficiencies, which “vary by age, gender, or race/ethnicity and could be as high as nearly one-third of certain population groups.”
Some of the most common essential nutrient deficiencies among the general American population include:
In addition to studying your supplement use, talking to your doctor can also be an excellent way to discover and explore solutions to nutritional shortcomings in your diet.
If you regularly experience unpleasant physical symptoms of nutrient deficiency – such as hair loss, slow-healing wounds, night vision loss, or irregular heartbeat – blood tests may be necessary to identify the vitamins and minerals lacking in your food intake.
Evaluate Your Physical Goals
Deciding how you want your body to look, feel, and perform is essential to delicious, nutritious snacking:
Weight Loss
Similar to evaluating the best supplements to take, it is crucial to consider your physical goals when deciding which snacks will work best for you.
If you want to lose weight, you should focus on healthy snacks that help you manage hunger and feel fuller between meals without sacrificing nutrition.
Snacks of this kind will be loaded with a mix of filling nutrients, like protein, fiber, and healthy fats, which provide numerous essential benefits to your body and fight junk food cravings.
Some of our favorite examples include:
These snacks pair very well with some of the Ultimate Nutrition Weight Loss and Energy supplements, like L-carnitine, Yohimbe Bark Extract, and Conjugated Linoleic Acid (CLA).
Weight Gain
Though a less common problem in the US, putting on weight can be as challenging and frustrating for some people as weight loss is for others.
Healthy weight gain requires emphasizing nutritious, calorie-dense snacks and ignoring the easy, harmful calories abundant in junk foods.
Some of our favorite examples include:
These snacks pair marvelously with Ultimate Nutrition Weight Gain supplements, like Isomass Extreme Gainer, Muscle Juice Revolution 2600, Muscle Juice 2544, and Pure Muscle Carbs.
Important Note: Difficulty gaining weight is especially prevalent among sufferers of specific medical conditions, like type 1 diabetes, hyperthyroidism, chronic stress/anxiety/depression, immune system deficiencies, and celiac disease. If you battle one of these conditions, always make sure to talk with your doctor before making any significant changes to your diet.
Develop a Meal Plan
Once you better understand your nutritional deficiencies and identify your physical goals, building a meal plan that proactively incorporates your healthy supplement snacks is a great idea.
The ultimate catch-22 of snacking is that it is very easy to do. It is refreshingly simple to plan ahead and pack nutritious supplement snacks before you head off for work, the gym, time with friends, etc. However, this also means snacks are easily forgotten and even easier to buy in unhealthy styles/quantities at innumerable stores.
To fight the latter, we recommend pre-planning your snacks as a regular, enjoyable part of your everyday routine.
Each week, take 15-30 minutes to prepare a list of your desired meals for the week and the snacks you would like to try between them. Be specific about the essential ingredients and the time you need to prepare each meal/snack, leaving some room for experimentation/alteration. After all, life doesn’t always go according to plan.
The more proactive you are with your snacking, the simpler it is to discover and enjoy new foods that fuel your body, harmonize with your supplementation, and support your physical, mental, and emotional health.
Once you establish a routine, you’ll be amazed at how fun and satisfying it can be to graze on snacks that nourish your body AND taste delicious.
Try Ultimate Nutrition Supplements
Ultimate Nutrition offers a diverse range of high-quality supplements that address nutritional deficiencies regardless of your diet, physical goals, or exercise style.
From our renowned pre-workout supplement, Pre Gold, to our world-famous Ultimate Nutrition ProStar® Whey, one of the best-selling and most recognized whey protein powders in the world, our in-house manufactured products can bring the best out of you.
What UN supplements should you take? As this article emphasizes, that’s up to you!
We divide our extensive range of high-quality options into distinct categories – like All Natural, General Health & Wellness, Performance & Recovery, Protein Supplements, Weight Gainers, and Weight Loss & Energy – to help you easily identify the best supplement(s) for your specific needs.
For more information on improving your nutrition and building a healthy, active lifestyle of high performance, also check out other posts from our Ultimate Nutrition blog.