Wow. This Nutrition Manifesto might be one of the most important articles I ever write for you.

Time for some tough love. It’s tough because it’s true, but it’s still love because I care so much about helping you overcome the obstacles in the way.

First, a damaging admission...I like chocolate. I also like eating snack food for meals (like almonds and cashews…mixed with chocolate).

While, technically, these food choices are still healthy (the nuts are packed with fiber, healthy fats, and a decent amount of protein), I rely on these foods too much. Those and protein bars. Time for me to man-up and get serious about my nutrition – just like you are.

So how do you eat better?

What’s the #1 change you could make to your nutrition to get better results?

The answer is so plain and simple, but not anything we want to hear. Why? Because we want a magical answer that will allow us to eat whatever we want and still get fitness cover model results. But it doesn’t work that way.

So here’s the deal. The #1 secret to eating better is…

By keeping things out of the house.

I know that’s not the answer you want, but it is the answer that will change your life. We need to pull together, to stay strong, to lean on each other for social support, and to make the right decisions at the store to make all other decisions much easier.

But I know, we’re human. (At least I am!) And we all too often let the junk start to creep back into our lives. (Although I blame my dog. I don’t know how it’s his fault, but it is! He always looks guilty of something.)

My mistakes are clear. I’ll go a month on a perfect diet, and then I’ll end up unnecessarily ordering boxes of Quest protein bars. While these bars are “okay” (gluten-free protein bars, and better than 99% of other protein bars), they simply aren’t REAL food. And that’s what I – and we – should eat.
So I’ve resolved to stop that.

I’m also going to cut back on my other vices – macadamia nuts and chocolate covered almonds. I don’t need to buy huge bags of macadamias – that only leads to five handfuls over the course of the day. And I don’t need to treat myself to chocolate covered almonds more than once a month.

I’m going to follow my own advice. And if I can do it, so can you.

Whatever your nutritional vice, let’s make a pact to make April our best month of Real Food Nutrition in years.
Shall we?

Let me know if you’re in by posting an “I’m in for Real Food April” on my Facebook page here: www.TurbulenceTrainingFanpage.com But it’s one thing to be better at the grocery store…but what in REAL LIFE?

Well, this weekend I’ve been down at Joel Marion’s in Tampa, Florida, to celebrate his birthday and the Easter weekend. Dinner each night has been fantastic. His Father-In-Law Frank is a great cook, and has been making us meals like steak, salad, broccoli and sweet potatoes.

Unfortunately, Joel has been researching dark chocolate…and has over a dozen different bars sitting in the kitchen. Plus, there was Easter chocolate sitting around for Saturday’s party and kid’s Easter Egg hunt…

Yes, I had some. But not a lot, because I knew I would be reporting back to you.

That’s the power of Accountability. It is one of the Four Pillars of Transformation Success, along with Social Support, Incentives, and a Deadline.

That is the second secret to eating better.

If you knew that you had to honestly report your daily diet to the rest of the world, would you eat that candy bar? That fried chicken? That extra piece of pizza? The extra value meal from McDonald’s? The pint of Haagen-Dazs?

97 times out of 100, the answer should be NO WAY.

That’s the power of Accountability. Remember that with every nutrition decision – and heck, important life decision – that you make.

Would you do ___ if the world was watching?  Use those two secrets to eat better.
But wait, there’s more…

Let’s say that even then, despite knowing you have to be accountable to the world that you are still struggling to stop overeating or simply eating some junk food.

Here are three more secrets to eating better:

1) Have a trigger to end any overeating.

This could be as simple as brushing your teeth.

Maybe it means getting up from the table to go for a walk (this is really great to help reduce your blood sugar and the amount of fat in your bloodstream after a big meal).

Or perhaps instead of endless snacking and picking at treats in your house, you could eat an apple (better to have a bloated belly from a big apple than one from a giant bowl of ice cream).

These are all great options to help you overcome the night eating monster. Use these to stay strong, even if you zapped all of your willpower at work during the day.

2) Have a checklist of good foods you must eat before any junk food.

My daily nutrition checklist includes an apple, 1oz raw almonds, 1 cup broccoli, 1 cup Green tea at each meal, 2 cups spinach in a blender drink, 2 servings Athletic Greens, plus a minimum 12 hour space between dinner and first meal the next day.

With a checklist like this, it eliminates the number of bad choices you can make. In most cases, you’ll be too full from good food to eat much junk.

If you make this checklist a habit, it will make so many of your choices ‘automatic’, and it will be easier to avoid dietary disaster.

3) Drink Green Tea at each meal (including natural decaffeinated versions)

Research – and experience – suggests people stay full longer when they do have a cup of Green Tea with their meals. That’s a pretty darn simple way to make a massive improvement in your diet. There are so many health benefits to Green Tea already, and this just moves it to the top of your nutrition checklist.

These are all perfectly practical tips for eating better.

They really could change your life. They can pull you out of a rut and get you back on track. They could help you go from lean to ripped. They could help you reverse diabetes.

That’s the power of proper nutrition. Let me know if this helped you because it’s really, really important to me that the information we share here at Turbulence Training is reaching our readers.

We have tens of thousands of people that open and read my emails, however it must be the shy-est group of people in the world, because we don’t hear from you enough.

But when I do hear from you, it gives me more ideas on what to write about…like today’s great tips.

Drop me a note on FB here - www.TurbulenceTrainingFanpage.com

And the more useful information I can give you, the more lives we change…and selfishly, the closer I get to my mission of helping 10 MILLION men and women – just like you – change their lives for the better. Looking forward to your feedback.

Sorry I can’t give you a magic pill…or secret ingredient to fix all of your nutrition.

Instead, just a steady diet of tough love and truth.

But those always work so much better, don’t you think?

Let me know how it goes,

Craig Ballantyne

PS – I’ll be right here…

…working on my own nutrition alongside you.

Keep me up to date on your progress at:

www.TurbulenceTrainingFanpage.com

We can do this!

PPS – I’m overwhelmed…

I posted this on the ETR FB page and wanted to share with you…turns out I have a lot to say when I don’t know what to say…LOL!

***
I am overwhelmed with gratitude. Twice this week people contacted the ETR support team to say that our articles and contest contributed (albeit in a minor way) to their decision to get out of a bad situation and to not commit suicide.

I don’t even know what to say.

I never imagined that our content and contest would have such an impact.

I think the big lesson in this:

Live by Example.

Do great things. Show the world that there are indeed POSITIVE people out there…that you care…that SOMEONE cares…that there is hope…that if you persist and never give up on what is important to you, that you CAN make progress…that there will be better days…that after the darkness there comes a dawn.

If you do all of this, and open your heart and care for others and even support perfect strangers, your world will open up to enormous opportunity and gratitude.

You can’t change all that is wrong in this great big world, but YOU can have an impact, even if it is just a tiny, positive impact on a stranger that receives a smile from you on the street today.

There’s so much we can do for others, and in the end, what we do for others ends up benefiting us 10-fold.

So let’s do this.

Let’s make our little worlds a little more amazing today.

Who knows what impact you might have!

Imagine the possibilities, for they are enormous!

Have an awesome day. – Craig

At the beginning of this interview series, I introduced Martin Rooney to you. The man with SUPER HIGH ENERGY and super busy. To find out his secret, I would recommend jumping back to part 6 of this expert interview series.

Click here to listen to the call.

******************

Craig:    Let’s talk nutrition. You said there can’t be any junk in the house. That’s like saying eat clean because the definition of junk and eat clean these days, there are so many different nutrition styles. What is the nutrition program that goes with Warrior Cardio?

Martin: In the book, and it’s pretty interesting you say that. Where John Barardi and I got together and this is a guy who not only do I trust with my nutrition, but I believe he’s probably forgotten more about nutrition that I’ll ever know.

We got together and I came up with this really interesting idea. We were up in Montreal, we saw each other and I said, “John, I have an idea.”

He said, “What is it?”

I said, “You know what? When I work with my highest level athletes, I notice that they only have about 20 things in their refrigerator and their cupboards. It’s pretty barren, and there are about 20 things.”

He said, “Okay, what’s your point?”

I said, “Well, my next level athlete that’s not so good, a little less high level, that guy has about 40 things.”

He said, “Okay, what’s your point?”

I said, “Well then, the next person who’s just a weekend warrior, they have about 80 things. Some of them are healthy, some of them really aren’t so healthy. Then the regular Joe, the regular person, they have about 150 things in their cupboards and none of them are good for them.”

I said, “John, the point is what’s the 20, man? What is the 20? Couldn’t we make it any easier for people where we say, ‘Here’s the 20 things. Make the list and go and buy the list. When you run out, go and buy more.’”

We battled back and forth for months to create this list and we called it the Warrior 20. It’s featured in Warrior Cardio and so many people have written in and they’re following this thing and it’s changing their life. If you really think about it, most people’s cupboards are filled with cereals and canned goods and cookies and chips and junk. The fridge has ice cream.

It’s just a bunch of crap, and then you open their produce drawer and there’s nothing. Where are the lean meats? There are none. Where are the good whole grains? None. You just realize people are buying stuff that on a box says it’s good, but it’s all junk. That’s what they eat all day long.

We’ve created a list, everybody can check it out at Warrior Cardio if they want. I don’t think it could be any simpler, and the cool part is everything on that list everybody is going to say, “Yeah, I know I should be eating it. I just don’t do it.” The challenge becomes can people do that?

Craig:    Absolutely. What about in the Rooney house. Is there stuff for the kids? How does Mr. Rooney avoid that?

Martin: I’ll definitely say, when you’re raising girls, I don’t know what has happened but there is this kind of unwritten girl rule that every girl needs a tiny little scoop of ice cream every night before they go to bed or they turn into vampires or something. I don’t know what it is, but I will say that with the kids, people will probably laugh but I’m making protein pancakes in the morning and we have real maple syrup that’s done on a farm that this buddy of mine gets me. We eat organic eggs, so the kids eat relatively healthy.

At school I’m not exactly sure what they’re getting because sometimes they like to buy their lunch, but the school has made an effort to be a lot more healthy, too.

At dinners, we cook healthy meals where it’s kind of like there’s always going to be some form of lean meat and vegetable and they have to eat it or they’re not doing their thing. I will say too, the kids are going to have their chips and they’re going to have their cereal and they’re going to eat a little bit of their ice cream or something. The way I look at is I never want to scare them away from food or scare them to death.

If anybody has seen my kids, my kids are really lean. If people go to the YouTube site, you’re going to see my nine year old banging out 15 chin-ups. She was a two time all American in track and field last year.

I feel not only am I doing it from my own standpoint, but I feel like I’m doing a pretty good job as a parent as well, whereas I’ve definitely seen that the fastest growing demographic of obesity is with kids. There’s no fear of that in my house, yet my kids understand food and they’re able to control themselves and they know what is good or bad. If I can get them to do the right thing, they’re the ones who are most important to me.

Craig:        That’s really awesome. How old did you say your oldest daughter is?
Martin: She’s 10 now, but the video that we have of where she bangs out 15 chins when she was nine. She’s done some pretty amazing stuff. She was a two time all American last year in track and field. We get almost more requests for her to do more videos than me. She’s stealing the show.

Craig:    That is a tough, tough job to steal the show from you, good sir.

We have covered pretty much the gauntlet of everything here. The training, the warm up, the recovery, the nutrition, and the high energy, of course. Is there any other message that you want to tell people about right now or say that you’re going to cover in more detail when we meet up onstage in June in San Diego?

Martin: I think not only did we cover a lot of stuff, I think there’s a tremendous amount of value in this call for a lot of people. I hope everybody shares it and got something from the info.

Maybe the last thing I’ll leave everybody with, that’s going to be the piece we started with again about the energy. What I always challenge everybody is when you were going to school you were probably in school. You went to class, you did your stuff, you did your thing, but you just weren’t passionate about it. You weren’t into school.

You probably weren’t asking the questions after class, you weren’t doing all your homework on time, you weren’t studying like mad. As a result, you didn’t get probably straight As.

My challenge to everybody, and hopefully we see everybody out there in San Diego. My challenge is you can’t be in fitness. If you’re going to be in fitness, we don’t need you because there’s a war going on and we have to get people healthier. The way we’re going to do that is we need people into fitness. We need people on fire.

What I’m going to show everybody in June is that it is as easy to be on fire and it’s actually more energizing than it is to be just laid back or lame or giving up on people.

Maybe this is the way to end the call. That question for yourself, and this is something you have to look in the mirror and ask, in this industry are you in it or are you into it? If you’re not into it, you have to start acting like you are. If you really aren’t and it’s not going to work, then you need to find the industry that you need to be in.

Right now we need more people into it, and that’s exactly what I’m going to be firing people up about when we hit San Diego in June.

Craig:    Man, that is fantastic. You have me fired up. I know I’m going to be there. I know a lot of excited people are going to be there. We’re really going to get our butts kicked when we do some boot camp workouts outside.

Mr. Rooney, thank you very much. That is really fantastic. Again, where can people find more information? What website should they go to?

Martin: If you like what you heard, check out my blog and a ton of the free information on TrainingForWarriors.com. We’re always doing new posts and everything else on the Training for Warriors Facebook page. We have over 10,000 people on there right now, too.

I’m always tweeting out on MartinRooney1 on Twitter, and hit me up. Tell me what everybody thought about this call and if it fired you up. Hopefully I can continue to do that moving forward.

That’s fantastic. Everybody again, Martin will be our main speaker at our third Turbulence Training summit ever in June. He’ll be there on the 22nd, the Saturday, in San Diego and it’s going to be fantastic.

Thanks again, Martin, for being on the call. Thank you for listening.

We’ll talk to you soon, everybody,

Craig Ballantyne, CTT
Certified Turbulence Trainer

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