How do you ensure that you are getting all you need?

Look across all of the nutrients and you will spot a trend. There is a lot of crossover in the foods which you will see nutrients pop up in:

  • Dark green leafy vegetables
  • Whole grains
  • Legumes
  • Nuts
  • Seeds
  • Red meat
  • Dairy
  • Organ meats
  • Eggs

Effectively, you will consume enough of everything so long as you are eating a well-balanced and highly varied diet. If you are concerned or just want to be sure, a great tool is chronometer.com which allows you to track micro as well as macronutrients. Using this every day is not necessary or recommended, as we mentioned, but adding in a typical 2-3 days of food to see where your numbers average out is a very good way to double check that there’s nothing glaring.

If you find that one of the nutrients is always low, this is where you can make deliberate dietary adjustments to suit.

Again, to re-address the point and drive this home – eating a diet which is calorie appropriate will ensure you achieve the weight loss/gain you desire, making sure your protein intake is adequate, fat intake is appropriate and carbohydrate intake is where it should be will also go a long way towards granting you the body composition you require (possibly alongside resistance training) and then by always being mindful of dietary balance, variety and colour (the colour of a food is a quick method of guessing it’s nutritional content in that two fruits/vegetables of different colours will offer at least some different nutrients) will go a very, very long way towards making you as healthy as possible and avoiding deficiency, either low level or clinical.