Should I Take Nutritional Supplements?

This is another tricky question that personal trainers face a lot. When we’re designing customized training and nutritional plans for our clients, we can determine this on a case-by-case basis, but when giving general advice to you guys, online, it helps to break the “typical supplement user” down into a few key groups.

Read on and see which one (if any) you fall into.

If You Already Cook Often and Know How to Eat Very Well…

Then even if you’re working towards a specific goal in the gym — gaining a certain amount of weight in a bulking phase, or eating specific proportions of things during a cutting phase — supplements are far from obligatory. The whole point of supplements is exactly why they’re called that — they supplement things that you might not otherwise get in adequate proportions in your diet.

But if you know how to cook well, shop for the ingredients you need, get enough protein, vitamins, carbs, fat, nutrients, antioxidants, and everything else the human body needs to stay functioning — especially when it’s being worked out in a serious way — then you aren’t the kind of person who needs to stay up at night worrying about supplements. There still might be a case in which it’s useful for you to take them, but basically, you’re already the living type of person that the entire ‘supplement market’ looks to as a model.

If You’re Very Rational and Analytic and Like to Follow Specific Instructions…

Supplements might very well be right for you. If you aren’t attached to all the things you eat in a serious way, and find yourself able to, well, supplement parts of your diet with a uniform ingredient that isn’t found at the grocery store or farmer’s market, you could be a perfect candidate for nutritional supplements.

It’s far easier to track exactly how much protein and other nutrients your body is taking in when you have all the information that comes along with supplements, so if you’re trying to hit a specific goal and you’d much rather do it in a scientific way instead of a food-centric way, you’re the kind of person for whom supplements were designed.

If You Simply Don’t Like Cooking, Ever…

This is a tricky area — it might seem like supplements are perfect for you, especially if you don’t really care that much about food and would just like to eat a pill every meal and get it over with — yeah, supplements might seem great.

But you fall into a different segment of the market here — instead of just supplementing your normal diet with some additional protein or whey or whatever it is you’ve determined is necessary, you might be looking to replace entire meals with nutritional supplements.

Unfortunately, in order to provide the carbohydrates necessary to fill you up, and the substance to at least make your body think that it has eaten a full meal, these supplements are often full of extra things that you’d be better off without — sugars, corn starches, corn syrups, and all sorts of strange preservatives and chemicals that you normally find in over-processed foods.

The more of these things you eat, the more variables you’re introducing into your diet that you can no longer track, and the more you’re handing over your nutrition and diet to a list of ingredients that’s often unpronounceable and not really created with your overall dietary interests in mind. Supplements are great if you don’t feel like buying, cleaning, and cooking spinach and beans and all the other things constantly, but it’s very rare to find a supplement that can ever act as a meal replacement without serious compromises being made.

Finding Good Supplements

The other issue is that finding a quality supply of supplements that don’t contain a bunch of unnecessary junk (which ruins the whole point of tracking exactly what you’re eating in the first place) takes a lot of work. Sometimes it takes about as much work and money as a quick trip to the supermarket to cook up a huge batch of vegetables and grains for the week, keeping them in the fridge and enjoying great meals with all the nutrients you need.

If you don’t mind being diligent about the supplements you’re buying — great! But remember, if you’re the type that’s liable to find a “meal replacement” and fall for its (exaggerated) claims, keep in mind that ages-old proverb — there is no free lunch. You’ll almost always pay the price for taking a shortcut, whether it’s getting extremely bored of your supplements after a few months, or their ingredients throwing off how much sugar you’re taking in during the day, or leaving you feeling tired because they just don’t have the same great stuff that real food has — it could be anything!

So: supplements are unnecessary for the lucky few, pretty good for those who have the right approach, and downright undesireable for those of us who want to treat them like a “magic pill” to replace all our meals.

Talk to your trainer or do extensive research online before starting any supplement program, and read the ingredient labels!