The night before Ronaldo’s first game back he sat down for dinner with his teammates and backroom staff.   With many players excited about his return they decided to copy his actions and followed him in not having a pudding. 

Why did so many players copy his actions? And why does this link back to every diet you have tried before?
Was it because the players wanted to show a dedication to the same cause of winning or maybe it’s because those washboard abs are seen as a sign of fitness and success.

In football teams, there are a wide variety of sized individuals playing different positions requiring different energy demands suggesting that the diet of each player should vary.  Which also happens to be the same for Joe Public. 

The energy needs of an individual come down to a few factors:

• The larger you are the more calories you will require 
• The more you move the more calories you will require

So if we link this back to football, a centre midfielder will typically burn more calories than a goalkeeper and in life, an office worker will burn fewer calories than a builder.

So in this circumstance were the players right in copying Ronaldo?  Well as a nutritionist I would be fuming at this point, as I would be witnessing key individuals who are potentially going to be negatively affecting their performance the next day due to being under-fuelled.  The needs of Ronaldo are completely different from the next guy.  

…and this is worth remembering.  A successful diet plan is one that works for you not only in the short term but also in the long term.  So when the next person posts up on Instagram what they had to eat that day, it is worth noting that we do not know the bigger picture.  We do not know how much they move, we don’t know how much they ate the day before and we don’t know their goal.

A diet works when we start to understand an individual’s lifestyle.  No one meal is going to have a negative effect on your results but copying someone looking for the same success is unlikely to happen.  
Here we build our nutritional programmes to be specific to the individual, whether that is weight loss, performance or health.  More importantly, we coach and educate our clients to not copy the next person, we teach them the nutritional fundamentals so that they can make their own informed decisions to stay in line with their goals.

Don’t look to copy the next guy in search of the same results, I guarantee it won’t happen, but instead look at the key principles behind why they choose to do what they do to see if it aligns with how you want to go about your day to day living.