Firefighter Nutrition: Keys to Effective Weight Loss

The data from NFPA and other research-based agencies is unargued: Cardiac disease and cancer are the battles that firefighters are facing—and we are losing. The general population is fighting a similar battle with cardiac disease, and according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 80 percent of the deaths in this country are preventable. How? What are we doing wrong? How are we losing this fight? Are firefighters losing the same fight? The answers have some common themes but need to be addressed differently.

Some will have you believe that just doing more—more movement, more calls, more training, more exercise—is the answer, and while that is indeed a part of the solution, it is not the whole answer. What you put in your body as fuel has a much more profound impact on it than what you are doing with your body. You cannot outwork improper intake. Food is fuel and we must understand that to understand how to eat what you want and need. That does not mean you cannot eat what you enjoy or need to live on some quick-fix diet plan that you cannot sustain to see the scale drop. In fact, both of those options do not normally lead to long-term success. 

Maintaining a healthy weight and an active lifestyle is the best way to decrease the risk of both cardiac disease and cancer risk. Many firefighters on the job have started or have looked at ways to stay healthy by maintaining a healthy weight, and for some that means losing weight. Having worked with many people, including tactical athletes who are well over 400 pounds, I can attest to some simple steps that need to be taken to ensure success. 

Determine your motivation

First, understand why you want to lose weight. What reason do you have for wanting to make this change? Because your doctor told you too? Because someone made a comment that made you think about it? Most people who make this sort of change to please someone else or because they want to change the way others think or look at them are ultimately not successful. That will simply not be enough motivation to make it through the struggle of planning meals, the time commitment or the clean shopping. There must be an internal motivator—a personal reason that this goal is important to your overall life, not just the way you look or how others see you, as those are side effects to the overall success.

People have different views on how firefighters look; we even make jokes about it. But there is no debating that when our customers call for our help, they expect high-performing athletes who can physically and mentally solve problems and risk themselves in dangerous situations. Can what you eat affect this ability? It absolutely can.

Small changes and simple actions

After understanding the why of weight loss, then look at how to make it happen. Approaching this is best done by looking at what you are currently doing. Small sustainable changes will help you feel accomplished and make it something you just do versus something you have changed or don't do. Yes, there are those rare people who are highly intrinsically motivated to just make many dramatic life changes stick, but people normally change too much too fast and do not feel like they can sustain it.

Small changes can help with non-scale victories like feeling good about something that is healthy other than just having the scale drop. For example, challenge yourself to drink more water. A good start is to aim for half an ounce to a full ounce per pound of body weight of water every day for the next 2 weeks. This can have a lot of positive effects, the big one being our brain receives signals from our body on a constant basis and the one for thirst and hunger is almost identical. This means that many of the times you think you are hungry, you may just be thirsty. This can help with cravings and portion sizes. Staying hydrated also helps promote cardiac health and helps your muscles and joints work better.

As important as it is to stay hydrated, that cannot be the only change you make if weight loss is the goal. When it comes to intake, there are so many ways that work for specific body types and lifestyles, but there are some good tips and information that can help with most of them:

·      Remove processed sugar from your intake. This will help your blood sugar levels balance, assist in weight loss, decrease fat storage, decrease empty calorie intake.

·       Eat clean foods, foods that are not heavily processed, such as fruits, vegetables, grains, oats, animal meats, etc.

·       Stop eating 2 to 3 hours before sleep. Sometimes this can be hard for those who do not sleep much due to high call volume. For those individuals, it can be more about what type of food you are eating versus when you are eating it. If it is the middle of the night and you’re coming back from a run, avoid large amounts of carbohydrates and try to keep your intake focused on clean protein sources or a quick small snack that is not heavy in carbs.

·       Substitute whole wheat and whole grain options for white. For example, with breads, pasta and rice, the brown stuff is better for weight loss than the white stuff.

·       Make more than you need and save some for later.

Meal prep

To this last tip, most who are attempting weight loss are familiar with the term “meal prep,” which is basically making food in bulk to be eaten later. People who can master this skill normally see good results in weight loss. 

When you are making meals that are geared toward weight loss, make enough that you can eat it for another one, two or three meals at another time. After all, time is one of the biggest obstacles in weight loss—not enough time to go to the store, not enough time to make healthy meals, not enough time to stick with it. So, to not waste time, most of the meals you eat should be thought out, planned and prepared ahead of time. 

This tends to be the hardest thing for people to focus on but also by far the most effective in losing weight. This is a spot where you just need to invest the time to make the meals ahead of time to guarantee yourself a clean meal. Then, stick with it. This is not something that see’s dramatic change in a week or two or 21 days. This will take time and effort, but like most things in life, you will get out of it what you put into it.

Let's be blunt: Quick fixes do not work. No diet pill on the market will make you lose weight without changing your nutrition as well. Fad diets and diet plans may take some pounds off, but if they are not healthy sustainable plans for long-term success, they will fail as well. Stop looking for the easy way out, there is nothing that will give you the success you are looking for outside of the hard work of eating right (most of the time) and staying active (all the time). This is what is going to add quality years on to what you can do on the job and years on to your life after you retire, period. So, you need to know that it is worth it, and you are worth the effort it will take. 

Professional guidance

When it comes to what to eat and when to eat it, that differs from person to person when weight loss is the goal. I recommend getting some professional support, such as a nutritionist, health coach, personal trainer or someone who can help you make the right choices for you, read the metrics and understand your results. Why? Because not all weight is created equal. When weight loss is the goal, it is very important that you are tracking fat loss, not just weight loss. This is where nutrition can play a bigger role than exercise.

Body fat, specifically visceral and subcutaneous belly fat, is most detrimental to our health. If you are losing large amounts of fat free mass, your body is going through a process of losing weight other than fat, as it feels it is starving so the scale may drop, but you will notice you do not feel well, and the weight will fight to come back on.

A tool like a body fat caliper or an electronic body fat measure is a good way to track the type of weight you are losing. If you take your bodyweight and multiply it by your bodyfat percentage as a decimal, you will get approximately how many pounds of fat are in your body currently. Take that number and subtract it from your total body weight and you will have an approximate amount of fat free mass. These figures are not exact, but this is an effective way to measure results beyond the scale.

The amount of body fat you should carry differs among gender and age. For example, the American College of Sports Medicine suggest that males between the age of 30 to 39 maintain a body fat percentage below 20.4 percent and women in the same age range below 24.8 percent.

Support systems

Beyond the professional guidance, other support systems, like family and coworkers, are crucial to success. Let your coworkers know that you are working on bettering yourself, not only for the job but also for the people who sit next to you on the truck. Let them know how they can help, and share your plan so they can help keep you accountable. Chances are they are going to be willing to support you however they can. As firefighters, we tend to stay away from having the weight loss conversation because of the fear of people feeling attacked personally. But this is not personal; this is professional. The demands of the job are the demands of the job, the data is the data. We need to care enough about our job and the people who do it to have that tough conversation. It’s no different than any other part of the job. If you had a firefighter who could not properly use a saw or advance a hoseline, we would work with them until they were able to do it. 

We love the word “brotherhood,” but if we really mean it, these are the conversations that must happen, as this is what is killing firefighters. We’re not talking about conversations that attack people but rather conversations that let the person understand that you care, and you are willing to help. 

What does that look like? As a shift, have a performance mindset, both with trainings that you are doing and the fuel you are putting into your body. Shop and eat how you want your body to perform on a major incident. When making meals together, make them out of real ingredients and make health-conscious decisions. Have educated speakers and presenters come in and present plans and trainings that you can implement at your department. Empower your health and safety committee to make decisions based on an overall goal for the entire department. Send health-passionate firefighters to seminars, train-the-trainers and conferences to bring ideas back that could work for your department, and then have an open mind about it instead of shutting it down because it is different from what you have done in the past.

Fight the fight

We must stop treating our apparatus better than our firefighters. We strive so hard to perform constant maintenance checks and cleaning, and put proper fuel and funds into our apparatus, but the people who ride in the apparatus are far more useful and important to our overall goal. This is going to be a tough battle, but it is worth it, our people are worth it, and adding quality years onto someone’s life with those they love is worth whatever it takes. Fight the fight and know you have people behind you.