Virtual health coach and personal trainer Azul Corahoria emphasizes the importance of nutrition and explains the different components of total daily energy expenditure (TDEE). She highlights that calories are units of energy and that our bodies need energy to function properly. She advises people to ensure they are eating enough and to focus on the quality of the food they consume. Azul also provides three easy ways to start eating healthier: balancing macronutrients (protein, carbs, and fat), being mindful while eating, and finding enjoyment in cooking at home. She encourages realistic and sustainable goals rather than setting unrealistic ones. Additionally, Azul cautions against labeling food as "good" or "bad" and emphasizes that health is not just about nutrition but also includes factors such as sleep, stress management, and movement. To find Azul, visit her Instagram (@azulcorahoria) and website (azulcorawellness.com).
Greetings everybody, today I have the pleasure of speaking to Azul Corahoria, who is a virtual health coach and personal trainer helping people to improve their relationship with food, fitness, and themselves. She teaches people how to move well, eat well, and live their healthiest lives with simple science-based workouts that build strength and confidence alongside easy and sustainable nutrition and lifestyle changes. No guilt tripping, no counting, and no dieting. Welcome to the show Azul. Hey Marcus, thanks for having me.
I'm honored to be here. Let's begin with why nutrition is so crucial. As a health coach, you guide your clients through all different kinds of healthy lifestyle changes. Why is nutrition such an important one, and why does it feel like the hardest? So the simple way of putting this is we would quite literally die if we didn't eat, and that's why it's important. But I want to dive a little deeper into explaining how the body works to show you exactly why it is so important to eat and to eat enough.
Our bodies run off of energy. Energy is what sustains us and allows our lungs to pump, our hearts to pump, allows you to walk from here to there. It all requires energy. And the sum of the energy that we expend is called TDEE, total daily energy expenditure. And there are four variants of energy expenditure in our day-to-day. We've got our BMR, which is our basal metabolic rate, our NEAT, which is our non-exercise activity thermogenesis, our TEF, which is the thermic effect of food, and our EAT, which is our exercise activity thermogenesis.
And I'll get into those in just a second. The reason I'm going to dive a little bit deeper into this is because right now in the nutrition space, everyone seems very afraid of calories. We've kind of demonized calories. Now people are just wanting to eat as little calories as possible. But it's important to learn about this aspect of calories because calorie is actually a unit of energy. Its direct translation is calorie unit of energy. And we need energy to survive.
We need energy to live. You can imagine the days that you wake up with no energy. You don't really want to do anything. You're not motivated. You don't want to work out. You don't want to do all these things, right? And the days that you wake up with a lot of energy, you do more. You play more. You move more. You get more work done, all this kind of stuff. So energy is actually really important. And since calories are energy, calories are really important.
So I'm going to go into the four different parts of our total daily expenditure just to give you a little bit more insight into why we need calories and how our bodies use calories which is why nutrition is important. So first off, we have BMR which is our basal metabolic rate. And this takes up about 70% of our total daily energy expenditure. And BMR is just the amount of calories you burn at rest every single day.
And people are generally really surprised to learn that they burn a lot of calories throughout the day without doing anything. That's what your brain needs to function, your heart, your lungs, what keeps your eyes blinking without you thinking about it. This is quite literally how many calories you burn laying down all day, not moving, eating or drinking, just solely keeping you alive. After that, we have MEAT, non-exercise activity thermogenesis which is all of the times you are moving that are not planned movement.
So getting out of bed, fidgeting, walking to the kitchen to have breakfast, walking from your car to the mall, all those kinds, typing with your fingers, that's all non-exercise activity thermogenesis. And that takes up about 15%. After that, at 10%, we have thermic effective food. So every time you're ingesting calories, your body is burning calories to digest the food, to absorb the foods into the nutrients, to go through your bowel system, all that kind of stuff.
So each macronutrient burns a certain amount of calories and that takes up about 10% of your total energy expenditure. Finally, and surprisingly to a lot of people, we have exercise activity thermogenesis. This is your planned exercise. So this is your weight lifting, your swim workout, your run workout, your hike, all of these exercises that are planned. And that comes in at just 5%. Without even talking about why quality is important and just focusing on quantity, let's say you're a male and you're in between the ages of 18 and 30.
Now if you're not active at all, your body is just by doing not much, your body is already burning at least 2500 calories, right? If you're an athlete, you're adding another 500 to 1000 calories perhaps. D1 athletes are generally eating between 3000 to 4500 calories a day. Olympic athletes much higher. Michael Phelps was known to be eating about 8000 to 10,000 calories a day. That's abnormal but it just shows you how much it is important to get enough food in.
Now quality is important because you want to make sure that you're getting enough of the right stuff in so that you feel your best. If you're eating ultra processed foods all the time, you're not getting enough protein or carbs, you're still going to feel pretty lethargic and low energy even though you might be eating enough. So it's a little bit of a balance of the two but I really don't think it has to be as complicated as we make it.
I think that a lot of the times it feels really hard because a lot of people are saying different things. There's this diet and that diet and I truly believe that just with like a little bit of education on the basics, it doesn't need to be that difficult. I also am a firm believer that you don't need to stop eating the things that you love and just start eating vegetables all the time. That also makes it very difficult.
I think a good balance is always key. Wow. I really didn't know all that and it's really beneficial to know. So what is your advice for people who want to start eating healthier, let's say today? What are let's say three easy ways people can start eating healthier right now? My first biggest tip would be to make sure that you're eating enough but also to make sure that you're eating enough of the things that are really going to help you.
So we have three big macronutrients, protein, carbs and fat and you definitely want to make sure that you're getting enough of each in. Protein because it helps grow and repair tissues and protein for lean body mass. It also helps promote satiety which is that hunger hormone. We've got carbs which is the main energy source of our bodies and our brains. It's our preferred fuel source and it is also a really good source of fiber which helps digest your regulation and then we have fat which is really important for hormone regulation and it also helps with vitamin absorption.
So making sure that you're getting a little bit of each of those in every meal is going to be key. And I don't think it has to be complicated either. Just looking at your plate and thinking, okay, am I having protein? Is there beef or chicken or eggs or if you don't eat meat, tofu, beans, lentils, things like that. Looking to see if you have carbs. So veggies are carbs. You definitely want to make sure that you're getting veggies in there and then also looking and being like, okay, do I have a grain? And a grain would be like rice or buckwheat, oats, potatoes are a great source of carbs, things like that.
And then finally looking at your plate and thinking, do I have fats in here? Do I have things like nuts or seeds, avocado, fish is a good source of fat and it also has protein in it, olives, did I cook with olive oil, things like that. We generally like to go into nutrition thinking of the things that we can take out or get rid of and I think the best thing that you can do for yourself is think about how I can add more beneficial foods into my diet, how can I add more nutritious elements into my meals before you even think about, oh, I need to eat less cake or less chips or whatever that looks like.
My second tip that might be a little more unconventional or just not talked about a lot is are you being mindful with your eating or are you eating while watching TV or playing video games or on your phone, right? The more mindless you are or the more you are in a stress state because you are doing something else, the less efficient your body is going to be at digesting your food. It's also going to inhibit you noticing when you're hungry and when you're full, which is such an important part because I'm sure we've all eaten into a place where we're like, oh my gosh, I shouldn't have eaten that much, I feel really full, right? And we have a hard time distinguishing whether we're still hungry or we're still full or maybe you've eaten a lot and after that meal you're like, oh, I feel like I'm still hungry but I shouldn't be, right? That's because we're so used to mindlessly eating and we're not actually paying attention to what we're eating.
So my second tip would be to sit down, be really mindful with your meals, you don't need to count your chews, right? But just be in the moment, enjoy the food that you bought or that you ate. My third one would be to try to find some enjoyment with cooking at home. I personally love eating out at restaurants but I don't do it every day. I don't order takeout every day. Cooking at home is the greatest gift that you could learn because one, it's super satisfying to cook something that actually tastes really good but then two, you can regulate a little bit more how much sugar that's being put in your meals, how much salt is being put in your meals, how much, you know, whether something's fried or not fried, right? So that kind of helps balance out, you know, your, when you eat out and you're eating some more of these kind of like denser and maybe not as nutritious meals, balancing that out with cooking at home as much as you can and ideally we make it enjoyable, right? Because it's best to do things that we don't like.
So finding new recipes, listening to a podcast, doing it with a partner, anything like that just to make cooking at home a little bit more enjoyable and accessible and that way you can start to take control of the things that you're putting in your body a little bit more. And I'm going to throw this in there because I know New Year's is coming around and we like to have these like very big goals and then by January and February, we kind of fall off, right? And so with all of these, you know, let's just say the three that I gave you, right? You want to make sure things are really realistic for where you are right now and feel like something that's doable and a little enjoyable, right? Because we definitely, you want to find enjoyment or else none of these habits are going to stick.
So if you, let's say, never cook at home right now, maybe cooking at home every single day is a little too much, right? Maybe you start with, okay, I'm going to make one meal at home for two weeks or for a month, whatever that is. And then once that feels really, really easy, you can go into, okay, I'm going to start making two meals at home, right? Or at dinner, I'm going to make enough for dinner today and tomorrow, right? Start off smaller with your goals so that they're more sustainable, they're more realistic and you're more likely to stick with them because that's how you're actually going to keep these habits consistent as opposed to starting with these really big goals in mind and then it being a little unrealistic, you getting upset or frustrated that you weren't able to stick to them, and then you kind of throw your hands up in the air and you're like, okay, well, this was ridiculous.
I'm never going to be able to do this. It's too hard, right? So I'm just going to end with that because with New Year's around the corner, I know it tends to get a little iffy for people. This has been really insightful, Azul. Is there anything else you would like to add before we depart? Yeah, I think I would want to leave your listeners with two things. The first one being is to be careful the way you label food.
It's very common for people to be like, oh, this food's bad and this food's good. There's a danger in giving food morals because then we tend to think like, oh, if I ate chips, I'm bad, or if I had a weekend where I overindulged, I'm bad, right? And that can do something to the psyche. So I generally with my clients really try and avoid calling things bad or good. And we just, we acknowledge some things that are a little bit more nutritious than others, but recognize that they all have room in our plate, right? But taking out the mentality of bad and good and, oh, I have to eat less of this and think of more as I just want to eat more of the nutrition elements, and that way you're kind of crowding out some of those other things.
That would be the first thing I want to leave you with. And the second thing I would want to leave you with is health isn't just about nutrition. It's not just about what you eat, and there's a lot of other factors that can generally influence what you eat, how you eat, how much you eat, and some of those being sleep. Are you getting enough sleep? Quality and quantity, right? Eight hours feeling breathable when you wake up.
Are you controlling your stress and your anxiety, right? A lot of those things can lead us to making not so nutritious choices down the line, right? Or they can cause you to overeat or emotionally eat, right? Because you're not dealing with whatever stress and emotions are coming up for you. Or the latter, when you're really stressed and anxious, you're not eating enough, which then also contributes to stress and anxiety in the body because now you're not eating enough, and that's another stressor.
And then, of course, there's movement, movement being so, so good for you. And yeah, so there are different aspects of health that aren't just nutrition. I know this podcast is mainly just talking about nutrition, but I just kind of wanted to throw that in there because I think we place a lot of importance on nutrition and not enough on the other foundational health indicators like stress and sleep and movement and things like that. Awesome. Thank you so much, Azul, for taking the time out of your busy schedule to be here with us today at the Marcus Show.
Can you let us know where to find you? Yeah, I am active almost every day on Instagram, Azul Coracoria, my first and last name, is my Instagram handle, super easy. And then my website is azulcorawellness.com, and those are the two biggest places that you can find me. I have an email newsletter that I send out weekly and monthly with just coaching tips, things that I generally talk to my clients about and things that have really helped me along my health journey and has helped them that I generally want to share.
So Instagram newsletter and website would probably be the best places. Thank you, Azul. Talk soon. Thank you again so much, Marcus, for having me. This was a blast, and I hope everyone was able to learn something and take something away. That concludes our episode of the Marcus Show. Thank you all for listening, and we'll see you next time.
