Certified health coach Sabrena Jo examines my lunch

Sabrena Jo is early. Of course she is.

The health coach has already grabbed us a table at Lulu’s, and now she greets me with a wide, white-toothed smile and a firm handshake as she tells me she’s been up since 5 a.m. Of course she has.

I examine her muscular, toned arms and youthful face for signs that her routine so far today — 30-minute cardio workout, breakfast, a snack, a dive into her day’s work — is grinding her down instead of making her cheerful and alert. Of course, I find no such evidence.

Sabrena — she prefers to go by her first name, she says — is a senior health and fitness adviser for the American Council on Exercise as well as a health coach (certified by that same body), personal trainer and group fitness instructor. In addition to working privately with clients, she also runs an eight-week nutrition and fitness program at Crossfit Memorial Hill. It’s called Nutrition Now, and I’ve asked her to lunch to help me figure out how I might make my own diet less Nutrition Maybe Later.

“You can’t have a conversation about getting healthy or changing body composition without talking about the food that you eat,” she tells me. “Essentially, what I do in my health coaching is take the USDA recommended guidelines for the average healthy person and give suggestions based on those ranges of nutrient needs.”

I’m no client, but I have come before Sabrena as one might: a sluggish specimen who, at the end of January, is almost ready to belatedly sign up for the annual post-holiday purge of bad habits. I have come to her with a question she probably hears a lot: Without forcing myself on some sort of apocalyptic diet or handcuffing myself to an elliptical at the gym — in short, without changing my daily routine all that much — how might I angle toward making positive, well-balanced food choices?

“When I talk with people about nutrition, I always give them a calorie goal — this many calories per day, that kind of thing,” Sabrena says. “Then I break those calories down into macronutrients, which are carbs, proteins and fats. Then I give the range of grams of carbs, grams of protein and grams of fat that they should shoot for each day.”

A balanced food plan (she dislikes the word diet) includes plenty of carbohydrates — a category I figured would be the first sacrifice on the path to healthy living. (Goodbye, bagels smothered with cream cheese.)

“My motto is, ‘I want you to eat so that you feel happy and not crappy.'” She laughs as she says this out loud, then continues. “Feeling happy and not crappy comes from not eating enough carbs. A lot of people cut carbs because they feel like that’s the quickest way to lose weight. You may or may not actually lose weight doing that, but you’re certainly not losing body fat. Cutting carbs also drains your brain power.”

So I can keep my bagels, and the cream cheese has fat, but I should probably invite a protein onto the plate, maybe some salmon.

Oh, and some arugula.

“What I see all the time,” Sabrena says, “is people not getting enough vegetables. I have people log and journal their food, and they simply do not get enough vegetables across the board.”

It’s at this pivotal moment that our lunch arrives, and I look down at the snow peas in my Tom Kha Gai. With some guilt, I inform my new consigliere that I have every intention of plucking these things out of my soup when I reheat the rest of it later. What few I consume during our lunch are purely for her benefit.

“Well,” she says, laughing, “what you need to understand is that you should only eat food that you like. That’s number one. If I were to tell you eat a bunch of vegetables that you hate and you were gagging as you tried to swallow them, you wouldn’t do it. That’s unrealistic. You have to figure out vegetables that you like and then you have to figure out how to prepare them so that you can eat them.”

I glance at Sabrena’s plate: two spring rolls. She tells me this is a snack for her, not a meal: “Believe me, this is not how I eat.” In fact, her go-to here is the cashew chicken, which she says hits all three macronutrients with its sautéed chicken, green beans, cashews and rice.

When ordering at restaurants, she tells me, it comes down to analyzing the percentages of macros you’re getting. The noodle dishes on the Lulu’s menu are good, if carb-heavy — which isn’t bad, necessarily, but it does up the calorie count.

“I’m not about restrictive eating,” Sabrena says. “I don’t believe in that, and I don’t recommend it for my clients, because if you’re constantly telling yourself, ‘No, I can’t have that, but I want it,’ then that becomes the only thing you think about. So if you look at this menu and decide, ‘Hey, I’m really in the mood for some noodles today,’ then go ahead and order it, but take half of it to go. For most people, restaurant portion sizes will quickly get them above and beyond their calorie needs for the day.”

If you’re tempted to finish that whole entree, she adds, consider ordering a side salad to start. That way you get something fibrous and filling in your stomach before the fun starts. She offers an alternative scene, set at a barbecue joint: Order your favorite menu item (hers is usually a pulled pork sandwich) but skip the fries (“Anything deep fried is a conscious splurge,” she says) in favor of the coleslaw, and eat just half the bun (or less).

“Every single time you put something in your mouth, whether it’s a snack or a meal, it needs to have those three nutrients — fat, carbs and some protein. Eating like that will make your brain happier, and it won’t make you feel like you’re going on a diet. And when you’re actually doing your exercise, it’ll help fuel your performance. Without getting into the minutiae of percentages and grams, that’s the best advice I can give.” She laughs again. “It’s not sexy.”

It might not be sexy, but it is an approachable philosophy. But then I remember the happy hour I have planned later. Dare I ask how Sabrena feels about booze?

“Alcohol can have a place in a healthy eating plan,” she says, without sounding exactly encouraging. “Just understand that alcohol has calories, and you’re drinking them. Alcohol is strictly a carb. A gram of white rice has four calories. A gram of alcohol has seven. Just the fact that it’s an alcohol means that it’s twice as many calories as other types of carbs. If alcohol has a place in nutrition, then it’s moderate.”

Moderation, I think. Well, I can probably do that.