Beautiful Thursday everyone. I wanted to blog today on something that I am extremely passionate about – FOOD! I can’t tell you how many times when I’m working with clients or at lectures that people ask me the following questions: So….. what should I eat then? Is (insert food here) healthy for me? My doctor told me I should eat more (insert food here), why are you telling me the opposite?
Food could possibly be the most confusing subject you interact with every day. For example, next time you go to the bookstore look how many “diet” books are on the shelves. Each book has it’s own message about what’s “good” and what’s “bad.” You pick up one that advocates for protein, while the other book sitting next to it says protein is bad. This is just one example, but you get the point I’m trying to make. I would argue that food serves as one of people’s biggest stressors in life (behind finances, relationships, and careers, or chronic illness). My goal then is to simplify something very complicated to a message that does not overwhelm you and that you can begin taking control of your own food journey.
Before I begin to break things down, I wanted to share the following quote with you, “One man’s food is another man’s poison.” This is saying that food is completely individualized and what’s “good” for you, could be “bad” for me. There are some very overarching concepts that I believe are applicable to everyone, but as you start to “fine tune” your diet, it becomes very individualized.
I’d like to explain what you should eat with the analogy of a funnel. If you know the shape of a funnel, it’s very large at the top and progressively gets narrower the further down it goes.
At the top you have the broadest concepts, and then as you go down the funnel you get more specific. At the top of my food funnel is a concept that has been around for thousands of years, a concept that is now a novel idea to some. It’s called eating REAL food!
Forget counting calories, weighing your food, or any other strategy you might worry about to improve your diet. The best place to begin improving your overall diet is to eliminate all the NON-FOODS in your diet, eat only real foods, and increase your filtered water consumption. Most of what people are eating today falls under the NON FOOD category. Even places like Whole Foods are LOADED with NON FOODS. So what is a non-food? My definition of a non-food is any consumable item that uses or robs more of your body’s vital resource to break down or metabolize than it actually provides your body. The following are hallmarks of non-foods: it does not closely resemble anything from nature, it contains a lot of additives to mask the deficiency of nutrients in the food, it’s highly processed, has a long shelf life (not true in all cases), and is advertised through commercials and magazines.
These NON FOODS aren’t just the obvious foods like Twinkies or soda. They look like processed soy milk, most “energy” bars (cliff), Kashi cereals, and about a million other “health” foods.
Look at your current diet and see how many things don’t resemble something from nature. If they do, chances are it’s a non-food. By simply eliminating your non-foods in your diet, your well under way of vastly improving your overall health and well-being without the worry of counting calories, weighing your food, eating only ‘shakes” all day, or wishing you never had to eat.
In my next blog, I’m going to move my way down the funnel and describe how you begin to individualize your diet to meet your very specific needs.
In the meantime, eat real food, love your self, and follow your dream.
Be well,
Matt