The Easiest Diet Tips You'll Ever Get
Think about this - Not only does the food you eat fuel your body and brain, you are literally constructed out of the nutrients extracted from the food you eat. Your body will absorb vitamins, minerals, fats and proteins and use these to build and reinforce your bones, grow your muscles, cartilage, tendons, ligaments, skin….everything.
You are made out of the food you eat. So what're you made of?
This is not an exhaustive blog of dietary advice, nor is it a prescriptive diet to follow meal-by-meal. It is simply a guide to eating healthier in a world where finding food that is truly good for you is getting harder and harder.
The food industry not only injects millions of dollars into convincing you that you need to eat more of this or more of that depending on the product they’re trying to sell. It also sells food completely deprived of nutritional value and peddles ineffective or unnecessary supplements. Then there are all the unhealthy methods they use to preserve, beautify, unnaturally enhance the flavour and increase the addictiveness of the food they’re selling you.
This blog is designed to give you some simple points that you can follow to eat healthier, feel better and improve your physical wellbeing. I’ve separated it into do’s and don’ts because it soothes my internal desire for order.
Do’s:
Eat whole foods - this means foods that have not been processed. So fruits, vegetables, free range eggs, nuts, seeds, non-cured meats and greek/natural yoghurts.
Eat organic where possible - avoid nasty chemicals on and in your foods. Organic foods might cost more money in the present moment, but could help you avoid costly health problems in the future. Think long game.
Eat grass-fed beef, free range organic chicken and wild pole-caught fish - these sources of protein are usually fed a type of food which is actually good for the animal, and guess what, the animals you’re eating are made of what they eat, and you’re eating them! This also helps you avoid over-stressed animals that have been pumped with hormones and antibiotics which can be transferred to you and make you unwell.
Try and eat a rainbow of colours daily - fruits and vegetables have a variety of pigments such as carotenoids, flavonoids and chlorophyll which are good for you. You don’t have to remember any of that though. Just eat the rainbow.
Cook at home as often as possible - so many huge benefits here. It’s cheaper than eating out so you’ll save money. You know EXACTLY what’s going into your food and hence into your body. You can prepare multiple meals at once and freeze them for convenience. Skill development - who doesn’t love someone that can cook? Also, the health benefits of putting the phone down and engaging in a non-digital activity, and if you do it with friends and family, even better health wise.
Eat fermented foods - as often as you can. Sauerkraut, kimchi, pickled carrot, onion and beetroot et cetera. Fermented foods contain healthy bacteria that improve your gut health and provide food for the good bacteria you currently have in your gut. Refer to my blog on gut health and your microbiome for reasons why this is important.
Drink lots of water. My recommendation is 2-3L depending on your size, activity levels and the temperature. If you sweat more, drink more. Easiest way to get enough water is buy a nice 1L reusable water bottle, drink and refill it 2-3x daily.
Eat good fats - I wont go into why they’re good, it gets too technical and that’s not the point of this blog. Raw Coconut oil, organic grass-fed butter, ghee, extra virgin olive oil, avocado oil, flaxseed oil, grapeseed oil, macadamia oil, the fat of wild-caught salmon and grass-fed beef.
Don’ts:
Avoid over-eating white foods - white bread, white rice, pasta, crackers/biscuits are usually processed, have additives and contain gluten. Go for wholegrain, sourdough bread and brown rice instead.
Avoid packaged food - if it’s in a packet, it’s usually been “processed”. That is, something has been done to it to increase its shelf life or enhance its flavour. If you see “ingredients” on the packet that don’t sound like food, you probably shouldn’t eat it.
Avoid excess sugar. Sugar = bad. The labels on food packaging can be confusing. Easiest takeaway from these labels is how much sugar is in the product. Food companies are hiding added sugars in products by giving sugar a different name in the ingredients list such as rice malt syrup, agave syrup, corn syrup, maltodextrin, dextran, sucrose, etc etc. Just look at the number value. A teaspoon is roughly 4 grams. Best way to assess whether a product has too much sugar is to imagine yourself adding the teaspoons to the food you’re about to eat. Eg. 56g of sugar in a 600ml chocolate milk - that’s like added 14 teaspoons on sugar to your milk! Yuck.
Avoid bad fats & fried food. Again - wont go into too much detail here. Fried foods and fat within processed/packaged foods. Not good. Oils - vegetable oil, canola oil, soybean oil, corn oil. Especially bad to cook with them as they’re not stable at high heat. They’re cheap, processed, genetically modified. Nope.
Avoid alcohol. A little here and there is fine in my books. I’m not here to tyrannise you. If you’re going to drink, red wine is probably best but the anti-oxidant effects of resveratrol in red wine has been overstated in my opinion. Resveratrol itself has strong anti-oxidant properties but the amount in red wine probably doesn’t out weigh the negative effects of the alcohol. Otherwise drinking a spirit with soda water will avoid the huge amounts of calories involved in spirit mixers. Sorry team, I had to say it.
Avoid cigarettes. Obviously.
These tips should provide a guide to eating healthy. They make sense and are evidence backed. I think it’s better to have a rough guide and a general understanding about what to eat than to try to remember every little detail. It’s overwhelming, time consuming and difficult to remember.
Don’t beat yourself up if you step outside of the guidelines. We all do. Just return to them when and where possible.
Below I’ve attached the above rules without the following explanation so you can copy, paste and print it out. Stick it on your fridge, keep it in your kitchen or take it shopping with you and check to see whether what you’re buying and what you’re cooking is helping grow a healthier you.
Do’s:
Eat whole foods
Eat organic where possible
Eat grass-fed beef, free range organic chicken and wild pole-caught fish
Eat a rainbow of colours daily
Cook at home as often as possible
Eat fermented foods
Drink lots of water
Eat good fats
Don’ts:
Avoid white foods
Avoid packaged food
Avoid excess sugar
Avoid bad fats & fried food
Avoid alcohol
Avoid cigarettes
Go. Eat.