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Food is Dead
Let me start by saying something controversial: there is no such thing as a “healthy meal,” not really. I guess you could eat a very healthy live animal and that would be a healthy meal. But I don’t see that happening often. Food is not “healthy.” Food is more or less nutritious, food is more or less calorie-dense, and food is more or less tasty. But let’s be real: most of the food we eat is dead or dying. In the best case, the food you eat was alive moments ago, (oysters anyone?) however in most cases your food has passed through several industrial processes that stripped its original glorious biology -think Pop Tarts. This might seem like an annoying linguistic distinction that only a nerd cares about. And it most definitely is, but hey! hold on, there is a useful point to be made: the thing that is healthy or unhealthy is you, not your food. Your health is your responsibility, and yours alone. A snickers bar after lunch is not going to make you unhealthy. But a daily Snickers bar after lunch might. A Snickers bar on Monday and then a Coke on Tuesday, plus those delicious donuts Janice from accounting brought to the meeting on Wednesday (because she does not give a fuck), that bag of chips that somehow made its way down your gullet on Thursday afternoon while you were rushing to meet that deadline, and finally that half of a pizza Friday night, plus the tortilla chips and pork belly tacos you ate after you got drunk on Saturday--all this combined WILL make you unhealthy. Repeated actions are what makes you unhealthy; it is your habitual behaviors that improve or harm your health. But ice cream is not “unhealthy” or “healthy.” As matter of fact, that Saturday ice cream you always have with your kids might be the best habit you have. If that Saturday ice cream is what allows you to eat more nutritious and balanced meals consistently the rest of the week, if it allows you to avoid all that junk that Janice keeps bringing to Wednesday’s meetings and the Friday pizza and beer binge, and if it allows you to spend some quality time with your kids, that Saturday ice cream (despite being full of sugar) is totally making you better and healthier in the long term. Enjoy!
What we are up against - Part 1
Let’s start today with a grounding idea: we are fortunate enough to live in an age in which we can actually think about how to optimize our personal nutrition. When I was growing up, everyday I saw people in the streets who did not have enough food--I don’t mean they didn’t have high quality food, they didn’t have any kind of food. Luckily things have changed in most parts of the world. And to be sure, if you are reading this you are just trying to improve your health by tweaking your nutrition. This is a privilege of our times: the great access we have to food, to nutritional information, and to sophisticated metrics.
Close the Gap | Coaching | Finding What Works for You | Fitness | How to be a learner? | Mindset | Smart PracticesBanzo's sword and metric fixations
Are you a victim of your metrics? Are you constantly trying to better your metrics, just to feel frustrated and unaccomplished? I have been there, it is awful. In this post I present to you a set of principles that will help you use metrics to serve you and not the other way around.
Eating in the car
My job as a fitness coach is to help people create the habits necessary to achieve their goals. Most of the time those habits go very much against traditional cultural practices, sometimes they go against my trainee’s very identity. This means there can be a great deal of resistance involved in changing habits. When I ask people to eat veggies for breakfast they usually look at me as if I were completely insane.
CICO Explained
You probably have a friend who has told you that "a calorie is not a calorie". Most likely, you also have another friend informing you that calories are the only thing that matters. Maybe you think your emotional well-being is ultimately dependant on being in a caloric deficit because that is the only way you will feel amazing like you did when you were 25, and you were twenty pounds lighter. Maybe calories in a label is that magic number that makes you feel either guilty or guilt-free after eating food. Yup, calories, what a unit measure! Kilometers, Celsius Degrees, Yards, Newtons, Watts, Nanoseconds, none of the other unit measures have this emotional and manipulative power over us. Well, watch the video today to get some clarity on the topic. Nerd alert! There is some heavy math in it! No, not really. Enjoy!
Breakfast on the Road
The road can be a tough spot when it comes to good nutrition. However there are always options. The road is an excellent opportunity to apply the principles: do what you can with what you have where you are.
