No matter what. I could drop the mic there and leave. But I will not. Get this. Your brain does not function as well when you are inactive. You are not as productive and your thinking is not as sharp. I am not talking about being super fit and lifting all the weights and doing...
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!
If you had worked with me on nutrition or fitness, you most likely have heard me comparing you to a horse or a dog. Some people don't like it. Some look at me with a wtf face. It is simple though. I ask my athlete: "if you wanted to make this hypothetical horse into the fittest horse you could, how would that look? How does that compare to what you are doing to yourself?" It is one of my secret weapons.
You probably know it by now. I have things to say. Thanks to the questions and lessons I learned from you, I always have a big list of blog ideas, video ideas, Instagram ideas, and even book ideas. Sometimes in those lists, patterns emerge. I see common beliefs and cultural practices that end-up messing up my athletes. They usually take the form of "evident truths" that don't need to be questioned. What I have found out is that the opposite is correct. They need to be challenged. Moreover, they need to be aggressively examined. Because of that, I have created the series: "Frequently not asked questions". Today's video is the first of this series and it has to do with losing weight and athletic performance. Watch it and let me know what you think.
Often the most laborious work is the most neglected and underestimated. When it comes to nutrition, my experience tells me that most of us focus on the things that we have little or none control over. We fool ourselves thinking we can eat a given number of grams of carbohydrates, or the total number of calories, or a specific window of time. Yet, the things that are entirely under our control, like how we eat and how much attention we pay to the actual act of eating, we neglect. The video this week presents a simple idea, if you want to call it a hack so that it sounds sexier, go ahead. It is an excellent complement to the blog post from two weeks ago. It also contains all the right numbers and science behind it.
To diet soda or regular soda ... or not soda? I get the question regarding non-caloric sweetened drinks a lot. It is a good showcase of the standard nutritional problem we face nowadays. It has all the elements that make this kind of discussion entrenched and complicated: cultural beliefs of what we should or not consume, product marketing, incomplete science, and the fact that Coke is delicious. Like everything else, there is not one straightforward answer. However, in this video, I give you my view on the topic. You should come out of it with some ideas on how to decide for yourself.
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.
It was just two years ago that the Huffington Post delivered this amazing article: “A Glass Of Red Wine Is The Equivalent To An Hour At The Gym, Says New Study”. It was an outstanding piece of modern journalism. It finally answered the question that had been troubling nutritionists and doctors for ages: why do...
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!