Ah, nutrition.
With special thanks to the fitness industry, the food industry and pop media, we can safely say that nutrition can be a really freaking confusing and mystifying subject.
Because outside forces have made such a mess of this whole nutrition discussion, we’re going to have a multi-part conversation about it, aimed at clarifying and simplifying things. Obviously, we won’t be able to cover everything…but the point here is to illustrate why you don’t have to know everything in order to make sense of your own nutritional eating practice.
In fairness, nutritional science is really a relatively young area of study and the mess of different ideas out there, while confusing, also represents the beauty of the scientific process. Many different ideas are fine. What we won’t stand for, however, is the judgment and shaming.
…which means, the way we’re going to approach nutrition might be a bit different from what you’ve encountered before.
You know, no value judgements attached to food choices, no shame.
Framing our conversation
So, as we make our way into our conversation about nutrition, I’d like to frame our conversation this way:
When we talk about nutrition, what we are talking about is an approach to eating that focuses on nourishing your body and making you feel good.
This makes for an interplay that will be at times, complex, and at others, simple.
Does chocolate nourish your body? What about kale?
Well, since we’re not going to be speaking in terms of good foods or bad foods, we come to discover that it’s not a simple yes or no answer.
Does mango make you feel good? How about ice cream?
If your answer is yes, then that food plays a role in contributing to your overall well-being—and that makes it an important part of your diet and lifestyle.
Nutrition exists along a continuum
I think it’s important for me to note explicitly that nutritious eating is a practice, and it is one that happens along a continuum.
It’s a bit like training: no single workout is going to be the one that makes you fit and strong. It’s ok for some workouts to be more high-energy than others. What matters is the trend over time.
Similarly, no single meal is going to “make or break” your practice.
And we should also be clear about the overall goal of your practice—here, I have assumed that goal to be nourishing your body and feeling good. What’s great is that “feeling good” is so subjective. That means that you get to decide.
Consequently, at no point in your journey are we going to suggest you stop eating anything that you enjoy eating. How much and how often you eat is totally up to you.
What we will suggest, or offer, to you is that you aim to eat more.
More can often be better.
Because diet culture has messed with us all and somehow managed to plant some rather unhealthy and unhelpful ideas into our heads, many of us often think that the key to getting healthier lies in eating less.
For those who are looking to lose a few pounds, the perceived solution often lies in restricting what they eat. People can spend a long time in this place: wanting to lose some weight, trying to eat less… not really losing any weight, ramping up the efforts to eat less…
As you probably know, we are not going to frame this conversation in terms of losing weight or losing fat. This is going to be about how to eat in a way that will leave you feeling energized and mentally clear. This is going to be about eating in ways that will likely have an impact on a number of health markers (as measured by blood tests and doctors).
[And, to let you in on a secret, eating this way—combined with your workouts—is likely to result in your body composition changing. Our point is that what matters the most is that you feel good in your body, regardless of what it looks like.]
So we’re going to talk about adding more to your diet.
[Another aside: diet is a tricky word that comes with all sorts of crappy cultural baggage. In this context, it really just means the food that you eat. However, because of the way that diet culture has made it into something that makes pretty much no one happy, we’re going to steer clear of it, as best we can, from here on out.]
In general, we can all benefit from adding more whole (meaning unprocessed) foods to each of our meals.
And almost all of us can benefit from more protein in each meal.
And more veggies and more fruits. (Really, it’s hard to eat too many vegetables).
So how do we go about doing that?
This post will be the first in ongoing series over the course of the rest of this year. Since I (Mike) post every other month, you can expect to see the next installment in March.