To help counter all the back and forth dietary blather, I’ve come up with 23 common-sense eating principles, tips, and thoughts on how to eat for exceptional health, overall life balance, and even weight loss. These are principles that I’ve learned over time, have seen working for many people, use myself, and aren’t likely to change when the next scientific study comes out tomorrow. My hope is that this list will reassure you that everything is ok—healthy living with food doesn’t have to be hard—and a lot of times it comes down to good old fashioned common sense.
1. As long as you aren't eating the Standard American Diet (SAD) and ARE making changes towards eating a wide variety of whole foods—including
lots of vegetables and fruits, you are already doing a lot to prevent
diet-related chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, obesity, type 2
diabetes, and cancer. Historically, humans have survived and thrived on a wide
variety of diets—from really high carbohydrate diets to eating mostly animal
blood, meat, and milk to diets highly comprised of just fat. The only diet that
seems to really make people chronically sick is our own nasty Western diet (coupled with minimal physical activity),
also known by some as the Standard American Diet, which includes lots of
refined carbohydrates, highly processed foods, meat, added sugars and fats, and
few fruits and vegetables.
2. Don’t wait until you are hungry to decide what to eat (that
usually ends in an overeating disaster). Have a rough plan in your head, know
what healthy options you have on hand, and consider getting into the habit of
eating smartly every 3-4 hours (this works well for some people).
3. If you don’t want to play the fad-diet-of-the-month game, don’t. You’ll live, I promise (and be much better
off, I might add!). Speaking of diet fads, JUST DON’T DO THEM. They don’t last
long-term (usually only a few weeks to several months), nor do they create new,
healthier habits—these diets and fad eating styles are merely band-aids on a
wound, temporary fixes that might give you a motivating high for awhile but will
inevitably leave you back at square one again. I’ve seen fad diets fail, again
and again and again. Enough already! The healthiest way to eat is the way that
you can eat for the rest of your life—a way that promotes health, keeps you
satisfied, is pleasurable, and supports a positive relationship with food.
4. There are no superfoods. At least in the sense that one particular
food is so amazing you need to spend an inordinate amount of money, time, or effort to acquire and consume it to the exclusion of other perfectly healthy foods. No one food will guarantee life to 102 or cure your cancer. Unfortunately, nothing like this exists.
Now, are some foods “more super” healthwise than others? For sure! But, there
will never be one superfood that does
more for your health than a balanced, overall healthy way of eating and
living. The hard truth is that superfoods are good business for health gurus, food
manufacturers, and the media—not for you and me. Tell Dr. Oz to shove his
Garcinia Cambogia and Acai berry. Don’t fall for the hype!
5. Eat food. Real, whole, basic foods. What do I mean by this? Whole
fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts and seeds, intact grains, fresh fish,
poultry, and meat. Avoid the cheaply manufactured, energy-dense, sugary, and salty
foods that crowd the supermarkets and beckon to us from the fast food menu board.
6. Rely heavily on foods that have few calories by
volume—conveniently, these are most often the plant foods we should be eating a
lot of anyway, as mentioned above. Eating this way is a very promising strategy
in weight loss and sustained weight control for life. When you think about it,
it’s common sense: if you feel more full (on fewer calories) for a longer
period of time, you will be less likely to consume unnecessary, extra calories
that can lead to weight gain. Best foods to help carry out this strategy? You guessed it: fruits and vegetables--the beneficial components being a
high water and fiber content.
7. Eat strategically to promote satiety—along with
a larger proportion of lower calorie/high volume foods, you want to include a
modest amount of satiety-promoting foods with each meal and snack. Fat and
protein do the trick here: think regulated portions of nuts, cheese, avocado,
eggs, or lean meat and fish.
8. COOK. From scratch. Start with whole, fresh ingredients. Hamburger
Helper and Panburger Partner are NOT your new kitchen assistants. If you find
yourself staring with dread at or are wondering how a handful of basic food
ingredients sitting on your kitchen counter could ever be as exciting and
delicious as the Monster Thickburger, you probably need some assistance getting
started with healthy cooking. Pour over healthy recipes on the internet (check
out my own blog recipes or one of my favorite recipe idea sources, Cooking Light), hire a dietitian to help you
prepare healthy meals, or take some healthy cooking classes. Cooking for
yourself is an essential survival skill in the healthy living wilderness!
9. Eat at home 95% of the time--goes hand-in-hand with cooking. If you can't eat at home, at the very least, BRING your food from home. Once you let
restaurants, food-sellers, and food manufacturers prepare even a moderate proportion of your meals, you lose control
over your eating...and your health.
10. Whole dietary patterns over time are more important than single
foods or nutrients. Consistency with your overall way of eating is key,
so it’s not necessary to
get overly obsessed with nutrient details. Our health relies not so much on the
individual nutrients we eat as it does on the source of those nutrients (the
whole food item) and the amount eaten. So the next time a food fear-mongering health
guru shouts at you “...but that has FRUCTOSE in it!” just smile to yourself and
eat on. You know better.
11. Most of what we need to know about what to eat (and what NOT to
eat), we already inherently know; however, if you are still in doubt about
whether or not to eat aerosol-can pancake batter, frozen pizza with over 90
ingredients, or Fruit Loops, use your common sense and remember Michael Pollan’s
sound advice, “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as
food.”
12. Know how many calories you are eating in relation to how much
energy your body needs. Yes, I strongly advocate tracking calories! I see
the most consistent weight loss and lifelong weight maintenance results when
people understand and use calories to their advantage. Determining caloric
needs and tracking caloric intake will never be completely foolproof—and that
is ok! Still, with close monitoring and subsequent tweaking over time,
determining caloric needs for weight loss or weight maintenance can be very
accurate. In fact, even having a rough estimate of how many calories you need
and how many you are taking in is better than unawareness since the process helps
you gain crucial knowledge and perspective about how the energy in food affects
your weight. By monitoring caloric intake and needs in my own life, I have been
able to keep my weight within three pounds of my goal weight for over 12 years.
13. Invest in food: you can’t afford
to be cheap here! We spend countless dollars on clothes, jewelry, manicures,
magazines, rent or mortgages, car payments, and other “stuff.” Surely our health and our bodies (we
only get one body, by the way) are more important than anything else in our lives. You really get what you pay for in most cases, and
that goes for food, too! If you spend a little more for better quality food,
you likely will treat that food with more respect—maybe prepare it with more
care or even eat it more slowly. Higher-quality food often tastes better, too,
and, as a result, you may need to eat less of it to feel satisfied.
14. Eat deliberately. When you
are going to eat, EAT. Don’t do anything else.
15. Recognize that food has a dual
purpose: it is nourishment for both body and mind. Somewhere down the line, too
many of us became more obsessed with the biological importance of food and lost
sight of the fact that eating is pure pleasure, enjoyable, and culturally
significant. Eat guilt-free. ENJOY FOOD!
16. How you eat affects the health of the planet. There's no skirting this issue anymore. With the health of
humans’ only home (planet Earth) in peril, you can’t NOT think about this
anymore and consider yourself a responsible or “healthy” eater. There are many
ways you can eat to reduce our impact on the environment, but one of the most
effective is to reduce your consumption of what Mark Bittman calls “inefficient
food”—the most energy-intensive and “inefficient” foods produced being meat,
dairy, and highly processed/packaged foods. Consider three powerful examples
Bittman shares in his book Food Matters
(a highly-recommended read) that illustrate the substantial energy toll
meat-heavy diets take on the environment:
- “...eating a typical family of four steak dinner is the rough equivalent, energy-wise, of driving around in an SUV for three hours while leaving all the lights on at home.”
- “If we each ate the equivalent of three fewer cheeseburgers a week, we’d cancel out the effects of all the SUVs in the country.”
- “For a family that usually drives a car 12,000 miles a year, switching from eating red meat and dairy to chicken, fish, and eggs just one day a week—in terms of greenhouse gas emissions—is the equivalent of driving 760 miles less a year.”
17. Create an eating environment
conducive to your goals. You wouldn’t put a tv, a bunch of your favorite
magazines, and have your iPad open to Candy Crush on your desk at work and
expect yourself to focus and get your job done, would you? So why would you
expect that having a bunch of tempting, fast, easily-accessible crap food around your
house and in your kitchen would help you commit to eating a moderate diet of
wholesome foods? Get rid of the junk and surround yourself with better choices!
18. Don’t fear fat but DO eat the best
kinds. If you avoid highly processed, manufactured foods and build your diet around mostly whole foods, eating the “right” kinds of fat becomes almost a nonissue. The best
fats are found in nuts, avocados, olives, seeds, fatty fish, and olive oil. Embrace
healthy fat!
19. You’re getting enough protein,
trust me. Do me a favor: instead of worrying about whether you are getting
enough protein, worry about getting enough vegetables. Any reasonably balanced, calorically adequate diet is going to give you plenty of protein. That’s not to say protein isn’t
important or can’t be used to our advantage. When does protein specifically
come in handy? Like fat, protein is great at helping us to feel full, which is
why it is smart to include a little with each meal and snack.
20. Have a plan, and a back-up plan, and a back-up back-up plan when it comes to eating. You
wouldn’t leave on a vacation without booking a flight, packing your luggage
with essentials, planning sight-seeing opportunities, or knowing where you are
going to sleep, would you? So why is ok to leave the house in the morning not
knowing what, where, or how you are going to fuel your body? Always have a rough eating plan, and, along these lines, it's wise to carry healthy snacks with you. Never get caught with your proverbial
pants down and “have” to resort to eating junk food or fast food. In other words, don’t let food "happen" to you; unfortunate as it is, in our
obesigenic society today, it takes a
conscience effort to make healthy choices, and planning helps keep you on the right path.
21. Eat today how you want to feel
tomorrow morning. Pretty simple, but very effective.
22. Stop eating before you’re full. The Japanese advise to stop eating when they
are 80% full. In India, certain traditions recommend only eating to a 75%
fullness level while the Chinese specify 70%. The prophet Muhammad described a
full belly as one that contained 1/3 food, 1/3 liquid, and 1/3 air (ie
nothing). There’s also a German expression that says: “You need to tie off the
sack before it gets completely full.”
Take your pick.
23. Everything in moderation,
including moderation. You only have one life, live it wisely and keep health at
the forefront, but don’t miss important opportunities to truly savor it, even
if that means a few extra glasses of wine or two pieces of birthday cake
instead of just one. :-)
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