How To Eat Healthy?
How To Eat Healthy?
To answer this question correctly you must first ask yourself a question. Who taught you how to eat?
When it comes to health, there is no such thing as keeping secrets. I want to be completely transparent with my readers: I wish I could tell you exactly what to eat every day for the rest of your life. But unfortunately, that is not possible. You wouldn’t like me doing it, nor would I be able to execute this strategy.
However, even if somehow managed to pull this off, I wouldn’t do it – why? Because a diet needs to be a fluid process that is a reflection of your goals, progress, and your ability to stay compliant.
One of the keys to a healthy, sustainable lifestyle is good nutrition. Your health can be improved by keeping a delicate balance between your activities and the food you consume – that is, eating a healthy balanced diet. However, with the availability of millions of options, advice, opinions, and possibilities, it is very easy to become confused about health and nutrition. You cannot out-train a bad diet! All the training in the world will not change your body unless you take control of your eating habits. I want to let you in on a secret. 80% of the time, people pretty much need the same basic diet (animal protein, greens, good fats, and hydration) to become lean, healthy, and happy.
My goal is to make the complex process simple; the best diet is one that is easiest to understand and follow. Let’s begin by trying to change the way you look at food. This is best accomplished by going over the recent evolution of food.
Nutrition is one of the essential pillars of a healthy lifestyle. About 70% of your fitness training results is dependent on what you eat when you eat, and how much you eat. One of the keys to a healthy, sustainable lifestyle is proper nutrition. Your health can be improved by keeping a delicate balance between your activities, the food you consume, and supplementation.
However, most people are misguided as, in the name of achieving unrealistic goals, they follow a path that further compromises their health. I have combined a series of healthy tips to help my readers achieve their body goals by staying on the right track.
My focus is on providing optimum solutions to my clients so they can improve their lifestyle and not just adopt any diet. I do that because diets are temporary and can be easily cheated on, whereas lifestyle is usually lasting. Once adopted, it can lead to long-term beneficial effects on one’s health. The key here to remember is that there are no shortcuts if you are looking for permanent solutions.
Who Taught You How To Eat?
Twenty years ago, if I asked you who taught you how to eat, most of us would reply, “Our parents or grandparents.” Today, the scary reality is that most kids learn to eat through social media, or television, the wheat industries’ food guide pyramid, or some type of celebrity magazine such as ‘Vogue.’
Society has conditioned us to think that we ‘should’ eat a certain way, either by skipping meals or going on complete starvation for prolonged periods. But guess what? The ‘should’s’ are most often complete garbage. ‘Healthy’ menu options and ‘healthy’ food products (many containing soy, gluten, and dairy) have diluted the true meaning of healthy foods.
We have radicalized healthy eating so much that we have taken it to the next step of food-liberalization. Now people go to a café in the morning, order a low-fat cream cheese muffin, and honestly believe they’re treating their bodies well. Then, such people walk past a guy who’s eating two full eggs, a steak with a quarter of an avocado, and think, “He’s eating too much fat.”
My question is, who taught you how to eat? Who told you a muffin is a healthier option? Who told you that consuming all the ‘low fat,’ ‘less cholesterol,’ and other ‘healthy’ processed foods is a wiser option?
We are fed scam after scam, and the worst part is, we keep on digesting it! Marketing industries play with human psychology, hitting the spot where it hurts the most. They make you believe you need things other than what’s actually good for your overall health. That is the whole agenda behind ‘effective health and fitness marketing.’
When a person comes to see a professional or is given advice that actually works, they can be somewhat skeptical. Why? Because it sounds different than the expectations built by hoax marketing campaigns! If you like to read gossip and fitness magazines that advocate celebrity diets, it’s okay – as long as you never believe a word printed!
Unfortunately, even today, many people erroneously believe that eating less is the way to weight loss. No! If anything, long-term starvation damages your metabolic health. When you deprive yourself of something for so long, craving for it intensifies.
Then comes a time when you retract after denying yourself for a long period. This retraction means your weight loss plan will eventually explode, while also harming your health. You might just find yourself binging on the closest bucket of ice cream or chocolate bars and then repeat the cycle all over again.
This can disturb the flow of regular nutrition in your body. Such diets are neither sustainable nor effective. That is why you see so many people stuck in a pattern of yoyo dieting. They only know one strategy for losing weight – either not to eat or to eat less. They can’t stick to it, but they think they can get their desired results.
The Football Field Time Continuum
I do not know how long the human genome has been around, and I am not looking to get into an ethical debate on the matter. It is not the point of this exercise; the intent is to get you thinking differently about food and how food has evolved.
Let’s agree that the human genome has been around for 4 million years. I want everyone to imagine a large 100 yard football field representing this 4 million year time frame. Now, I want you to imagine a blade of grass by the goal post; this represents about 20,000 years ago.
Visualize the size comparison between the 100-yard football field and the one small blade of grass by the goal post. Literature has shown that in the time frame representing the entire 100-yard length of the field, human beings were very healthy, lean individuals.
Fossil remains revealed that teeth decay was minimal, and joint disease was very rare. Yes, life expectancy was much lower, but in today’s age, even children have type 2 diabetes, arthritis, and many other ailments.
What do you suppose our ancestors ate? They primarily ate a lot of animal protein, veggies, healthy fat, and fruit/honey when available.
The small blade of grass by the goal post represents the time frame where planned agriculture took place, and farmers figured out how to grow their food and mass-produce grains. Since this time frame, human health has been on a steady decline. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 65-70% of the population is either obese or overweight!
How would you describe the modern environment you are living in? Are we really eating healthier and living a fulfilling life? No, we are not. The outbreak of technology has taken away the wholesomeness, the fundamental element, of living a healthier life. With modern advancements, we witness the emergence of numerous adversities that make us question if we are really living the lives that we desire.
We have convinced ourselves to operate on this modern paradigm that I would like to refer to as ‘the disconnected society.’ We are disconnected from everything except for technology that has kept us tangled in its loop.
The world is losing its balance. In my observation, what engenders this modern outlook is alteration beyond limits. Genetic modification in the name of biotechnology crosses genetically unnatural species of food and livestock for generating high yield. This violates the natural boundaries of production. Such ‘woke’ engineering advancements are ignoring the roots of a nutritious diet in favor of producing high yielding crops.
This is nothing but industrial monoculture growth, which shows the deterioration of nutritional food value. We walk into the zone of dangerous parameters where ‘Nature’ is losing its naturalness. If you ponder over this, I am confident that you will realize how important it is to eat healthy for better health! We are designed to eat foods that could be hunted, fished, gathered, or plucked!
Eating healthy does not have to be unnecessarily complicated. If you are overwhelmed by all the conflicting diet advice and nutrition guides out there, you are not alone. It seems for every expert advice you get about how a certain food is very good for your health, and you will find another completely contradicting the previous one.
Stabilizing health takes time. All you need to do is be determined and follow your diet routine religiously to achieve better results in the desired time. Being healthy is not about staying unrealistically thin, putting strict restrictions by fasting all the time, or even depriving yourself of your favorite food. Instead, it is all about improved health, feeling great, boosting your mood, and having more energy to perform tasks.