As a fitness and wellness professional, I often get asked about nutrition. What is the best way to eat? And, I have to be honest, I find that question frustrating. Not because the people and clients who ask about nutrition are frustrating! Certainly not! My frustration is aimed at our slow-to-change culture which fosters an environment where food is the enemy. I wrote on this topic a few weeks back in Our Twisted View of Healthy, a read that I highly recommend if you haven’t checked it out yet.
Whenever I encounter the mindset that food is the problem, or questions about the best way to eat, I try to share my approach to food in as simple and understandable a way as possible. I make no claims to being a nutritionist or dietitian, but I want to offer my opinion about how to have a healthy approach to food that doesn’t sound like a text book and is easy to manage. I’ll do my best to break my approach down in detail in a series of blog posts. Here are three points designed to help you change your mindset about food:
Food is never the problem. Our mindset about food is the problem.
Think about your food in a big picture, not what you are craving at this moment.
Today I’m covering the first point from above: Food is never the problem. Our mindset about food is the problem.
The first thing that must be understood to really get a handle on nutrition is that food is not the enemy. Food is just that: food. Restrictive diets, low carb diets, high protein diets, no fat diets; they all have one major flaw in common. They all set up one form of food or another as the enemy.
Each of our bodies are unique in design and need. A blanket approach of “this is bad, that is good” seldom works for everyone, and can often do more harm than good. Without going into an incredibly long-winded tangent, let me be clear about this. Are you paying attention?
Every body needs carbs, protein, and fat of some kind.
Maybe wheat doesn’t agree with you (as a person with Celiac disease, I get that.), but that doesn’t mean you should shun all carbs. There’s a whole world of healthy, helpful grains, fruits,and veggies for you to get your carbs from.
Maybe you don’t eat meat. That doesn’t mean you’re destined to have low-protein. Many vegetables and legumes also carry high amounts of protein. Meat just happens to have the highest amount of protein per unit (and fat, and cholesterol. Which are not bad, you just have to pay attention to what you’re consuming and compare that to what your body needs.).
Fat can be healthy and come from very healthy sources, like avocados and nuts. As with all things, moderation is the key.
Medical conditions can sometimes dictate what we can and cannot consume, but throwing your hands in the air and saying “Fine, I’ll just eat Twinkies” is not an appropriate response to this challenge. The world of food is vast. Work with a nutritionist to discover options that work with your body and help you find a rhythm that works.
When we start looking at the world through eyes that see only black and white, we miss out on the spectacular spectrum of nutritional opportunities around us. Nutrition is so much more than calories in, calories out, though that is a very helpful place to start. It’s an intricate maze of needs and checks and balances. Here’s a good example of how only looking at calories can be self-sabotaging:
I once had a client tell me they were using a point system to track what they’d been eating. According to the point system, they could eat two cupcakes a day and stay within the points needed in order to lose weight.
Two cupcakes a day to lose weight? My client thought they had found a way to cheat the system: I can eat the junk I want and still lose weight! As far as calories in, calories out goes, that might be true. But what is inside those cupcakes? Do they have the nutritional diversity needed to help your body function well? Probably not.
Instead of trying to “cheat the system”, why don’t we try to work with the system? The system, in my mind, is our body. Our body makes the rules for what will and won’t work. It’s our responsibility to learn what the rules of the system are and then work within them. For example, before I knew I had Celiac’s I ate a ton of whole wheat products. I had been educated about their health benefits, so by getting carbs from whole wheat sources I believed I was doing my body a favor. Except I kept getting seriously injured and sick (check out The Unlikely Runner). I had to learn that yes, whole grains are good for many health reasons, but no, gluten products did not help me. My body had a rule that I needed to learn to work within in order to achieve the health gains I was looking for.
It’s easy to understand why we feel compelled to “cheat” our nutrition. The topic is a labyrinth of choices and options and, sometimes, contradictions. And that’s just the scientific side of the issue. Add to that the complication of our psyche and emotions, a bombardment of marketing campaigns designed to convince you to buy, and an unfortunate cycle of using food as a means to show love and praise, and you know we’ve got some serious figuring out to do. We eat for many, many reasons other than to feed our hunger and often times leave those motivations uninvestigated for one reason or another.
After reading this, I challenge you to change the way you think about food. If you are one who thinks of food as an enemy, I encourage you to reexamine that. Why do you feel that way about food? Is it all foods, or just some foods that you look at this way? How can you change your view of food?
Next post, I’ll be going into the second point: Know your body, and give it what it needs. For a sneak peak at that topic, I again encourage you to check out Our Twisted View of Healthy. If you’ve already read it, go through it again and see if you can learn anything new.
Comments