diet

Jumping girl
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The Hedonic Case for Healthy Living

Many of life’s greatest pleasures are reserved only for the healthy

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

It sucks that so many of the pleasurable things in life are bad for us, right? Wouldn’t it be great if we could sit in front of the TV eating chocolate and drinking wine all day long with no ill effects?

Actually, no.

Even if we could somehow eliminate all the health impacts of such behaviors, they would soon leave us unfulfilled and miserable. We would increasingly numb ourselves to life’s most intense sensory pleasures and, when there is no higher level left, life would become utterly meaningless.

It seems counterintuitive, but the health impact of mindless pursuits of instant pleasure is more of a blessing than a curse. It’s a valuable early warning that we’re pursuing happiness all wrong.

Hedonic Adaptation

The path to meaninglessness briefly outlined above results from something called hedonic adaptation.

The hedonic treadmill, also known as hedonic adaptation, is the observed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes. — Wikipedia

This phenomenon has been observed in many psychological studies. Our experience of happiness is highly subjective and, when we reach a higher level, the brain simply adjusts the goalposts.

Pretty depressing, isn’t it? Does that mean we can never be happy?

Luckily, no. Sure, we will never achieve happiness through mindless pursuits of instant pleasure, but there is a better path to happiness that applies particularly well to personal health.

Varied, Intermittent, Earned

If we want to beat the hedonic treadmill, we need to keep things fresh. The first way to do this is to vary our pleasurable experiences. Attempting to buy constantly varying pleasurable experiences can quickly become very expensive and time-consuming. But there’s another way: get healthy.

Experiencing life through a fit body opens up a world of pleasure. Every daily action gets easier and more rewarding and you gain access to a wide range of experiences reserved only for the healthy. Over here in Norway, the prime example is cross-country skiing. If you’re unfit, it’s a real pain. But once you’ve put in the work, exploring the endless trails through nature using this varied and efficient mode of locomotion becomes a joyous experience.

Taking a scenic break on yesterday’s cross-country skiing trip 😊

The second way to derive happiness from pleasure is to make sure different pleasures come intermittently. I experienced this intensely when I finally quit sugar some years ago. Now that my tastebuds are no longer numbed by a constant barrage of excessive sucrose, I’m able to savor the broad range of flavors in my varied whole-food diet much more deeply. Also, the occasional sweet treat on a special occasion now becomes true bliss!

Fitness holds similar benefits. Back to the cross-country skiing example: This pleasant hobby obviously only works during snowy winter months, typically in January-April. Before the snow comes (November-December), ice skating on frozen lakes is another genuine pleasure. Then, in the summer, those same mountains and lakes are good for hiking, cycling, and swimming. Any of these activities would be nice on their own, but it’s the natural combo of variety and intermittency that makes Norway a very easy place to stay fit.

Third, pleasure gets a whole lot sweeter when we feel that we genuinely deserve it. This aspect supercharges health-related pleasures like those mentioned above because they’re only made possible by resisting all the twisted, health-destroying incentives in our society. The occasional unhealthy treat on a special occasion also gets much better when you’ve earned the right to indulge guilt-free.

Thanks to this factor, building a body you can be proud of is another reliable source of happiness. For example, toweling off a fit body after each shower provides a lovely daily boost of happiness and confidence. Sadly, as we’ll discuss next, quite the opposite is true for most people.

Avoiding the Burden of Poor Health

On the flip side, we find another hedonic benefit of healthy living: avoiding pain and discomfort.

Obviously, recurring health problems, both small and large, sour the experience of life. Hedonic adaptation allows us to adjust to poor health and maintain decent happiness levels, but the much higher likelihood of intermittent and intense health shocks has a more severe impact.

This can range from small annoyances like occasional indigestion or acid reflux to moderate issues like always falling ill during flu season to big things like the need for chemotherapy or major heart surgery. A varied, intermittent, and earned influx of unpleasant health issues due to unhealthy lifestyle choices seriously harms our life experience.

Then there is the way our bodies look. Few of us like our bodies. Catching a glimpse of our naked (or even fully clothed) selves in the mirror can trigger intense negative feelings. If someone says something negative about our bodies (or just gives us a dismissive/judgmental look), it can hurt even more.

Bottom Line: Being Healthy is More Fun

All considered, a healthy lifestyle is simply more fun than an unhealthy one. Healthy living 1) opens up a much broader range of life’s pleasures, 2) intensifies the experience from these varied and well-earned pleasures, and 3) supercharges pleasure from the occasional unhealthy indulgence.

But even though the hedonic superiority of a healthy lifestyle is obvious, there’s an important caveat that catches all too many people out: Trying to force isolated healthy behaviors into an otherwise unhealthy lifestyle through sheer willpower will have the opposite effect. Fad diets and New Year’s gym resolutions rarely work and often just make things worse.

No, if you want all the hedonic benefits described above, you need to maintain a holistically healthy lifestyle. A varied and delicious whole-food diet, regular exercise deeply integrated into your daily routine, a high prioritization for sleep, and the ability (and willingness) to slow down to curb stress when needed are all crucial. If even one of these is badly out of alignment, it can drag the others down too, quickly draining our willpower and our pleasurable experiences.

Carving out such a holistic healthy lifestyle in our modern world with all its incentives to binge and stagnate is no easy task. But adding the promise of greater short-term pleasure to all the well-known long-term benefits of healthy living might just be enough motivation to push you through.

And once you experience the pleasures of a holistically healthy lifestyle, you’ll never go back! 😊

Thanks to Alta and Janet Cloete.

Your natural body
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You Never Need to Worry About Your Weight Again

Focus only on your health and trust nature to take care of the rest.

There’s plenty of space for your natural body between an unhealthy weight and the unrealistic beauty standards portrayed in the media. 
Created by Janet Cloete using Wikimedia Commons images from Muffintopmaria and Cedward Brice.

Are you happy with your weight? If you are, congratulations! You’re part of an elite group. According to this survey, only 2 in 10 Americans are happy with their bodies.

But have you ever wondered why we experience such large social pressures to appear slim and athletic? After all, there are several periods in history where plump bodies were desired, especially for women. Why are these same well-rounded figures stigmatized today?

Keeping Each Other Accountable

My best theory about today’s obesity stigma is that it’s our instinctive attempt to keep each other accountable for contributing to a better society. The societal costs of obesity are enormous, and our world would undoubtedly be a better place if it could be controlled more effectively.

But this way of thinking creates severe problems. For starters, we’ve managed to push the social body standard all the way to the opposite extreme. This unrealistic expectation completely neglects the large space between fitness model standards and obesity that is both healthy and attainable.

We also need to acknowledge that genetics have plenty to say about the shape of our bodies. This article puts the genetic influence on obesity at about 25%, rising to as much as 70–80% for people who really struggle to lose weight.

But our genes have not changed over the past two generations when the obesity epidemic started running rampant. No, the primary driving force behind this epidemic is the ubiquitous availability of addictive empty calories — foods purpose-built to short-circuit the body’s natural satiety response and make us overeat. The omnipresence of these slow poisons is capitalism’s greatest failure and our costliest societal burden.

Hence, we’re stuck in a society that’s obsessed with athletic physiques but surrounds itself with foods designed for overeating. If there was ever a recipe for terrible body-image (and all the associated mental health problems), this is it.

A New Standard

It’s a good thing that we instinctively want to keep each other accountable for reducing the massive societal burden of obesity, but we’re focussing on the wrong issue. Instead of pressuring each other to be thin, we should be actively encouraging each other to maintain a lifelong healthy diet. Bodies should be shaped for health, not for social media.

In this article, I want to give you permission to feel at home in whatever body arises from a genuinely healthy diet. This is your natural weight that you never need to apologize for.

Fueling your body with all the right foods despite society’s constant attempts to addict you to empty calories is a great achievement that should be celebrated, regardless of the number on your scale.

How to Find Your Natural Weight

Your natural weight is the number that arises when you eat as much as you naturally feel like from a varied diet dominated by whole foods.

In other words, you allow your body’s natural satiety response to regulate your calorie intake by 1) removing toxic foods designed to make you overeat and 2) ensuring that all your nutritional needs are met (naturally).

There are three simple guidelines that define such a diet:

  1. Consume more than 80% of your calories from whole foods. Regularly eat from each of these four categories: 1) nuts, seeds, and berries, 2) cooked and raw veggies, 3) avocado and other fruit, and 4) non-meat proteins (here, mildly processed foods are also OK).
  2. Eat at least 30 different types of whole foods every day. This is much easier than it sounds.
  3. Commit to always pay the true cost of the foods you buy. The best way is to use charitable donations for offsetting the societal damages caused by any empty calorie purchases. A good starting point is to give $7 for every 1000 calories of unhealthy food.

Regularly moving your body is important too, but diet comes first. As you approach your natural weight and start noticing much-improved vitality from your healthy, whole-food diet, exercise will follow naturally.

If you stick to these guidelines, you can eat as much as you feel like and be 100% comfortable with the result. Whatever the scale says, you would have given your body every chance to stay healthy and contribute to society.

But be prepared: Transitioning from the Standard American Diet (SAD) to a healthy, whole-food diet can be tough. Empty calories are drugs, and they can be just as hard to quit as smoking. This empty-calorie detox plan can help you through this challenging transition period, one step at a time.

What is Your Natural Weight?

The researcher in me is very curious about the variation in natural weight within the human population. I’m lucky enough that my natural weight is at the optimal point according to the Smart BMI calculator. That means I’m blessed with genes that align my natural weight with societal expectations.

Not everyone will be this lucky, but I would like to believe it’s impossible to become obese on a varied, whole-food diet. When you cut out almost all empty calories, it might even be difficult to become overweight. I could not find any studies that directly test this hypothesis, so I’m very curious to learn more about different people’s natural weights.

If you maintain the kind of diet described above, please share your Smart BMI in the comments below. Also, if you’re currently overweight and commit to a varied, whole-food diet with almost no empty calories, I would love to hear about your progress after a few months!

But whatever the result may be, know that society cannot expect you to change your genetic makeup. To be honest, it can’t even expect you to maintain a perfect diet when it constantly tries to addict you to empty-calorie drugs. Anyone who maintains a varied, whole-food diet under these circumstances is doing society a massive service, regardless of their bodyweight.

For that, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. 😊

Thanks to Alta Cloete.

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The 5 Levels of Empty-Calorie Detox

Awakening, Upgrading, Governing, Designing, and, for the truly committed among us, Abstaining

Created by Janet Cloete using images by artistlike and Gerd Altmann from Pixabay.

If you live in the Western World, your likelihood to be addicted to illicit drugs is about 2%. Softer addictions like alcohol and nicotine are more common at around 20%.

But there is another category of addictive substances that affects most of the population: all those irresistible, nutrient-free treats rich in refined carbs, saturated fats, and salt, collectively known as empty calories. The science is now becoming clearer on how these substances lead to consumption disorders and addiction, especially sugar.

Basically, these hyper-palatable foods stimulate the reward centers in the brain (like all other drugs), encouraging more consumption even when safe limits have long since been crossed.

This response comes from our evolutionary history where food was scarce, and binging was important for survival. In today’s world of caloric abundance, this outdated survival instinct has quite the opposite effect.

“Food addiction” remains a contentious term, mainly because empty calories are obviously much less addictive and harmful than illicit drugs like heroin or cocaine. However, while less than 2000 tons of cocaine are produced each year (most of which is successfully seized by authorities), the world uses 172 million tons of sugar.

Thus, even if sugar is 1000 times less harmful than cocaine, its effect on society is much larger simply because we use 100000 times more of it. In fact, empty calories are the single costliest burden humanity faces today.

Lightening this terrible societal burden is the primary motivation behind this article. If you’re prone to empty-calorie impulse buying or even if you just know you’re eating more sugary treats than is good for you, please read on.

The Five Levels of Empty-Calorie Detox

Below, you’ll find five detox levels, arranged from basic to complete. When considering these levels, remember that empty calories are not nearly as harmful pound-for-pound as illicit drugs, so total abstinence is not required. Even Level 1 can help you make a sizable dent in your empty-calorie intake to the benefit of yourself, your loved ones, and your society.

If I had to recommend a level to aim for, it would be Level 3. This is the Pareto-level where you can avoid 80% of the problems with only 20% of the effort.

I’ve been at Level 4 for several months now, and it’s been a positive experience that I will happily recommend to anyone who is serious about their health. However, I think the total empty-calorie abstinence of Level 5 could be a step too far.

So, don’t rush it! Empty calories are soft drugs and, unless you lock yourself away in empty-calorie rehab (no joke, society could use such institutions), pushing too hard too early will only end in a hard relapse. Thus, take it one step at a time and only level-up once you feel strong and motivated enough to commit 100%.

And when you reach a level you’re comfortable with for the long-run, that’s totally fine. Anything above Level 0 is a win for yourself and your world.

Level 1: Awakening

We all know that certain foods are good for us and others less so. But few people understand the true cost of our massive indulgence in nutrient-poor foods designed to make us overeat. In fact, the word “food” shouldn’t even be used to describe these slow poisons.

Simply taking a bit of time to learn just how bad they truly are will give you ample motivation to start your detox journey.

So, please take 5 minutes to scan through this article on the social costs of empty calories. That’s it. Five minutes is all you need to do to reach Level 1.

Following this exercise, you might notice some interesting changes in your mindset. Be mindful of this the next time you walk into a carefully designed empty-calorie ambush. Your newfound understanding of how much damage those brightly decorated packets of instant pleasure do to society should make it much easier to resist their charm.

Over time, this creates a powerful empty-calorie deterrent. For example, after all the hours I’ve spent researching this topic, I’m now more disappointed than tempted by the empty calories that lurk around every corner of the supermarket. Thus, I just sigh and walk past the temptation without wasting any willpower (which feels pretty good, to be honest).

Level 2: Upgrading

Unfortunately, the addictive allure of empty calories is so strong that most of us will need more than a simple intellectual understanding to break our addiction. Some gradual replacement therapy is a great tool to further increase our awareness. That’s why the next step is to become more selective about the sugary and fatty treats you allow into your body.

On this level, you strike a bargain with yourself to only indulge in top-quality culinary treats that contain at least some nutritional value.

Examples include premium dark chocolate, quality ice cream with berries, yogurt-covered nuts, and gourmet cheeses or cured meats.

Still allowing yourself access to these luxurious “somewhat empty calories” makes it considerably easier to permanently abandon all those cheap and dangerous “totally empty calories” like candy, cake and cookies, cheap chocolate and ice cream, potato chips, and soda.

The high cost of such “somewhat empty calories” will also naturally temper your consumption. You could start by working out how much money you previously wasted on cheap “totally empty calories” and set that as your budget for enjoying these premium treats.

Level 3: Governing

The third level is where you do for yourself what governments should have started doing for society long ago: make sure that you always pay the full societal cost when you buy empty calories.

The best way to reach this level is to draw up your very own charitable donations contract to govern your empty-calorie intake.

This contract specifies the amount you will pay to your favorite charity whenever you engage in any clearly defined act of self-sabotage. Purchases of empty calories should be the very first item on your charitable donations contract. My best estimate of the social cost of empty calories is $7 per 1000 kcal — a good foundation for these donations.

Give it a go! It works like a charm. Not only will this arrangement give a big boost to your health; it will also help you support some great causes. Helping others by improving yourself is an awesome feeling.

And don’t be put off by the word “contract.” It could be as simple as writing a quick note about how much you will pay which charity, signing it, and sticking it on the fridge.

Level 4: Designing

After you’ve spent some time at Level 3, you may realize something peculiar: Although your empty calorie intake has greatly reduced, your life has not gotten any worse. You might even have to admit that things are better now that you’ve shed a few pounds without even trying, enjoy higher energy levels, and no longer suffer from empty-calorie guilt.

When you reach this point, you could consider upgrading to Level 4.

At this level, you commit to designing your life so that almost all of it happens in environments free from empty calories (including common table sugar).

Your home is the first and most important of these environments, with your workplace second.

Implementing such no-empty-calorie zones involves some interesting psychology. If you do it too early, your mind might rebel and lead you on an empty calorie binge out of pure spite. But if you time it just right, your mind might accept. This is a surprisingly liberating state where you no longer need to engage in that annoying empty-calorie debate every time you pass the chocolate aisle in the supermarket. Instead, the decision is made beforehand and your mind quickly learns that there will be no debate.

You’ll also notice that your healthy, whole-food diet starts tasting better as your sugar and saturated fat tolerance reduces. In addition, the occasional quality treat at a special event suddenly becomes genuine bliss. Just like any drug, excess sugar numbs your experience of sweetness, making you crave even more sugar. Reversing this process is a deeply rewarding experience.

Level 5: Abstaining

The final level is to ban all empty calories from your life. If you’ve already reached Level 4, the small additional gains you can make from taking things to this final level may not be worth it. To be honest, I don’t know because I’ve never tried it, but as mentioned earlier, I’m skeptical.

There are several cases when “somewhat empty calories” are certainly worth their full societal cost. For instance, if you’re at a memorable celebration where the point is to eat, drink, and make merry, you might spoil the mood if you demand to be served exclusively whole foods. Similarly, if a friend invites you over and goes through the effort of preparing a delicious dessert, letting yourself freely enjoy it brings great social benefits. A delicious treat can also help soothe the pain when life has dealt you a serious low-blow (although you should be careful that this does not trigger a relapse).

If you truly commit to Level 5, your friends will learn that you don’t do any unhealthy food. You’ll just need to make sure that people know of your principles beforehand, almost like a vegan or someone who’s gluten intolerant. Thus, it’s certainly possible. I’m just not sure it’s worth it.

Be Clear About What Qualifies as Empty Calories

If you plan to progress through the levels outlined above, I strongly recommend sitting down and making some firm decisions on where you draw the empty-calorie line. As mentioned earlier, there are many “totally empty calories” that are open-and-shut cases. But there are also those “somewhat empty calories” that at least offer some nutritional value.

The most general empty-calorie definition I can come up with goes like this: A food rich in refined carbs, saturated fats, or salt you mostly eat for emotional reasons. And here’s an even shorter version:

Listen to your conscience. Deep down, you know which foods do you more harm than good.

Drawing a hard and firm line is crucial to avoid wasting energy and willpower on endless empty-calorie rationalizations. Trust me, an addicted mind can come up with extremely creative rationalizations to keep using. Don’t fall into that trap.

Other than that, I can only wish you hearty good luck! Although it might not feel so initially, life gets much better once you break your empty-calorie dependence. I sincerely hope you get to experience this for yourself 😊

Thanks to Alta Cloete.

Real cost of empty calories
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The Social Cost of Empty Calories

Here are the true prices of your favorite sweet, fatty, and salty treats:

The wholesale price (Walmart/Target) of popular empty calories when social costs are factored in. All images from pixy.org.

Would it surprise you when I say that empty calories are the single most destructive element in our society today?

It sure surprised me when this thought first crossed my mind. I love chocolate, chips, and ice cream just as much as the next guy (possibly even more), so I certainly didn’t want to make this discovery. But the more I looked into it, the more it made sense.

Indeed, empty calories cost society more than any other terrible thing you can think of — war, violence, and terrorism, smoking, alcohol, and other drugs, climate change and other environmental damages — empty calories beat them all.

In this article, I’ll break down the numbers and estimate the true social cost of some of our most popular health-destroying treats.

Obesity

Let’s start with the most visible and broadly discussed impact of empty calories. By itself, obesity was almost the greatest single man-made social burden in 2014 (see the image below). And given the rate at which it’s expanding, it probably takes top spot today (around $2.5 trillion). The damages could even be substantially greater. For example, this report puts the cost of obesity at $1.7 trillion for the United States alone — a staggering 9.3% of total economic output!

Image source.

Although physical inactivity does play a part, empty calories must take most of the blame for the global obesity epidemic. Healthy levels of exercise increase our calorie burn by about 15%, which is countered by a natural increase in appetite. In contrast, the ruinous effects of empty calories on our bodies’ natural satiety response can easily make us binge double the recommended daily calorie allowance.

In fact, I’m not even sure it’s possible to become obese without consuming any empty calories. If you know of someone who stays obese on an empty-calorie-free whole-food diet, I would be very interested in learning more.

Overall, I would lay 50–90% of the blame for the obesity epidemic on empty calories. This equates to about $1.8 trillion per year.

Absenteeism and Presenteeism

But obesity is not even the most damaging effect of empty calories. An even greater cost comes from the degree to which these unhealthy treats create nutritional deficiencies. They do this by taking up such a large fraction of our daily caloric requirement (ultra-processed foods make up almost 60% of the average American diet) that there is simply not enough room left for the nutrient-rich foods our bodies need to stay healthy.

The most direct effect of our overfed and undernourished society is high levels of absenteeism (inability to work due to illness) and presenteeism (trying to work while ill). An average of around 12 sick days per year subtracts about 5% of global productive output, with presenteeism accounting for much more. These costs are particularly severe in Asia, where the average employee in Hong Kong is losing an astounding 77 workdays.

Image source.

It’s hard to believe such numbers. If we estimate the average global productivity loss at 40 workdays per individual, that adds up to 18% of total economic output or $16 trillion of lost value per year — greater than the entire economy of China!

How much of this crazy number would be eliminated if empty calories vanished from society? That’s hard to say. Other factors such as stress, mental illness, and other unhealthy lifestyle choices like smoking and alcohol abuse also play major roles. However, my experience shows that excellent nutrition has the power to eliminate common illnesses, even when other factors like stress and sleep are far from ideal. Others I know who made similar changes to their lifestyles confirmed this notion.

Sadly, unhealthy diet is the largest behavioral health issue in the workplace today, with two-thirds of people reporting not meeting generally accepted healthy eating standards (which is quite a low bar in the first place).

Image source.

To better isolate the effects of poor nutrition, we need to subtract other factors from this massive total cost. The share of productivity losses in the total obesity burden mentioned in the obesity report discussed earlier is about 70%. If we subtract 70% of the costs related to obesity, smoking, and alcohol from that report and the costs of mental illness discussed next, we’re left with $9.5 trillion in damages.

Much of this is caused by common illnesses that can be largely prevented by eliminating empty calories and eating a whole-food diet supplying the body with all necessary nutrients. Thus, I would attribute 20–60% of this huge societal burden to empty calories.

Mental Illness

I’ve previously made the statement that Western society has successfully weaponized food for psychological torture. This is no hyperbole. A society that idolizes overly thin body shapes while surrounding itself with ultra-addictive substances purpose-built to encourage overeating guarantees widespread psychological problems. Women are particularly affected by this problem, mainly due to huge social pressures to achieve the impossible beauty standards portrayed in the media.

Mental illness could be costing the world even more than obesity. This report puts the cost at a whopping 3.8% of GDP (about $3.3 trillion), about half of it from depression. How much of this can be linked to the poor body image and general poor health created by empty calories is unknown, but you can probably imagine that it would be a substantial fraction. I would put it somewhere between 10 and 40%.

Growth Prospects

Out of all these scary numbers, the thing that frightens me most is how rapidly these massive societal costs are growing. As hundreds of millions of developing world citizens join the middle-class, empty calories are among the first small luxuries that become readily available. Addiction quickly takes hold, leading the developing world to follow the developed world to becoming seriously overfed and undernourished.

Image source.

We must stop this madness. Easily the best way would be to tax ultra-processed foods to correctly reflect these massive societal costs, but we’re a long way from getting this done. So, for the time being, our only choice is to take full personal responsibility for ourselves and our societies. To do this, we need a proper understanding of what these costs truly are.

The True Cost of Empty Calories

Adding up these estimates puts the global burden of empty calories somewhere between 3.5 and 9.3 trillion dollars. According to this study, the average American diet consists of almost 60% ultra-processed foods and only 30% whole foods. In Europe, the numbers are about half that amount, with the UK almost reaching the lamentable US level. But the best overview comes from this comprehensive study, illustrated below.

Image source.

Less than half of the foods in the figure qualify as truly addictive empty calories (contributing to obesity and mental illness), but all these foods have low nutritional value (contributing to absenteeism and presenteeism). We will therefore take two-thirds of these ultra-processed foods into account in the calculation.

This means about 85 kg of empty calories per person in the highly developed West, 25 kg in the moderately developed East and Latin America, and 10 kg in the rest of the world. This leads to an average of about 22 kg per person. At 5 kcal per gram, this amounts to about 300 kcal per person per day. Data from the same study shows that ultra-processed beverages contribute another 40 kcal, bringing the total to 340 kcal per person per day.

So, if we take the average economic burden of $6.4 trillion, this amounts to $2.3 per person per day or roughly $7 per 1000 kcal. With that in mind, let me present the true cost of some of your favorite snacks:

Made by Janet Cloete using images from pixy.org.

Please contribute to reducing this enormous burden by always paying the true cost of empty calories. A great way to do this is to use your charitable donations contract to donate $7 for every 1000 kcal of unhealthy food you buy. This allows you to naturally adopt a healthier diet while simultaneously supporting some great causes.

Just like offsetting your carbon footprint, paying the true social cost of empty calories is the right thing to do. But unlike carbon offsets, paying a fair price for empty calories brings direct benefits to you and your loved ones. Please give it a shot — it’s a true win-win scenario!

Thanks to Alta Cloete.

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How Many Different Types of Whole Food Did You Enjoy Today?

Answering this simple question can tell you more about your long-term health than any other.

Image by silviarita from Pixabay.

Do you sometimes get lost in all the health advice out there? Me too. The near-infinite number of diet plans, fitness programs, and mindfulness practices filling the internet can easily become overwhelming.

Which made me wonder: How much can we simplify things? Or better yet: Could health be boiled down to a single question?

Well, no. But answering the question in the title will tell you more about your long-term health than any other I can think of (do let me know if you come up with a more important one).

So, why is this question so vital? Because it directly addresses the biggest health problem of our time: We’re overfed and undernourished. Filling your body with a wide variety of nutritious foods will not only keep you in great health (perhaps you never get sick again); it will also help you effortlessly maintain a healthy weight.

Why the Emphasis on Variety?

It deserves repeating: The world is overfed and undernourished. Most of the food in our supermarkets is rich in calories and poor in nutrients. This makes our bodies crave more food for two reasons:

  1. Empty-calorie foods are purpose-built for addiction, shamelessly exploiting our primitive cravings for refined sugars, saturated fats, and added salt. I view this as capitalism’s single biggest failure.
  2. Nutrient deficiencies can trigger our bodies to demand more food, even when our caloric needs are met. That’s why a nutrient-rich diet is a great way to rectify unhelpful hunger signals sent by our bodies.

We’re all too aware of the impacts of consuming too many calories. But the implications of insufficient micronutrients enjoy far too little attention. Our bodies require a wide range of vitamins and minerals to function optimally, and persistent deficiencies bring all sorts of nasty consequences.

Simply put, an impressively high number behind our title question offers the perfect antidote to our “overfed and undernourished” dilemma.

Furthermore, focusing on one simple thing: maximizing the number of different whole foods you eat every day, keeps things attractively simple. A varied whole-food diet simply leaves no space for taking all those slow poisons designed to throw our food cravings all out of whack.

So, let’s see how we can load up on a wide variety of whole foods in a highly practical and deeply enjoyable manner.

The Four Whole-Food Categories

The first objection to a healthy, whole-food diet is that it’s not practical in a busy modern lifestyle. We simply don’t have the time and energy to turn multiple whole ingredients into tasty meals day after day.

Second, we meet the objection that whole foods are no fun. What’s the use of living longer when we cannot enjoy the good things life has to offer?

Let’s put these two limiting beliefs to bed right now. The ideas in the following sections make it so practical and pleasant to enjoy a wide range of whole foods that there will be no excuses left.

1. Nuts, Seeds, and Berries

This is my all-time favorite whole-food category. Not only because of the incredible health benefits and the fantastic taste but also because of the great practicality. You can check out this article to learn how to turn 16 healthy ingredients into a delicious breakfast in as little as two minutes.

The key is to buy nuts, seeds, and berries that are already premixed. In the case of seeds, you’ll most likely need to do this yourself, but, if done smartly, the required time investment is negligible. Buying and premixing your seeds in bulk is also great for your wallet.

In short, if you set this up well, you’ll have a lifelong healthy breakfast that is a pleasure to eat and a breeze to prepare.

2. Cooked and Raw Veggies

Vegetables have developed into rather unfortunate symbols of the sacrifice we must make to live healthy lives. Preparing them can also become a rather tedious task.

Luckily, there’s a straightforward solution to both these concerns. The “meat as vegetable dressing” flexitarian eating philosophy offers a fantastic combo of health, taste, and practicality, throwing in a clean conscience as a bonus. Such meals are perfect for cooking in large batches and freezing for later use. Here are some delicious recipes that will cost you no more than 5 minutes for each of your daily warm meals.

When it comes to raw veggies, simply treat them as snacks. Always have some cherry tomatoes, carrots, or peas lying around the house where you can easily see them. These veggies not only make surprisingly tasty snacks; they also help to naturally control cravings. Another simple idea is to have a green salad (or just a few cucumber slices) next to every warm meal.

Lastly, I strongly recommend building a green smoothie habit. This health cocktail is also best made in bulk and frozen. Do this, and you’ll pay well under a minute of your precious time per glass of green smoothie.

3. Avocado and Other Fruit

Fruit has come under fire in recent years for its high fructose content, but it remains an important source of nutritional variety. Raw veggies are a better snacking option, but adding your favorite fruits into the mix is no problem. Pressed fruit juice is also OK as long as it contains no added sugar.

But there’s one fruit that deserves special mention: the avocado. This fruit is unique because it barely contains any sugar, providing loads of healthy monounsaturated fats instead. If you master the art of avocado management, turning this delicious food into a staple is also very practical.

Start by buying your avocados while they’re still rock hard to avoid any nasty bruises. Then just let them ripen naturally at home. Do a quick check once per day to find the ripe ones and transfer them to the fridge, where they will last for more than a week. With a little practice, you’ll soon learn to manage your avo stockpile so that you always have several perfectly ripened specimens in the fridge just waiting to be eaten.

4. Non-Meat Protein

Protein is the only macronutrient broadly accepted in the dieting community, with both fats and carbs often triggering extreme opinions. But many high-protein foods have another problem: serious environmental and animal welfare impacts. That’s why this category excludes meat.

Luckily, there are plenty of tasty and convenient non-meat alternatives at our disposal. When looking at animal products, fish, eggs, and dairy offer many healthy and delicious options. Eggs are a particularly good option in terms of practicality. Everyone should know how to whip up a good omelet or perfect scrambled eggs in a few short minutes.

When looking at plant proteins, legumes are king. They’re also perfect candidates for the “meat as a vegetable dressing” warm meals mentioned earlier. You can mostly buy these foods canned or dried and add them to the pot with no extra effort.

Putting It All Together

Here are the best time-saving strategies for maximizing your whole food variety and enjoyment:

  • Design your super breakfast of nuts, seeds, and berries.
  • Cook your warm meals in bulk based on the “meat as a vegetable dressing” philosophy, freezing them for highly convenient warm lunches.
  • Make sure to include plenty of legumes in these warm meals.
  • Prominently display raw vegetables as your primary snack foods.
  • Establish a green smoothie habit and regularly include a green salad next to your warm meals.
  • Master the art of avocado management.
  • Learn to whip up some eggs in a matter of minutes.

These habits help me eat about 40 different whole foods every day without spending more than 10 minutes on food preparation. This varied whole food diet naturally controls my cravings, helping me maintain my ideal weight and never get sick without investing any of my limited willpower. Whenever I feel hungry, I eat something I enjoy. Simple as that.

So, how many different types of whole food did you enjoy today? And, more importantly, how many will be you enjoying tomorrow?

Thanks to Alta Cloete.

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How to Eat as Much as You Want and Never Get Fat

Feast on the right foods and your body will know when to stop.

Compiled from images by Pixabay and Dmitry Mishin

Let’s start with an unusual statement: Western culture has weaponized food for psychological torture.

This is no hyperbole. On the one hand, our culture idealizes overly thin bodies and, on the other, it surrounds us with foods purpose-built to make us overeat — the perfect recipe for food-induced misery.

Now, don’t get me wrong; we should certainly keep each other accountable to avoid obesity (which costs society a mind-boggling $2 trillion every year), but social pressures to be excessively thin have long been out of hand. Ironically, these pressures only make us gain more weight.

It’s high time we straighten out this twisted system. First, let’s ignore social conventions and define “fat” as the point where health risks become serious. That would be the “high” or “very high” risk bands in this calculator (orange and red areas in the figure below).

My Smart BMI positioning from eating as much whole food as I feel like.

Second, let’s replace all those sugary, fatty, and salty addictions with a healthy and varied whole-food diet. I’m confident that getting “fat” on such a diet will be very difficult, even if you give yourself complete freedom to eat as much as you feel like (sounds nice, doesn’t it?).

When diligently adhering to the following steps, you might even find it impossible to break out of that pretty green band in the figure above 🙂

  1. Stock your kitchen with all the right foods.
  2. Make sure you always pay the true cost of empty calories.
  3. Drink plenty of water and use it as an intelligent snack moderator.
  4. Use your toothbrush to help you stop when 80% full (Hara Hachi Bu).
  5. Find good reasons outside yourself to maintain your healthy diet.

So, if you’re currently at an unhealthy weight (or spending a huge amount of time, money, and energy maintaining your healthy weight), I challenge you to stay (or get) fat on this eat-as-much-as-you-want diet. Let me know if you manage to do it. I sure couldn’t!

Step 1: A Home Stocked with the Right Foods

The best weight-loss tool out there is not a gym membership or a smoothie maker; it’s a home that contains only filling, whole foods. By extension, this also means that you need to make almost all your food at home (which doesn’t need to cost you more than 15 minutes per day).

Below, you’ll find the four categories of whole foods you need to invite into your home. For optimal results, make sure that more than 80% of your calories come from these four categories, with at least 10% from each. Here are some handy links to calculate your calorie requirement and the calorie content of different foods. In addition, maximize variety by regularly eating from each item mentioned in the four titles below.

Nuts, Seeds, and Berries

Nuts and seeds have a bad reputation due to their high-fat content and energy density. But if you ensure they’re not doctored by those mad addictive food scientists (using all their refined sugar, saturated fat, and excessive salt), your body’s natural satiety response will keep you safe. Here’s an ideal breakfast to help get you started.

Cooked and Raw Veggies (at Least a Third Non-Starchy)

Vegetables, especially the non-starchy variety, are the best filling foods at our disposal simply because they contain so few calories per volume of food. That’s why this category will be your biggest challenge in meeting the “10% of calories” guideline. To pass this test, you’ll have to rely heavily on both cooked and raw non-starchy veggies, given that they only contain about 30 calories per 100 g of food.

Cooked veggies can be rather bland, but it doesn’t have to be that way. There are plenty of ways to spice up your cooked veggies. My favorite is to use a little meat as a vegetable dressing.

Raw veggies make surprisingly good snacks. Always have some carrots, cherry tomatoes, or peas readily available in places you’ll frequently see them. These guys can be surprisingly tasty, so snack away with reckless abandon! Also, turn the green salad (or just a few cucumber slices) into a staple next to your warm meals. Last but not least, establish a green smoothie habit.

Avocado and Other Fruit

If you experience withdrawal symptoms from kicking your refined sugar addiction, fruit is a great way to ease the pain. Its natural sweetness will see you safely through to the other side. Whole, pressed fruit juices are also allowed as long as they don’t contain any added sugar.

One special (and not particularly sweet) fruit deserves its own paragraph: the avocado. You’ll frequently see this unique fruit in lists of the world’s healthiest foods. Given its high-fat content in contrast to the high carbohydrate content in most other fruits, it’s perfect for balancing your macronutrient intake.

Non-Meat Proteins from Animals and Plants

Among animal products, this category puts the threshold at 7 g of protein per 100 calories. Eggs, fish, and some dairy products meet this criterion. Most cheeses do not due to their high saturated fat content. Also, for environmental reasons, please keep your total animal product intake (including meat) below 20% of your total calories.

From the plant-world, the threshold is lowered slightly to 5 g of protein per 100 calories. Many legumes qualify for this prestigious category (those that don’t can go to the vegetable category). You can also try protein-stacked algae like spirulina and chlorella. Although not counted in this category, the nuts and seeds we discussed earlier will also make sizable contributions to your plant protein intake.

Step 2: Pay the True Cost of Empty Calories

Getting at least 80% of your calories from the above-mentioned foods offers excellent protection against all those dangerous empty calories purpose-built for addiction. But you can go a step further: fix capitalism’s worst failure by ensuring you always pay the true cost of these junk foods.

The best way to do this is to include any purchase of empty calories in your charitable donations contract — a formal contract listing the unhealthy actions that will increase the amount you give to charity. A good place to start is to donate one hour’s wages every time you buy empty calories.

What qualifies as empty calories? Anything with lots of calories and few nutrients that you buy in pursuit of an addictive dopamine hit. Some are obvious, while others, like dark chocolate and cheese, are more debatable. Your conscience will tell you where to draw the line. Listen to it.

Another dangerous element deserving a prime spot on your charity contract is your main binge trigger(s). For me, this is eating in front of the TV. Such triggers can very easily corrupt your mind and your natural satiety responses, driving you to unnecessary self-destruction.

Step 3: Water and Snacking

Staying hydrated is an excellent way to control cravings. This dieting challenge has three water guidelines:

  1. Drink two glasses of water directly after waking up.
  2. Drink a glass of water before every snack.
  3. Always have a bottle of water within arm’s length.

Point 2 is an especially effective way of controlling excessive snacking. Often, mild dehydration is a contributor to unhelpful cravings, and snacking is something we do out of impulse. This rule automatically takes care of both these issues.

Step 4: Hara Hachi Bu

This age-old practice of stopping when you’re 80% full is one reason why Japanese people, particularly the residents of Okinawa, live such long lives. Make sure you control your portion sizes to meet this guideline, and if you still feel serious cravings when your plate is empty, go and brush your teeth. Getting the food taste out of your mouth is often all that’s needed to kill those pesky cravings.

On the rare occasion that your craving persists even when your mouth is minty fresh, feel free to enjoy a healthy snack preceded by a glass of water.

Step 5: Find Your External Motivation

The last rule in this eat-as-much-as-you-want diet challenge is to find some motivation outside of yourself for eating all the right foods. This article discusses a range of options, including correcting grave social injustices, saving the environment, protecting animal welfare, and securing the health of your loved ones.

To put this into action, print out a large picture representing your chosen external motivation and put it on your fridge door.

The Challenge in a Nutshell

So, are you up for it? Here’s a short rundown of the rules:

  1. Get 80% or more of your calories from the following food categories, at least 10% from each: nuts, seeds, and berries; cooked and raw veggies (at least a third non-starchy); avocado and other fruit; non-meat protein from animals and plants.
  2. For variety, consume foods from each of the food sub-categories mentioned above at least twice per week (vegans can skip the animal protein and use a threshold of 4 g per 100 calories).
  3. Include the purchase of any empty calories and engagement in any of your binge triggers in your charitable donations contract.
  4. Follow the water guidelines: 2 glasses first thing in the morning, 1 glass before any snack, and a water bottle always within reach.
  5. Once you reach 80% fullness, you can only eat more after you’ve brushed your teeth.
  6. Decorate your fridge door with a big picture symbolizing your chosen external motivation for healthy eating.

As long as you stick to these rules, you can eat as much as you feel like!

I’m really curious whether anyone can stay (or become) “fat” while adhering to these rules. Please let me know how you got on with this challenge!

Thanks to Alta Cloete.

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What 10 Years of Green Smoothies Taught Me About the Art of Healthy Eating

Let’s take willpower out of the equation…

Image by NatureFriend from Pixabay.

Spinach, kale, celery, cucumber, apple, ginger, and turmeric.

This is the rather intimidating list of ingredients I’ve been ingesting in the form of a green smoothie almost every day for the last 10 years.

To understand the magnitude of this achievement, we need a quick rewind to my childhood. There, we find a well-meaning mother struggling to get her stubborn son to eat even the tiniest serving of veggies, let alone green things like kale and spinach. The best she could manage was some well-disguised carrots and potatoes in meat-centered casseroles and the occasional bribe for eating a few slices of cucumber on the side.

So, imagine her surprise when I started eating (or drinking) spinach, kale, and celery on a daily basis! But this was a special time — the start of my healthy living transformation — and I was highly motivated to change (a serious cancer scare can do that to you). When The World’s Healthiest Foods showed me that spinach was the most nutrient-dense thing on the planet, I knew I had to find a way to get more green stuff into my body.

Still, despite this surge of motivation, there were two serious obstacles in my way: 1) eating these bland greens was no fun whatsoever, and 2) making a daily smoothy (and cleaning up afterward) was even less fun.

The process of overcoming these obstacles gave me the key to lifelong healthy eating in a world filled with addictive empty-calorie treats (and inspired one delighted mom to adopt the green smoothie habit herself).

Today, I’d like to share this key with you.

Pain-Free Healthy Eating

Humans have strong instincts to chase instant pleasure and avoid instant pain. These are the instincts so shamelessly exploited by food companies to create the ultra-addictive treats that fuel our global obesity epidemic.

Here’s the rub: If you’re expecting yourself to consistently accept instant pain and forego all pleasure in the name of healthy eating, you’re deluding yourself. You might last a week, a month if you’re extremely motivated, but sooner or later, you’ll cave. And when you do, you’re likely to binge away all the progress you’ve made in no time flat.

No, healthy eating should not be painful. In fact, we should do everything in our power to make it as pleasurable as possible! It was this realization that started my lifelong green smoothie habit.

After learning about the health benefits of spinach, I tried several ways to prepare it and hated them all. Cooked spinach is just deeply unpleasant unless drowned in an unholy amount of cheese. Following many failed attempts, I finally happened upon the idea of a green smoothie.

What attracted me to this idea was the inclusion of apples and any kind of fruit juice. I liked several fruit juices and did not mind the occasional apple, so I thought to give this a try. At first, my ratios were rather lopsided towards apples and orange juice, but it worked: I found the resulting green smoothie quite tolerable, even mildly pleasant at times.

Over the years, I’ve gradually increased the spinach and kale fraction, reduced the orange juice, and switched to more expensive pressed juice with pulp. But this transition has been so gradual that it never threatened my commitment to my daily green smoothie.

More importantly, this philosophy soon flowed over to my other meals. For breakfast, I’ve come up with a genuinely delicious mix of nuts, seeds, and berries. For lunch, I use the meat as a vegetable dressing philosophy to bring great pleasure to the consumption of copious quantities of cooked veggies. And, for dinner, I mostly indulge in my favorite fruit, the avocado, on some seed-sprinkled crackers with a delightful bit of smoked salmon on top.

Because they are delicious, these ultra-healthy meals work with my natural instincts instead of against them. The result? Lifelong healthy eating habits without having to waste any of my preciously limited willpower reserves.

Effort Minimization

Our desire to avoid instant pain extends beyond our aversion to tasteless healthy food. Indeed, our food not only needs to be tasty; it also needs to be effortless.

This is a major challenge when it comes to green smoothies. The process of chopping up vegetables, blending them, and cleaning up afterward is no fun whatsoever. I soon realized that expecting myself to repeat this process every couple of days was never going to happen.

So, I decided to explore economies of scale. First, I bought a large smoothie maker and some freezer containers. Then, like any good engineer, I proceeded to optimize the process. I bought enough ingredients for two months of green smoothies, chopped them all up, arranged them in six piles for easy blending, blended one after the other, stored the product in the freezer containers, and cleaned up.

Soon, I had this workflow optimized to the point that it took less than 40 minutes to make 2 months’ worth of green smoothies. In other words, each smoothie costs me about 40 seconds, which is a price my lazy instincts are willing to pay for lifelong health.

Again, this philosophy soon spread to the rest of my eating regimen. For breakfast, I optimized the workflow so I could combine 16 healthy and delicious ingredients in a mere 2 minutes. For lunch, I followed the same bulk-prep-and-freeze strategy as with the green drink, creating ultra-convenient daily hot lunches for a mere 5 minutes a pop. For dinner, I developed a solid system for reliable avocado ripening and learned a few simple alternative recipes for some variation.

Overall, I spend an average of 10 minutes per day preparing my deeply enjoyable healthy meals. More importantly, the need for willpower is concentrated into a single session per month. On all the other days, the willpower requirement is zero.

To Sum Up

If you want to enjoy a (substantially longer and more rewarding) lifetime of healthy food, you must:

  1. Make your healthy foods as desirable as possible. Putting healthy food into your body should require no willpower whatsoever.
  2. Make healthy eating effortless. Concentrate your food preparation in large batches to restrict willpower requirements to once or twice per month.

Setting this up takes a bit of time, but you will enjoy rich returns for the rest of your life. I sure hope you give it a go!

Thanks to Alta Cloete.

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Give Karma a Helping Hand: How to Leverage Your Charitable Donations to Build Better Habits

Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay.
Karma provides the bridge between cause and effect separated by time. — Paraphrased from the Encyclopedia Britannica.

We’d all like to believe that doing good deeds in the present (cause) will lead to good consequences in the future (effect). The problem is that Karma does not offer any guarantee that good deeds will be rewarded any time soon. In fact, the reward may only come in a future life!

But what if we could give Karma a little nudge? What if we could take a good deed, like regular charitable donations, and mold it into a guaranteed positive effect, like lifelong healthy eating habits?

Today’s article shares an attractively simple and extremely effective method to do just that.

Want to Break a Bad Habit? Make It Expensive

Last week’s article got all worked up about capitalism’s greatest failure: all those ultra-addictive nutrient-free calorie-bombs that impose such a terrible burden on individuals and society alike.

Fixing this problem is laughably simple in theory: tax different foods according to the well-understood long-term effects they have on our health, productivity, and environment.

Sadly, translating this simple theory into practice is a whole lot harder.

But we don’t need to keep struggling through life surrounded by all these terribly twisted incentives. We can fix capitalism in our own little worlds at minimal cost and enjoy all the great benefits that follow.

Your Personal Charity Contract

Yes, if the politicians won’t step up, simply do it yourself. Draw up a formal contract in which you list the amount you’ll give to charity every time you engage in a self-sabotaging habit.

Keep it very simple, and make sure your definition of each self-destructive action is crystal clear. If not, you’ll very quickly figure out ways to game your own system. Here is my list as an example:

  • Buying any empty calories.
  • Eating while watching TV (my biggest binge-eating trigger).
  • More than 0.5 kg of daily weight gain (violation of Hara Hachi Bu).
  • A visible red bar on RescueTime (more than 30 minutes of distracting activities on my PC).
  • Not getting up after my fitness band buzzes to indicate 1 hour of inactivity.
  • Streaming/downloading any video content with questionable legality.

Whenever I engage in any of these clearly defined modes of self-sabotage, I must donate $30 (about one hour’s worth of after-tax income) to charity. Most months, I trip up a few times, and that’s just fine. Thus far, it’s gotten me almost half-way to offsetting my entire life’s carbon footprint.

But there are also months when this system gives me Jesus-like levels of self-control. These months, I pay nothing to charity, and that’s just fine too. Perfectly healthy and productive living contributes enormous value to society in and of itself.

Don’t Forget the Carrots!

An incentive system that’s all stick and no carrot is no fun. That’s why your contract should also include some small incentives for building nurturing habits. Here are mine:

  • Eat from each of these five food categories daily: raw veggies, cooked veggies, fruits & berries, nuts & seeds, and non-meat proteins.
  • Drink a glass of water before every snack.
  • Keep my eating window shorter than 12 hours.
  • Fully complete my morning and evening routines.
  • A conversation or presentation where I did everything right.
  • Successfully reframe any counterproductive self-talk.
  • Complete a successful meditation session (fully present).

Every time I do one of these things, I earn back 10 cents. Over the course of a month, consistently nourishing behavior can earn enough to cancel out one of the penalties from the previous section.

I settle the balance at the end of every month. That means that a perfect month with no self-destruction and plenty of self-nourishment earns me one free treat from my penalty list. I can tell you: chocolate has never tasted as good as when it was earned over a perfect month 🙂

Bean Counting

Keeping track of these carrots and sticks is a breeze if you already commit 2 minutes to your Graph of Life every morning. If the Graph of Life is not for you, a simple counter app on your phone will also do the trick.

At the end of every month, donate the balance to your selected charity. My favorites include the education of girls and women and carbon offsets in the form of community-centered projects — both of which help those who were not as lucky as us to win at the lottery of birth.

Make sure you set your penalties and rewards so that your average month forces you to pay an amount you’re a little uncomfortable with. This will give you the incentive needed to improve your habits.

I strongly recommend that you give this a try! Good Karma tends to follow those who practice healthy and productive habits day after day.

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Low-Fat, Low-Carb, Vegan, Carnivore — The Unnecessary Extremes of Dieting

Why not keep things simple with a balanced diet of nutrient-dense whole foods?

Image compiled using photos by Nathan Dumlao, Victoria Shes, Siami Tan, and romanov.

We sure have a strange relationship with food. The world spends as much money on weight-loss products as it would cost to end world hunger. And yet, obesity trends look like this:

Image source.

In the Western world, being at a healthy weight now puts you in a shrinking minority group. Extrapolated trends from this source show that only 1 in 4 American adults are not overweight or obese.

We’ve become desperate to find quick fixes to this fundamental problem. And in our desperation, we do the typical human thing: turn to extremes.

Let’s look at three examples of this diet extremism, contrasted with the simple, balanced approach I use to maintain my ideal Smart BMI of 35/70 and never get sick.

Low-Carb or Low-Fat

We get almost all our calories from three macronutrients: carbs, fats, and protein. It’s hard to get more than 20% from protein, so the bulk of our calorie consumption must come from carbs and fats.

Major reductions in either carbs or fats (and the associated major increase in the other one) is a common theme in dieting. Low-fat diets recommend high consumption of many foods that low-carb diets avoid and vice versa.

This is all quite silly. Things that are forbidden in one type of diet become the staple of the other. Such restrictive diets severely cut down on the number of whole foods at our disposal, making it difficult to achieve healthy dietary variety in a practical, affordable, and enjoyable manner.

No, carbs are not the enemy, and neither are fats. The villains in this story are empty-calorie carbs and empty-calorie fats — all those nutrient-free treats purpose-built for addiction. Cutting these slow poisons from your life is the single best way to maintain a healthy weight. Do this, and you can freely enjoy a wide range of delicious whole-food carbs and fats.

Animal Products

Here, we also encounter a wide range of options, all the way from no animal products whatsoever to a totally carnivorous diet. It can also be a little less extreme, like vegetarian diets allowing eggs and milk and low-carb diets that recommend high meat consumption.

When talking about animal products, though, health is far from the only important consideration. We should also think long and hard about environmental impacts and animal welfare. In fact, it’s simply impossible for most world citizens to enjoy diets rich in animal products without serious environmental damage and the cruelty of factory farming.

These considerations tilt me towards low animal product consumption (especially meat). A little bit of meat can make your vegetable dishes truly delicious while providing high-quality proteins and B-vitamins, but it should be restricted to the bare minimum.

That’s why meat represents only 5% of my calorie intake, with another 10% coming from fish, eggs, and dairy. Aside from the valuable nutritional variety this provides, intelligent use of animal products in plant-rich dishes makes high vegetable consumption deeply enjoyable, securing long-term health.

Intermittent Fasting

Arguably the most popular dieting trend of recent years, intermittent fasting also attracts plenty of extremist views. Some plans impose severe restrictions on eating patterns, and some pundits even claim that when you eat is more important than what you eat.

This is complete nonsense. Obviously, binging on empty calories strictly within an 8-hour window is much unhealthier than eating a healthy, whole-food diet with no regard for fasting.

Herein lies my main gripe with all the intermittent fasting hype: The overwhelming importance given to meal timing diverts precious focus from much more important dietary considerations, such as nutrient density, variety, and moderation.

Yes, there is good evidence of the benefits of intermittent fasting, but it’s no magic bullet. That’s why I focus on nutritional quality and diversity first, adding a convenient 10–12-hour eating window as an afterthought. If I experience genuine hunger outside my eating window, I will eat something healthy, saving my limited willpower reserves for more important things.

The Real Reason Behind Our Obesity Epidemic

Ready? Here it is in two parts:

  1. We’re equipped with powerful food cravings that evolved to keep us alive over 200 millennia of extreme scarcity (before we had access to unlimited food conveniently dispensed in supermarkets).
  2. Food companies quickly learned to send these cravings into overdrive with addictive empty-calorie treats to maximize profits. Product ranges designed for the latest dieting fad grow profits even more.

This is the fundamental problem each of us must overcome to maintain a healthy diet and a healthy body weight in our affluent modern society.

So, how do we do this? Simple: Make sure you spend your time in environments that are completely free of empty calories and ultra-processed foods. Most important: Never allow these purpose-built, ultra-addictive, nutrient-free, empty-calorie-bombs into your home.

Carving out such healthy environments among all the temptations in our modern world is no easy task, but it’s the only solution that attacks the very root of the problem. So, if you’ve tried the extreme solutions mentioned earlier without much success, maybe it’s time to permanently change your environment and uproot this problem once and for all.

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3 Delicious Recipes That Make a Little Meat Go a Long Way

Your healthy, tasty, practical, and economical path to flexitarianism

Meat is a contradiction. On the one hand, it delivers delicious flavor and important nutrients. But on the other, it brings serious environmental and animal welfare challenges.

This is the dilemma that flexitarianism seeks to address.

My favorite flexitarian philosophy is called meat as a vegetable dressing. This practice never serves meat as a dish by itself. Instead, a little bit of meat is strategically deployed to make vegetables truly delicious. The three recipes shared below are designed based on this principle.

As a bonus, these dishes also freeze well to ensure maximum practicality. I exploit this feature by preparing them in bulk over the weekend and freezing them in convenient containers for delicious, healthy, economical, and highly practical warm lunches during the week.

I hope you find them as useful and enjoyable as I do!

This traditional South African dish with Malayan origins really is the ideal vegetable dressing. It’s richly flavored and perfectly textured for making large amounts of veggies taste fantastic. Originally, it was meant to flavor rice, but in this version, we replace most of the rice with vegetables.

Bobotie contains a wide array of seasonings that can be adjusted to taste, depending on whether you like your food more spicy or fruity. The recipe given below leans to the fruity side.

You can further reduce the meat content by replacing some of the minced meat with vegetarian mince (mainly soy). I generally use a ratio of 2:1, but this can be adjusted to preference.

The recipe creates about 12 servings.

Ingredients

Meat, Dairy, Eggs:

  • 1 kg (2.2 lbs) mixed meat and vegetarian mince
  • 3 eggs
  • 1/2 cup milk

Vegetables:

  • 2 kg (4.4 lbs) of mixed chopped vegetables. For convenience, I use frozen bags containing chopped broccoli, carrots, baby corn, water chestnut, and parsnip, but most other vegetable mixes will also work well.
  • 2 large onions (chopped)

Seasoning & Other:

  • 2 tablespoons (tbsp) olive oil
  • Salt and pepper
  • 2 tbsp curry powder
  • 1 teaspoon (tsp) turmeric
  • 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
  • 1/3 cup lemon juice
  • 1 cup chutney (mango or peach)
  • 1/2 cup brown vinegar
  • 1/2 cup apricot jam
  • 1 1/2 cups raisins
  • 250 g (9 oz) brown rice

Instructions

  1. Preheat the oven to 200 deg C (390 deg F).
  2. Spread the (unfrozen) vegetables on a baking tray, add a little oil and salt and pepper, and bake for 30 minutes.
  3. Meanwhile, heat the oil in a cooking pot or large frying pan, and sauté the chopped onions with the curry and turmeric.
  4. Add the mince, lemon juice, salt, and pepper, and cook for 15 minutes at medium heat with frequent stirring.
  5. Add the chutney, brown vinegar, and cayenne pepper and cook for another 10 minutes at medium heat with frequent stirring.
  6. Lastly, stir in the apricot jam and the raisins, and pour the mixture into a greased baking dish.
  7. Beat the egg and milk and pour over the dish.
  8. Take the vegetables out of the oven, insert the bobotie, and bake for 1 hour.
  9. Meanwhile, cook the brown rice.
  10. Enjoy a well-deserved plate of bobotie, veggies, and rice!

This recipe contains an impressive volume of mushrooms and additional mushroom cream sauce. So, if mushrooms are among your favorite veggies (even though they’re technically fungi), this is a good recipe for you.

You can use the same mix of meat (preferably pork or poultry) and veggie mince as with the bobotie to further reduce the meat content of this dish.

For an additional veg boost, try adding a green salad on the side, particularly one containing cucumber. The crunchy cucumber texture combines surprisingly well with the lasagne in the same bite.

The recipe creates about 12 servings.

Ingredients

Meat & Dairy:

  • 1 kg (2.2 lbs) mixed meat and vegetarian mince
  • 250 g (9 oz) chopped bacon
  • 450 g (1 lb) cheese (grated)
  • 2 cups of milk

Vegetables:

  • 2 large onions (chopped)
  • 5 garlic cloves (finely chopped)
  • 300 g (11 oz) tomato purée
  • 5 green bell peppers (chopped/sliced)
  • 1 kg (2.2 lbs) mushrooms (sliced)
  • 1 large eggplant (aubergine)

Seasoning & Other:

  • Lasagna sheets
  • 4 tbsp vegetable/olive oil
  • 75 g (3 oz) mushroom cream sauce powder
  • 75 g (3 oz) butter/margarine
  • Salt and pepper

Instructions

  1. Preheat the oven to 200 deg C (390 deg F).
  2. If not precooked, cook the lasagna sheets in water with a little olive oil and a pinch of salt.
  3. Heat a little oil in a cooking pot or large frying pan. Add the chopped onions, salt and pepper, and garlic. Cook for 15 minutes at medium heat with frequent stirring.
  4. Stir in the tomato purée, cook for 5 more minutes, and set aside.
  5. Heat a little oil in a large frying pan, sauté the bell peppers and bacon, and set aside.
  6. Next, sauté the mushrooms and eggplant, add pepper to taste, and set aside.
  7. Cook the mushroom cream sauce in 2 cups of milk and 1 cup of water.
  8. Use the butter to layer a large baking dish and then add the ingredients in layers as follows: lasagna sheets, mince mix, bacon and bell peppers mix, lasagna sheets, mince mix, mushroom and eggplant mix, mushroom sauce, and cheese.
  9. Bake for 45 minutes or until golden brown.
  10. Serve with a green salad (or just a few cucumber slices) and enjoy!

There’s chili con carne (chili with meat), and then there’s chili sin carne (chili without meat). Well, this is something in between. The goal is to retain just enough meat to keep it truly delicious.

The same mix of meat and veggie mince is recommended here. As with the previous two recipes, this one also yields about 12 portions.

Ingredients

Meat:

  • 1 kg (2.2 lbs) mixed meat and vegetarian mince

Vegetables:

  • 4 red onions (chopped)
  • 5 garlic cloves (finely chopped)
  • 1 kg (2.2 lbs) carrots (sliced)
  • 6 red bell peppers (sliced or chopped)
  • 100 g (4 oz) red chilies (finely chopped)
  • 300 g (11 oz) of tomato purée
  • 1 kg (2.2 lbs) canned chopped tomato
  • 2 kg (4.4 lbs) canned kidney beans

Seasoning & Other:

  • 2 tbsp olive oil
  • Cayenne pepper
  • Salt and pepper
  • 250 g (8 oz) brown rice

Instructions

  1. Heat the oil in a large cooking pot and cook the chopped onions and mince with frequent stirring until the mince turns brown.
  2. Add the chopped garlic, carrots, red bell pepper, chili, and cayenne pepper and let it simmer for 5 minutes.
  3. Stir in the tomato purée and chopped tomato and cook for 45 minutes at medium heat with regular stirring. A bit of water can be added if the mixture becomes too dry.
  4. Add the kidney beans and let it simmer for another 15 minutes.
  5. Meanwhile, cook the rice.
  6. Add salt and pepper or additional cayenne pepper to taste.
  7. Serve and enjoy!

As a bonus fourth recipe, we have a quick and easy vegetable stew where a few pre-cooked meatballs add great taste. It’s very simple to make and a great way to load up on veggies when you’re not sure what to make for dinner.

As given, it yields about 6 portions.

Ingredients

Meat:

  • 450 g (1 lb) of pre-cooked meatballs

Vegetables:

  • 2 red onions (sliced or chopped)
  • 450 g (1 lb) carrots (sliced)
  • 2 red bell peppers (sliced or chopped)
  • 450 g (1 lb) green or asparagus beans (chopped in thirds)
  • 450 g (1 lb) small mushrooms (whole)

Seasoning & Other:

  • 2 tbsp vegetable/olive oil
  • 6 blocks vegetable broth
  • 250 g (9 oz) of barley rice
  • Salt and pepper

Instructions

  1. Add 1 liter of water to a large cooking pot, add the oil and bring to a boil.
  2. In the meantime, start chopping up the vegetables and add to the boiling pot in the following order: onions, carrots, bell peppers, beans, and mushrooms. Control the heat to keep a mild boil.
  3. Add the vegetable broth blocks and the barley rice and cook with occasional stirring for 20 minutes.
  4. Stir in the meatballs.
  5. Add salt and pepper to taste and enjoy!

Recipes and images created in collaboration with Janet Cloete.

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