diet

Meat as a vegetable dressing
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The Ethically Conscious Meat Lover’s Dilemma and How to Solve It

Use the “meat as a vegetable dressing” philosophy to keep enjoying your food without all the environmental and animal welfare baggage.

Image by Janet Cloete.

I love meat.

There, I said it. I love the taste and the texture of choice cuts from dead animals cooked to perfection. I also appreciate the high-quality protein and other nutrients these dead animals bring to the table.

But at the same time, I love the environment and despise factory farming.

Yes, meat is an environmental nightmare, especially beef and lamb (see the graphic below). Pork and poultry are several times better but still much worse than most plant products.

Image source.

Factory farming is one of the great evils of our society, but it’s the only way to supply the growing global appetite for animal products. There is simply not enough land on Earth to give all our farm animals a good life in an environment closely resembling their natural habitat.

So, what can we do?

Flexitarianism and the 5% Rule

At the risk of further angering the world’s vegans, I don’t see a problem with killing and eating animals. This is how nature works — animals higher in the food chain kill and eat animals lower in the food chain. And the apex predator of planet Earth is a hairless ape called Homo sapiens.

But I have a major problem with forcing animals to live terrible and unnatural lives before they are killed. Even worse, we do this on such a grand scale that it causes serious and lasting damage to the environment.

The solution?

Well, it’s three-fold:

  1. Limit meat to 5% of your calorie intake. Add up the calories listed on the food labels of your weekly meat purchases and aim to get it below 5% of your calorie requirement for healthy weight.
  2. Restrict red meat to once-a-year special occasions. The bulk of the 5% mentioned above should come from pork and poultry.
  3. Only buy meat if you know and approve of its origin. If you’re not sure, write to the supplier (and drop them if they don’t answer). Factory farming cannot exist without consumers turning a blind eye. In addition, ethical animal products offer significant health benefits.

Following these three rules will limit your meat purchases and force you to buy more expensive products. That’s why you, as a flexitarian or ethical omnivore, need to be smart and extract maximum reward from minimal meat consumption. Let’s see what that looks like.

Meat as a Vegetable Dressing

Limitations stimulate creativity. You’ll experience this first-hand when you start working towards 5% meat consumption. In my case, this enforced creativity led me to the “meat as a vegetable dressing” concept.

As a child, I disliked vegetables almost as much as I liked meat. My mom had to resort to all kinds of trickery and bribery to get me to eat something green. I’m not sure if it’s related, but I was also a rather sickly child. In fact, I probably wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for modern medicine.

After a mercifully “mild case of cancer” in my early 20s, it finally dawned on me that I need more vegetables in my life. So, I started eating my veggies in the only way I ever found tolerable: next to meat.

Over the years, the environmental and ethical problems of meat consumption increasingly weighed on my conscience, and the vegetable-to-meat ratio steadily grew. To my great surprise, this required no sacrifice whatsoever. I could still enjoy meat every day and, with appropriate seasoning, the vegetables actually contributed to the culinary experience.

Today, meat is relegated to little more than a vegetable dressing. Its role is to make vegetables taste awesome, and it’s doing a fine job! My vegetable intake is now so high that I’m confident my 12-year streak of perfect health will continue indefinitely 🙂

Take It Slow

Following the “meat as a vegetable dressing” principle is easy: take your favorite meat dishes and gradually increase the vegetable-to-meat ratio. As this ratio increases, you can grow more liberal with the spices to really put some zing into your meaty vegetable dressing.

In other words, you don’t need to adhere to the 5% rule right away. Just commit to steadily approaching it over time.

And there’s no need to stop at 5% either. I’m currently just below this threshold and still plan further cuts. The reason? My meat-containing meals remain so delicious that I find it difficult to adhere to Hara Hachi Bu — the healthy Japanese eating habit of stopping when you’re 80% full.

Try it! You’ll be surprised at how far you can push this simple principle without sacrificing any culinary enjoyment. I certainly was!

Your planet thanks you 🙂

New motivation for healthy diet
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A New Dose of Motivation for Building Your Lifelong Healthy Diet

How your healthy eating habits make the world a better place

Image by Janet Cloete.

Diet. Lose weight. Be happy.

This is the simplistic idea behind the almost $300 billion global weight-management industry. And the more this philosophy fails to achieve results, the larger the industry grows.

Why is it so hard to eat healthy food and avoid excess? After all, we all know the tremendous benefits of a healthy diet.

Many people have tried to explain this enigma in many different ways: habits, environment, self-control, stress, nutrient deficiency, self-image, the diet industry itself…

There’s a pattern here: an intense focus on ourselves and the ways we fall victim to external forces. Maybe it’s time for a paradigm shift…

Forget About Yourself: Do It for Others

Rule 2 of Jordan Petersen’s 12 Rules for Life is to “treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping.”

This rule was inspired by remarkable psychological research that shows how we tend to take much better care of other people, or even our pets, than we take care of ourselves.

It’s ridiculous! How can we care more about our dogs than ourselves?

One explanation that carries an uncomfortable degree of truth is that, deep down, we don’t feel like we deserve our own care. We know all our deepest and darkest secrets, our pitiful insecurities, those thoroughly embarrassing thoughts and feelings in the depths of our being.

The more we neglect self-care, the worse this internal mess becomes and the less deserving we feel. Looking after others (including our pets) is much easier because this deep and dark stuff is hidden or non-existent.

After reading this chapter in Dr. Petersen’s book, I experienced one of those special lightbulb moments. It dawned on me that improving the well-being of those around me is an important driver behind the extremely healthy diet that makes sure I never get sick.

In the rest of this article, I want to share this motivation by clearly describing the hugely positive effect your healthy diet has on the world.

Address the World’s Worst Injustice

Life can be terribly unfair. In the rich world, issues like institutional racism and gender pay-gaps take the spotlight while we habitually ignore a much greater injustice: the vast inequality of opportunity within the human population as a whole.

Here’s a sobering stat for you: The obesity health burden and the cost of the extra calories we must produce to keep over 2 billion people overweight amounts to the combined income of the poorest half of the global population. Let that sink in: The top half spends as much on overeating (and its consequences) as the bottom half spends on their entire lives!

The lottery of birth: You had roughly equal chances of being born into a life like the top image (source) or a life like the bottom image (source).

If you’re reading this, it means you’ve won the lottery of birth. Maintaining a healthy, mainly plant-based diet without unhealthy excess is an excellent way to help those who were not as lucky.

Like any other commodity, food prices work on supply and demand. When those born into affluence moderate their consumption, prices reduce, making it easier for those less fortunate to buy the food they need.

If you really want to earn your own respect, use some of the savings from buying less food (less meat in particular) to directly address the terrible injustice of inequality of opportunity. This charity is my favorite.

Combat Climate Change

Agriculture is responsible for a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions. And well over half of these originate from animal products (mostly meat), despite delivering only 17% of global calories.

Image source.

Cutting your food intake (and especially your meat consumption) is a great way to help the world combat climate change. In addition, this action will make a large contribution to addressing gross global inequality because the poor suffer disproportionately from climate change.

Mitigate Other Environmental Problems

As shown below, humanity’s three biggest breaches of planetary boundaries are phosphorus and nitrogen flows and genetic diversity. Agriculture plays a prime role in all three.

Image source.

Phosphorus and nitrogen pollution originates mainly from industrial fertilizers (without which we simply cannot feed the world). The vast land areas used for agriculture, combined with widespread pesticide and herbicide use, threatens many species, reducing natural diversity.

You can help address all these grave environmental problems by adopting a healthy plant-dominated diet. Countless human and animal lives stand to benefit from your healthy eating habits.

Improve Animal Welfare

If the world had less than a billion people, we could all enjoy products from ethically sound free-range and pasture-raised animals. But we’re quickly heading to 10 billion, and, in this reality, factory farming is the only way to supply the world’s ravenous appetite for animal products.

Imagine living your life in these cages in this shed (source).

Humans killing and eating animals is not the problem. That’s how nature works — the apex predator kills and eats animals lower in the food chain. The real problem is the miserable lives we force these animals to lead before they are killed.

One of the many salient points Yuval Noah Harari makes in Sapiens is that we can measure our progress as stewards of the Earth by the combined well-being of all sentient beings. By this measure, we’re doing an absolutely appalling job, mainly due to factory farming.

No, you don’t need to become a vegan. But please reduce your meat intake to a bare minimum so we can stop torturing animals on factory farms.

Strengthen Our Welfare Systems

Did you know that 90% of the gargantuan healthcare expenditure of the United States is due to chronic diseases? And the primary recommendations for reducing this terrible human and economic cost is the adoption of simple healthy lifestyle choices, such as a healthy diet.

Image source.

Our poor diet choices are not only driving up society’s healthcare burden; it’s also eroding our ability to carry it. Unhealthy people simply cannot be as productive as healthy people (e.g., obesity is a strong predictor of long-term sick leave). In this way, poor diet choices shrink the tax base.

Thus, your healthy diet can make a great contribution to the social welfare systems that secure the livelihoods of your family and countrymen. Healthy eating habits reduce your likelihood of depleting these systems and increase your ability to support them.

Set a Healthy Example

Humans are social creatures. We’ll go to great lengths to fit into our peer groups, especially those we look up to. And it doesn’t matter so much what this peer group says; it matters more what they do.

Peer groups come in various sizes. For example, an obese parent indirectly communicates to their children, colleagues, social circle, and the broader community that unhealthy eating habits are OK.

Please be aware of the signals your diet choices are sending out, especially to those who look up to you. If you maintain a healthy diet, you significantly increase the chances that they will too.

A Picture on the Fridge

You don’t have to agree with all the arguments I made in the previous sections, but hopefully one or two of them struck a chord. Focus on those and internalize them into your value system.

Better yet, get on the internet and find a striking image that embodies the one that resonated most with you. Print out a big copy and stick it on your fridge door at eye level. Then, see what happens.

The aim of this picture is not to guilt-trip you into starving yourself — only to avoid unhealthy excesses (excess meat in particular). In fact, this picture should motivate you to give your body all the nutrients (and calories) it needs to create great value for society.

If you manage to reach the point where you can truly feel how your healthy diet benefits the lives of others, your eating habits automatically improve. Your valuation of yourself will soon follow suit, allowing you to accept that you thoroughly deserve the self-care provided by a healthy diet.

Once you reach this point, it’s mission accomplished: healthy eating habits for the remainder of your substantially longer and more fulfilling life 🙂

Sleep stats
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My Data-Driven Review of Classic Sleep Advice

The causes and effects of a good night’s sleep

Image by Janet Cloete.

Sleep is the foundation of human health and performance. It keeps us healthy, emotionally stable, intelligent, creative, attractive, and accident-free.

As the world slowly catches on to this foundational truth, the internet is filling up with sleep advice. But there’s a problem: very little of this advice is backed by any quantified proof.

That’s why I decided to quantify the effects of various lifestyle choices on my sleep quality. My daily choices are recorded on my Graph of Life, and my sleep quality is quantified via Sleep Cycle.

Let’s see what the data has to say.

The Results

I performed an analysis of the statistical correlations between the wide range of lifestyle metrics I collect on a daily basis and my sleep quality. The five most important correlations are given below, together with two obvious requirements for high sleep quality: duration and consistency.

The correlation of sleep quality with different lifestyle metrics from the day before (causes) and the day after (effects), compared with the impact of sleep duration and consistency (dashed lines).

Let’s take a look at each of the factors in turn.

Time in bed

The dashed green line shows the high correlation of sleep quality with the amount of time spent in bed. This one is obvious: I only sleep when in bed, so enough time in bed is a prerequisite for high sleep quality.

Consistency

One of the first things you’ll see in any sleep hygiene article is the need to maintain a consistent sleep schedule (even on weekends). I quantified this metric by comparing the standard deviation of my sleep duration to my average sleep quality over each week.

As shown by the orange line, sleep consistency is about half as important as sleep duration. Interestingly, the correlation of sleep duration (0.40) with consistency is even higher than sleep quality (0.33). This means that poor consistency strongly reduces the time I spend in bed.

It makes good sense: With all the demands of modern life, consistency is the only way to make enough time for good quality sleep.

Eating habits

I’ve previously established that eating habits are the single biggest factor in the quality of my day. For this reason, I was not overly surprised when it again emerged as the winner in this case.

The graph shows that good eating habits are even more important than consistency when it comes to sleep quality. Delving a little deeper, I saw that this effect was split equally between two factors:

  1. Time in bed (correlation = 0.28). My eating habits are a good indication of my general level of discipline on any given day. Poorer discipline often means that I get in bed too late, giving me fewer hours to sleep.
  2. Sleep efficiency (correlation = 0.26). The ratio of sleep quality to time in bed also reduces substantially with poor eating habits, resulting in less restoration for every hour spent in bed.

We can also see that a good night’s sleep causes better eating habits the following day. It’s well-known that an underslept mind leads to more food cravings as well as cravings for the wrong kinds of food (see the “obesity and diabetes” section in this article).

Checklist

My checklist is a direct indication of the number of things I did right on a particular day. Many of my checklist items are recurring productive and healthy actions, keeping me firmly on the straight and narrow.

The graph shows that ticking many items off my checklist is both a cause and an effect of high sleep quality. It’s easy to imagine how a good night’s sleep would improve my ability to get things done the next day, but I was a little surprised that this was also such a significant cause of good sleep.

But there is a logical explanation, and it looks quite similar to the one given above for the effect of eating habits:

  1. Time in bed (correlation = 0.23). Like eating habits, my checklist is a good indicator of discipline, which affects my sleep duration.
  2. Sleep efficiency (correlation = 0.23). A productive day seems to make each hour of sleep more restorative. This must be related to that tired-but-satisfied feeling typical at the end of a successful day. It’s easy to imagine this pleasant feeling leading to better sleep.

Work

The effects of work on sleep can be interpreted similarly to the effects of my checklist discussed above. However, the correlations are considerably smaller. This is because my checklist is a more holistic indicator of whether I did the right things during the day than my work performance.

Even though the correlations are smaller, they clearly show that prioritizing sleep is good for productivity. This confirms that sleeping less in pursuit of greater productivity is a terrible idea.

Excercise

Regular exercise is sometimes recommended as a sleep aid, but the graph shows that this was not the case for me. In fact, this is the only statistically insignificant (p > 0.05) correlation in this analysis, implying that the little blue bar in the graph could just be random.

However, a good night’s sleep helps me exercise the following day. This is also no surprise given that physical performance improves significantly with sleep (see the “motor memory” section in the aforementioned article).

Energy

The relationships between my energy levels and sleep quality look similar to the correlations with exercise: High energy levels are an effect of good sleep quality rather than a cause.

It makes sense that a well-rested body and mind will feel more energetic. The correlations are stronger than those of exercise because my subjective energy score includes both mental and physical aspects.

Other important factors

Sleep quality also depends on several other factors that I could not quantify due to a lack of data. Let’s take a quick run-through:

  • Wind-down routine. This is something I’ve only started doing recently and I don’t yet have data for it. My feeling is that this does help a bit, but it doesn’t perform miracles. Next year, I’ll have the data to confirm.
  • Smoking and alcohol. Both of these are said to be bad for sleep. I don’t smoke and very rarely drink, so I lack the data to quantify this.
  • Coffee. No coffee after lunch is another commonly listed sleep hygiene guideline. I’m a (caffeine-free) tea-person, so no data here either.
  • Bed and pillow. Another obvious bit of advice is to maximize the comfort of your bed. Some years ago, I often woke too early with neck pain. Luckily, this was quickly fixed with a fancy memory foam pillow.
  • Light and temperature. A cool and dark room is another common piece of sleep advice. Over here in Norway, both light and temperature vary greatly over the seasons, but I see no clear drop in my sleep quality during summer months. I do use a sleep mask in summer, but I make no attempt to control the temperature in my room.
  • Noise. Sleeping in a noisy environment is tough. Luckily, I live in a quiet neighborhood with few disturbances. There is a bit of noise from neighbors on rare occasions, so I can still collect some data next year.
  • Scents. I have some lavender pillow mist I remember to use every once in a while, but I don’t collect data for it. I doubt that the effect is significant, but I still plan to investigate this properly next year.

The Takeaway

Start with the big two: duration and consistency. After that, my experience shows that good eating habits and a productive day are the next two best inducers of a good night’s sleep.

Otherwise, there is a range of additional factors whose influence I’m yet to calculate. Most of these are obvious, such as a cool, dark, and quiet room with a comfortable bed. Others, like a wind-down routine and aromatherapy, will be interesting to investigate further in the future.

Sweet dreams!

fruit-2305192_1920
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Season 1 Summary: Nutrition

Image by silviarita from Pixabay.

Nutrition is a strange subject area. On the one hand, it can be very simple. We all have a reasonably good idea of what we should put in our bodies and what we shouldn’t. But, on the other hand, actually following through on this simple advice is really tough. Hence, the global obesity epidemic. 

The mission of the Supermorning Nutrition chapter was to automate healthy eating. And it all starts with some food groups that are not only healthy but also tasty, convenient, and affordable. 

Five groups of superfoods

Here they are in all their glory:

These guys can give you all the nutrients (and enjoyment) you need from food. But making them a permanent part of your life requires some proactive action.

Making super the new normal

Here are some proven guidelines for making these superfoods a permanent part of your life:

  • Nuts, seeds, and berries: Buy your seeds in bulk and select packs of mixed nuts and mixed frozen berries. Together with some yogurt, they create the perfect breakfast.  
  • Raw green veggies: These green nutrient bombs taste rather bland, but things like a green drink and smart combinations with other tasty foods can make them regulars in your diet.
  • Cooked veggies, mushrooms, and beans: Here, we focus on the “meat as a vegetable dressing” idea. This will give you very tasty cooked meals with a huge amount of vegetables. 
  • Fish and eggs: The convenience of smoked and canned omega-3 fish and scrambled eggs or omelets can make these high-quality protein sources regulars in your diet. 
  • Avocado (and other fruit): Here we discussed the fine art of avocado ripeness management together with several ways to make fruit consumption even easier. 

Putting these ideas in place takes a bit of effort and experimentation. But once it’s up and running, you’ll have yourself a lifelong zero-compromise healthy diet 🙂 

Healthy, tasty, convenient, and affordable. It sounds like the perfect happy ending! But sadly, this story also has some bad guys who do their best to make us fat, sick and addicted.  

Four food villains

Here are the bad guys in the nutrition story:

It is possible to keep these villains at bay. But this does not happen by itself. We need to take the time to construct some super-powerful defenses. 

Building the fortress

Our healthy eating fortress has four layers of defense:

  • Refuse to pay for self-destruction: Trading time, effort, vitality, and life expectancy for fleeting endorphin highs is a truly terrible deal. Realizing this on a deep level is a great first layer of defense.  
  • Healthier snacking: Sometimes really tasty treats can have some longer-term benefits. For these rare occasions, choosing healthier alternatives makes all the sense in the world. 
  • Home-made meals: Taking care of your health becomes a lot easier when you take direct control of what goes into your body. Home-made food also makes overeating much less likely. 
  • Whole foods: Buying more whole produce is a great way to keep self-destruct foods out of your life. Getting into the habit of reading food labels can also add many good years to your life. 

Making change stick

This chapter conveniently coincided with the end of the year, so I framed this as a New Year’s resolution. But you certainly don’t need to wait until the end of the year for making healthy nutrition permanent:

  1. Understand why diets have such a high failure rate.
  2. Intelligently shape your environment.
  3. Intelligently shape your habits.

It takes some time and effort, but lifelong healthy eating habits are possible. Setting this up will add many years to your life and much life to your years 🙂

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Can We Finally Master Food?

Over the next two weeks, we’ll be taking a look at how we can finally take control of the amazing technological revolutions discussed last week. 

In other words: how we can go about securing all the great benefits, while avoiding the many drawbacks and dangers. 

Let’s start with the oldest one of the bunch: the agricultural revolution.

Awesome efficiency

In the previous post, we discussed the absolutely astounding progress in agricultural productivity over the last couple of centuries. 

As a result, we now spend a small fraction of the time spent by our forefathers to earn our daily bread. And we get a much better diet in exchange for that little effort. 

Do yourself a favor and calculate the fraction of your day you have to work to earn enough money to buy your food. This is an excellent topic for gratitude. 

Amazing variety

Thanks to the agricultural revolution, your local supermarket contains every nutrient your body needs. 

Make use of this amazing privilege by building automatic healthy eating habits that involve a high degree of dietary variety.    

Massive waste

Far too much of the bounty from the agricultural revolution is processed into empty calories that impose enormous health-related costs on society. We also consume too much food in general.  

This is much like paying some people (empty calorie producers) to come and smash up your house and then paying other people (the healthcare and diet industries) to try and patch it back up again. 

To avoid this massive waste, excluding self-destruct foods and automating lower calorie intake should be high on the priority list. 

Huge environmental impact

Animal products are the main problem here. Despite supplying only 18% of global food energy, meat and dairy uses three quarters of agricultural land and emits two thirds of greenhouse gases. 

Animal welfare is also still a major concern. 

You don’t need to go full vegan. But I recommend restricting meat to 5% of your total calorie intake. By using the “meat as a vegetable dressing” philosophy, this is quite easy. 

Amazing potential

Follow these rather obvious tips and our oldest technological revolution can give you an amazingly long and healthy life at an amazingly low cost 🙂 

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Recap: Making the Classic “Healthy Living” New Year’s Resolution Work

It’s hard to believe there’s only five days left of this decade! Such a major milestone often brings with it some very useful motivation for driving positive change. This week’s posts were all about channeling this motivation into creating permanent healthy eating habits. 

So, let’s wrap this up with the traditional checklist…

The checklist

Here’s the 1-2-3 to a nutritional New Year’s resolution that might actually work 🙂

  1. Understand why diets have such a high failure rate.
  2. Intelligently shape your environment.
  3. Intelligently shape your habits.

So, if the classic health and weight loss resolutions are running through your head as we approach the new decade, why not give this a try?

As a reward, you’ll get to enjoy the next decade (and many more after that) in optimal health at your ideal weight 🙂

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New Year’s Resolution: Optimize Meal Timing

After optimizing our calorie intake and personalizing our healthy eating regimen, we just need to put the cherry on top: eating the right amounts at the right times. 

The amount and type of food you put in your body is much more important for long-term health and longevity than the timing. But getting the timing right can help to manage energy levels, control appetite and promote good sleep. 

Let’s take a look…

The ranking

Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a pauper. This little bit of wisdom has been around for decades, yet many people still do it the other way round. 

Yes, you can find articles swearing by a vast array of alternative eating patterns online. But most professionals recommend this old bit of wisdom. 

A big breakfast high in protein and healthy fats will supply your body with plenty of gradually releasing energy over the course of the day. 

A moderate top-up of slow-releasing energy around lunch can keep you going throughout the afternoon. Moderation is key though: drowsiness from a heavy lunch can really hurt your productivity. 

Dinner should be something small but filling. It’s aim is to keep away any distracting hunger before bedtime without putting any extra stress on the body when it enters recovery mode in sleep. 

Doing it the other way round can easily leave you listless in the morning (typically the most productive time of the day) and heavy and uncomfortable in the evening (hurting your sleep quality). Poor meal timing can also drive you to graze on unhealthy snacks throughout the day, really hurting your long-term health.

The timing

Intermittent fasting has become quite a buzzword in recent years. It’s often touted as a good weight loss strategy because it regularly puts the body in a state where it needs to draw on fat reserves for fuel. Or perhaps it just works because you have less time to consume calories. 

Most serious scientists agree that intermittent fasting can have some benefits, but simply eating healthy foods in moderation is much more important (1, 2, 3).  

Personally, I just use the principle for maximizing my sleep quality. On a typical day, I’d have a small dinner about 3-5 hours before bed, leaving me just comfortable at bedtime – not hungry and not bloated. 

Then I sleep soundly for about 8 hours, wake up and go through my morning routine that includes a large breakfast 1-2 hours after waking up. This results in 12-15 hours of intermittent fasting.

Given the importance of sleep, this is an important benefit.  

Fasting after feasting

During the holiday time, you’re likely to have one or two very large dinners. This is all well and good, but it could seriously disrupt your healthy eating pattern. 

Luckily, fasting can help to quickly restore your overall energy balance after a feast. Indeed, if you cancel the calorie imbalance with a day of fasting, you can get back to your normal healthy eating regimen the very next day.

Such a quick recovery is very important to keep your healthy eating habits strong enough to last a lifetime. 

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New Year’s Resolution: Personalized Eating Regimen

Merry Christmas! I hope you have a good one! Over here, we at least got a somewhat white Christmas. Here’s some evidence of the partial whiteness from Monday’s ski trip 🙂 

I’ll keep it short today to not occupy your Christmas time. So, let’s continue where yesterday left off: implementing permanent lifestyle changes to reach your ideal weight and stay there forever.

Our focus today is on maximizing the amount (and variety) of nutrients from a reduced calorie budget. Luckily, this is easy if you manage to cut down on empty calories, convenience-first foods and filler carbs. 

Our job then becomes simple: optimize variety, taste and practicality. 

Take ownership

The eating regimen that combines these elements in the best way will look different from person to person. For this reason, it’s important to come up with a combination that works best for you. 

The more invested you become in creating your own healthy eating regimen, the greater the chance that it will last a lifetime. Developing such a personalized nutritional regimen is one of the best investments you can ever hope to make! 

Be sure to keep in mind that this does not need to happen overnight. You can patiently explore different options, keeping the good and chucking the bad. We’re building an eating regime for the rest of your life, so it’s all well and good if the process takes time. 

One basic framework, endless possibilities

One month ago, we covered five different classes of superfoods: nuts, seeds and berries; raw green veggies; cooked veggies, mushrooms and beans; fish and eggs; avocado (and other fruit). Some practical tips for making these superfoods a permanent part of your life are given here. 

My only suggestion is to make sure you eat a good helping from each of these categories at least once every two days. The amount of variation possible within this framework is endless, leaving lots of freedom to find the solution that works best for you.

I really hope you make this little investment of time! It will pay you back 1000-fold over the rest of your life 🙂 

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New Year’s Resolution: Automate Lower Calorie Consumption

The first part of our nutritional New Year’s resolution is the simplest and simultaneously the most difficult of them all: simply consuming fewer calories. 

If your Smart BMI is already in the 34-35 band, there’s no need to read any further today. Unfortunately, the majority of people lucky enough to be born into material affluence are well above this range.

The reasons for lower calorie intake are obvious. Everyone wants to look and feel better, live longer, save money, promote social justice and save the planet all at the same time. 

Our real challenge is actually doing it…

How to permanently reduce calorie intake

As discussed in yesterday’s post, the key is to gradually implement changes to your environment that will cement a new lifestyle. In this case, we simply need to remove all the triggers to overeating and keep them out forever.

The first step is to simply buy fewer calories. Yes, this sounds too obvious, but it genuinely works! My permanent 8 kg drop to my ideal weight (below) is largely due to this simple idea. 

Luckily, buying fewer calories does not necessarily mean eating less food. It just means more filling foods instead of the addictive empty calories lining the shelves at your local supermarket. 

So, empty calorie carbs and fats should be scrapped from the shopping list. Simply refuse to pay for self-destruction. And for those few occasions when culinary treats are genuinely beneficial, splurge on healthier alternatives. 

Next, gradually commit to home-cooked meals where you design your own unique blend of nutrition, taste and convenience. This personal touch is an excellent way to ensure permanent change and eradicate all those convenience-first designed-for-overeating foods from your life. 

Another smart move is to reduce the amount of filler carbs (bread, rice, pasta) in your diet to about 5% of your total calorie consumption. This action will open up plenty of space in your calorie budget to fill with the great foods we’ll get to tomorrow. 

Lastly, commit to tracking your progress. Record your weight once or twice a month with no option to stop when you don’t like the numbers. For the best results, insert your ideal range like in the graph above. 

Summary 

In short, change your eating habits by changing your shopping habits. Simply buy fewer calories by cutting out empty calories and convenience-first foods. Instead, commit to home-made food, finding your personalized optimal mix of nutrition, taste and convenience. 

Not buying something is a whole lot easier than not eating something that’s already in your house. Gradually create this healthy nutritional environment in your home, and lower daily calorie consumption will automatically become a permanent part of your life 🙂 

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Permanent Healthy Eating Habits: The Perfect New Year’s Resolution

Yes, we’ve made it to the last full week of the decade! It’s certainly been an interesting one, and the next one promises to be even more so 🙂

It’s usually around this time of the year that people start coming up with some grandiose New Year’s resolutions. Mostly, these resolutions are linked to diet and/or exercise. And sadly, they rarely make it past January. 

This week, we’ll talk about three great resolutions for the new decade, paying particularly close attention to one key detail: actually making it happen. 

The key to a successful New Year’s resolution

If you promise yourself you’ll go on a diet from the 1st of January, let me save you the trouble. It ain’t gonna happen, at least not for the long run. 

The one and only way to successfully achieve a New Year’s resolution is to change your environment so that actions consistent with your goal happen automatically. It’s well worth reading this long sentence a couple of times. 

If you commit yourself to the latest fad diet inspired by access to a fresh new decade, you’ll soon end up relying on willpower alone. And, over time, willpower always runs out. 

Diet vs. lifestyle change

The weight loss industry is one of the most fascinating constructs of our affluent modern society. In the United States, for example, this industry is worth $72 billion, significantly more than the clean energy industry. 

Yet, the long-term success rate of diets and other weight loss schemes hovers around 5%. This means that almost all of those 72 billion dollars might as well have been burned. 

The rather obvious reason for this great failure has been discussed earlier: the powerful cravings that kept us alive through millennia of extreme scarcity are still just as strong in today’s world of great affluence.

We’ve evolved to eat for our very survival and, in today’s world with hyper-palatable nutrient-free treats around every corner, an obesity epidemic is a pretty obvious result. 

Fad diets and exercise gizmos are powerless against millennia of evolution. Indeed, the only way to victory is to gradually implement permanent lifestyle changes that automatically control our primitive cravings. 

This is what we’ll be doing over the next three days. So, stay tuned… These strategies could help create a New Year’s resolution that actually happens, making the 2020’s your best decade ever 🙂

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