“Diet” and “nutrition” are topics that can bring about feelings of confusion, discomfort, guilt, embarrassment, and aversion to engage in any meaningful discussion.
If this does describe your experience with conversations and feelings around food, we are here to say we hear you.
Hopefully these next few thoughts can help you engage with a more positive and exciting way to view your relationship with food. After all, food should be a vehicle to help you live your life to the fullest.
Rather than throw more nutrition facts and information on top of what is an already convoluted and confusing subject matter, let’s focus on how we truly view food.
“Do you see food as fuel to your body?”
It’s a simple question, yes, but the answer likely has many layers to it. So many of us see food as something to regulate. To limit. Too much is bad. Some are worse than others. Some food we can eat lots of, and others we shouldn’t. Do I need more calories? Less calories? What the heck are macros? Do I need more of them? Less? Ughh…
Talk about paralysis by analysis. The only thing we take from it is that if we want to gain control of our diet and eating, we need to restrict, restrict, restrict.
Less calories, less sugar, only certain types of fat… The list goes on and on.
What if instead of view food as something to restrict, we view it as something to fuel our lives? What if we asked ourselves “What does my body need at a baseline to fuel my exercise and activity goals, recover well, and help me feel great?”
These questions can reshape the way we view food. Instead of being a resource to restrict, food is now seen as a valuable form of fuel. Many of us discover that we have chronically under-fueled our bodies of key nutrients that help us recover, build muscle, and support a healthy metabolism.
We can begin to assign nutritional value to foods based on what they provide as fuel as opposed to purely their calorie content.
Take protein as an example. We want anywhere from ½ to 1 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight every single day (this isn’t universal but holds true for most of us).
If I am a 150lb individual, I should be consuming ~75-150g protein per day (high end if possible). If I split that across 3 meals per day plus a snack and a post workout protein shake, I should be averaging ~40g protein per meal!
Most of us find that we would greatly undershoot this goal daily and likely have for years. We are depriving our body of its source of recovery, muscle building, and anabolic metabolism.
If we made it a goal for the day to eat enough protein, we would likely think harder about the food we want to eat to reach that goal.
Rather than assign specific caloric values to these foods and set limits that make us feel like eating is a bad thing, we can understand that our body needs enough of these macronutrients daily to work its best.
Instead of seeing some foods as inherently “good” or “bad,” it is perhaps better to simply understand that some foods do a great job of giving our body the fuel it is looking for daily, and others don’t.
This is only the tip of the iceberg, and the goal of this blog is not to make you a nutrition expert.
Rather, we want to give you permission to view food as a good thing that fuels your best life.