Nutrition 101

I’m always trying to improve my diet. Lots of people seem confused about how a diet works, but it’s really simple. There are three things one needs to understand.

1: If you are alive, you have a diet. You can’t go “off” or “on” a diet. Having no diet is the same thing as complete starvation. Eating whatever you feel like is a diet, and so is eating rocks. Neither one of them is a very good diet, but that’s beside the point. The point is, you have a diet already.

2: Baby steps is key. Changing your diet all in one sweep is a bad idea because your taste buds and your brain won’t have time to adapt. A good place to start is to pick your worst dietary habit, like soda for example, and to cut your intake in half. If you’re drinking two cokes a day, drink one. If you’re eating fast food four days a week, make it two days a week maximum.

3: Your optimal diet is unique. There’s no single diet that is perfect for everyone, because everyone’s body is different. Nor is there a single diet that’s perfect for you all of the time. If you sweat a lot you need more salt and water, and if it’s winter you need more vitamin D.

So what’s the optimal diet for you? Depends on your goals. I have three long-term goals for my nutrition:

1. Keep my immune system strong.
2. Keep me supplied with enough energy to work out hard 6 days a week.
3. Give me enough nutrients to build muscle.

With those goals in mind, I decided to do the following things:
*Cut down on sugar by quitting soda and candy, only eating bread that contains less than 6% sugar.
*Cut down on unhealthy fats by quitting fast food and snacks.
*Cut out alcohol to keep my immune system strong.
*Try to keep an eye on how much protein / good carbs / good fats I am getting per coin and bill when I shop for food.

So far, this is a pretty winning combination for me. No restrictions on how much I can eat, no restrictions on when I can eat what. A pleasant surprise is that since I started cutting down on sugar, stuff that’s only kind of sugary taste much sweeter to me. For example, broccoli and spinach taste sweet. I think my taste buds were just overloaded with sugar back when I was drinking soda, because I don’t remember broccoli ever tasting sweet.

I keep making small adjustments though, that’s the key. Never stop adapting and improving your diet, or any aspect of your behaviour for that matter. Right now I’m looking at when and how to use caffeine optimally.