Nutrition can be really confusing. Just take a look at any ‘health’ magazine and you will see dozens of seemingly pressing issues that apparently make or break you diet and health success.
As a result, I get asked lots of very specific diet related questions. Here are a few of the questions that I have been asked recently:
How much protein should I eat?
Some days I am ravenous and others I have no interest in food; is that bad?
Am I eating enough green vegetables?
How do I know if my child is eating enough?
Do I need to eat every three to four hours?
Is it important to eat breakfast as soon as I get up in the morning?
What should my daily fish oil intake be?
If I eat past eight o’clock at night will I screw up my metabolism?
I am not going to go through Dr. Stephen Covey’s ‘Rocks and Sand’ analogy today, even though I love using that one.
Instead, we are just going to assume that you have the rocks firmly in place and are eating nutrient dense, real food regularly and have minimized or eliminated toxic foods from your diet.
Assuming all of that, here is a new idea I would like to propose: When it comes to being healthy, the rest of it does not matter. At all.
Now, before I step too hard on any toes, let me explain.
We do recommend that people take their essential supplements daily, even going as far as recommending how much to take on a daily basis. We also recommend eating protein at every meal.
These are the reasons for that:
- We are creatures of habit. Our brains learn by chunking information and forming routines and habits. Neural pathways are developed and strengthened through repetition. Consuming essential nutrients in a routine way is a great behavioural tool to ensure that you do not forget to take these things altogether.
- The daily doses that we recommend for the essential supplements are adequate for most people to get close to hitting optimal levels of these nutrients in their bodies. Such as an omega 3:6 ratio of 1:1 and a Vitamin D level of 50-70 ng/DL.
- Eating protein at every meal is a good habit to ensure a highly nutritious diet that also gives normal “fullness” signals to the body, lessening the chances that you will over eat.
However, it is not necessary to follow these guidelines to the letter. The important part is that your body has all of the nutrients it requires.
Even though we make those suggestions, we also always recommend that you get your nutrient levels tested. We do not actually know exactly how much your body needs to hit those optimal levels. Instead, we are making a pretty well educated guess about what should work.
Your body is not a machine and does not have a gas tank. You do not consistently burn through all of your fuel at the same rate. Your body stores vitamins, minerals, and energy to use, as required, for optimal function of your organs and tissues. In fact, your body has reserves of certain nutrients that can last for weeks, months or even years.
Our systems are actually not designed for consistency. Up until a few decades ago, depending on where you live in the world, food security did not exist.
We have lots of biological programming to shift into scarcity and starvation mode, and virtually no biological programming to handle long-term abundance. This is one of the major contributing factors to obesity, metabolic syndrome and chronic disease.
If you do not take your supplements everyday, if you do not eat meat every day, if you do not eat vegetables every day, if you eat variable amounts from one day to the next, you are actually playing to your body’s expectations more than if you eat the exact same thing at the exact same time day after day after day.
Listen to your body. If you are eating real food, follow your cravings and your hunger. It will not steer you wrong.
Stop stressing about what you think you should be doing and just go with it. Your body is actually pretty good at detecting and signaling what it needs.
The best advice I can give you is to trust your own body before you trust the advice of a magazine columnist or diet guru.
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