A Little Diddy on Diet: Purposeful Eating

AHHH SO Many Choices!

Endless amounts of sugar and even more amount of fake sugar!

High Saturated Fat, but not necessarily bad in moderation!

This is not the hemp I mean to add to your diet!

Purposeful Eating

Diet is a horrible word. I hate it, but, I LOVE EATING! In fact, I love it sOo much so that it’s a large reason why I started my journey in the fitness world.

I was born southern and raised on southern food. I have a huge affinity for grease turned crispy around a piece of meat like a warm blanket trap for all thing heart disease and I don’t stop at chicken. Fry anything up and I’ll eat it. Vegetables that weren’t fried are meant for the aesthetic value at the center of a table, not on the plate. I wasn’t a big sweet fan, largely because there was always something soaked in butter that I preferred. But, I had my weakness in the sugar field growing up- banana pudding, tapioca pudding, banana bread and Reeses peanut butter, YUM!

Needless to say, I had a lot to learn ladies and jolly jingles, I had a whole lot to learn. Stir fry, when I started my journey, was a healthy meal to me. I was so lost in the depth of destructive eating that stir fry was my smoothie. It was my night off burgers stuffed with bacon and cheese. Stir fry may be a healthy meal to you too, and that my friends is a perfect place to start (it can become healthy when done right, join the facebook cook club emailing me now or signing up at the bottom of this page!!) Honestly, though, stir fry is a wonderfully valiant effort in this battle we wage. We are but tiny peasants standing against a force so strong it takes much more than knowledge to defeat the ones taking our pennies and sugar souls. We have to be cunning, we have to stand together and communicate, we have to be quiet and sneaky and deliberate in every little thing food, or they win. Allow me to give you an example.

When I walk into a grocery store in a hurry, dropping my health guard slightly as I run, it’s going to be bad. I can almost guarantee that the man is going to win at least one battle in the war-zone I just entered. Sure the produce section is pretty easy, but not really. In the produce section is also where I need to get my dried ORGANIC cranberries. As I hurry through the aisle beside the brightly colored bell peppers and big leafy collards my eyes fall on a huge bag of cranberries, I grab them and hit the next thing on my list. Cereal. I rush around and find the cereal aisle, I find a box with a lot of green and the words whole grain and organic. It has a sunshine and beautifully colored oats. Now, lets fast forward. I check out and head to my next errand, the post office. While going to the post office I open my cranberries and pop them into my mouth. YUM! These are the best cranberries I’ve ever had! I take another handful. YUM! I just want more! I pull up to the post office and take one more handful and devour it. Then, I look at the ingredients. 56 g of ADDED CANE SUGAR!? What the HELL!? What evil person did this to me. That’s basically like going to Baskin Robbins. I SoOoO would have rather wasted 56 g of sugar on a delicious ice cream cone. Shit.

I know, you may be saying, Mark that’s a little anal isn’t it? No, not at all! Dried Cranberries already have enough natural sugar to taste just fine. 4 grams. I’m happy with 4 grams of sugar, but 56?! 56 grams of sugar is enough to make me a fein and crave those things the rest of the day. Not only that, there are 4 calories per gram of sugar. That means my cranberries just gave me 224 calories. Do you realize I could have some fried chicken at that? Cranberries or fried chicken…. Umm there’s no argument there.

So, I head back to the store two weeks later, plenty of time on my hands. I go in, serenity on one shoulder and joy on the other. I have a pep in my step and a strut swaying my butt around like I’m on a runway. My wrist is flicking around and my chest is out. I feel like I’m in my underwear and all the boys are watching with mouths wide open. A big, huge, smile is slapped across my face. I know you know the feeling. Basically, on top of the world.

I head back to that aisle where I found my cranberries and look at my selection more carefully. Oh, there’s a little package there that has no advertising or bright flashy colors and what? NO added sugar! I can eat these all day long. I can use them as snacks and achieve the same filling without the added emptiness left in my gut after the bag of lies I got two weeks ago. I then remember that my cereal, too is just going stale because it had 34 grams of sugar and I usually put my cranberries on it and that makes for a freakin candy breakfast and my name is NOT Buddy the Elf. So, I head back there and find a box with 2 grams of added sugar. 2 grams, I’m fine with that. Not sure why they put 2 grams in, but I can rest with that. So I head out of the store with a sashay and a big middle finger to the creepy man snickering in the corner while he tries to poison me so I end up under his thumb putting shots in my belly so I can eat his shit. Catch my drift lady’s and jingle jollies??

But, I have some bad news. It’s not just added sugar we have to look out for. That creepy perv of a man making me feel gross for being me has talked to other creepy guys who actually write the very language we speak! They know some of us occasionally have time to look at the ingredients and we know to look for added sugar. So, they simply change it all up and come up with new words for sugar. Then they advertise NO ADDED SUGAR, but it has like 10 different ingredients that actually mean sugar. Uggh, it’s so freaking frustrating. So now, I have to pull out my glasses that I stopped wearing after leaving the abyss of psychological research and Adderall sniffing, reading every word of every paper having to do with attachment theory that my University had, and search for words that end in OSE or RUP… That’s a good start, but it doesn’t touch on the list. If you want the full list just email me.

Then there are fats. I’m not scared of fats. I love them. They are good and give me fuel. But there are certain fats that aren’t good. These fats don’t give me fuel. They literally enter my blood stream and turn my free-flowing blood into a sludge like a waste plant exploding into a wild scenic river. The little fishies in my river start choking and my arms feel like they go numb. No lie, after some time of eating healthy, you’ll notice this happen and just be baffled by how numb you really used to be. The same happens with sugar. I wonder why the day is just kind of BLAH and then I look at my diseased cranberries and cereal. But, give it time, you’ll get there. For now back to fats.

We want to watch out for the words TRANS fats… Saturated fats are debatable. It’s my theory, along with a host of other professionals, that saturated fat is not actually that bad, especially if you are on an exercise program. It’s TRANS fats and HERE is the kicker ya’ll. The producers of TRANS fats talked with the big creepy sugar slob and he agreed to give them a leeway. They can now officially say 0 TRANS fats when there is actually not 0 TRANS fats. Absurd right? Ya’ll, this is how badly corrupt this stuff is. They can say 0 as long as there is less that .5. I don’t know what type of fucked up math they are doing, but that’s not what my elementary teacher taught me. SoOOo you have to pull out those glasses again and look for any word like hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated.

Now, for another horrible trick of the man WHOLE GRAINS. Ohh don’t get me started. Whole grain bread is like saying a bed of nails. You can’t keep a grain whole and also make it bread. Just like you can’t keep it a bed if it’s made out of nails! Bread is processed… You can eat it. I don’t. I do just fine without bread. But, don’t worry, you’ll get there. On top of that just look how much sodium a loaf of bread has in it and generally sugar too. Ah the bread aisle is just the worst, besides the cranberries.

We have such a horrible relationship with carbohydrates because we pair carbohydrates with bread. When people drop bread, they drop weight, but not because of the carbohydrates, it’s the source of carbohydrates that’s helping them drop weight. When they stop processed carbs all of a sudden they have more energy and feel more full through the day. That means they have energy to exercise after work, they don’t eat as much crap snacks and they sleep better… Stop pointing at the carbs and start pointing at the source and you will begin to find what I mean by purposeful eating.

Everything we put into our body serves a purpose. There are tons of things to consider, but for the sake of simplicity, lets break it down into the three major building blocks of life. The Three Macronutrients: Protein, Carbohydrate and Fats. If we get proper amount of these from the proper sources, our bodies will have what they need to not only perform, but excel. The difficult thing is getting it from the right source, which was the WHOLE purpose of the above rant.

A note on Supplements and Micronutrients (the science sounding stuff underneath macronutrients). All of the nutrients packed into your daily multivitamin can be achieved through eating right. You can save your money. Most multivitamins are created in a factory where the workers wear haz mat suits. Honestly, you don’t need that stuff. Their marketing is good, but that’s also why you’re picking out the wrong cranberries. So for now, let’s concentrate on the three macronutrients. If your doctor has done extensive blood work claiming you need more Iron, then please, take your supplement. But if not, just give this a try. (Note Iron needs to come from an animal source. The Iron in Spinach will not suffice to fill the gap. You need what is called HEME Iron. The Iron in spinach is not absorbed in our body) As you can tell, there is a lot to say when we bring up individual nutrients so just rest assured, if we eat right you are getting those. If any supplement, choose a straight up fruit and veggie compound like Juice-Plus and omega-3’s if you don’t like eating fish often.

Ok, so back to the macro’s: Protein, Carbs, and Fats.

I have already touched on fats above, namely, avoid trans fats and limit saturated fats. I have other hacks that I don’t want to get in here but feel free to schedule a session!

Carbs- Don’t be scared of them, but eat the right ones. If I eat an apple in the morning, I am already 1/8th of the way for my requirement. My veggie-based protein shake has 8 carbs in it, some have more. I usually have a banana in the morning too, meeting 1/4th my required intake. I always have one at night (banana’s can help you sleep and if you’re eating right and going to bed slightly hungry, meaning your body has digested your food and you have stored it so your mind can rest while you sleep then a banana can help you retain that semi satisfied feeling right before you cozy up). Then I have carrots for snacks, I put bell pepper (also bell peppers have 300% of your required vitamin c, so toss that Vitamin out!) in my salad, I eat an Orange, maybe a cliff bar and then a side of brown rice with my curry… Ok I’ve got all the carbs I needed, if not more and I didn’t eat bread. The biggest thing is that I was actually satisfied all day because the carbs I ate were high in fiber, clinging to me and making me feel satisfied all day!

Protein- A lot of my clients have a hard time finding enough protein. Do not fear my friends, protein is lurking around the corners of the grocery store when you look in the right places. We have been taught the only place to get them is meat and beans, but fear not- this is utterly false. I limit meat to once, maybe twice a week. On top of that I work out 2-3 hours a day. My protein needs are much higher than the general population, but I always get plenty. One of my favorite ways to add protein is with hemp seeds. Pour it into (sugar free) yogurt, pour it over cereal, pour it into a smoothie, put it on salads, in granola. Another fun addition is flax, put it with everything you do hemp seeds. There are also things like barley and bulgar, whole grains with tons of protein. I do keep a whey Isolate that has no additives, no sugar and 30 grams of protein (MyProtein on Amazon). It’s a dairy product and I don’t do dairy besides this shake on occasions. It’s great, taste like a glass of milk.

Okay, so I get it, all of you are different and I’m different than all of you. The trick is finding what works for you. I would totally love to help you dive into this. Schedule a consult and we’ll get your nutrition dialed in after a month or two. It’s really not that hard, but it does take some shifting in how you approach food.

YUM Fried Chicken on a leaf :)

Thats how many cranberries I get if there’s 56 added grams of sugar. Unacceptable!

NOT ALL FATS ARE BAD! But if they look like this…

The further from this it looks, the more processed it is.

My trusty Juice-Plus ensures I get all my fruits and veggies!