Wellness Nutrition
Defining How to Eat to be Well: SIMPLE Eating
Congratulations! I don’t know how you found this page in the unbelievable sea of pages on the internet, but you did and I hope you find this tip of the metaphorical iceberg helpful!
When it comes to nutrition, diet, and healthy eating, you’ll be inundated online by ads, sponsored websites and books, and a plethora of seemingly conflicting data – at least I was, and I’m guessing you have likely already discovered the same thing. In trying to navigate this endless sea of information I became frustrated (putting it very mildly) because I wasn’t looking for an ideology to follow (i.e. veganism), or a complicated and sciency diet (i.e. keto), or a monthly membership to a nutrition service. I just wanted to know what current research says about the food I put in my mouth without having to get a PhD/MD or take a gamble on the approach that sounded best and cost the least.
Instead, I was looking for something basic, simple, and founded on research to help steer me clear of trendy and even dangerous diets and dietary advice. I was shocked that I couldn’t find a good source for such information in one self-contained and relatively brief package (like this site). So after gathering information, studying it, distilling it, and assembling it, the foundational information tied nicely into a comprehensive, yet concise approach. Based on the questions my family and friends started asking me as they became aware of the knowledge I was gaining I realized other people were interested in what I found, and hence I wrote the pages on this site to help as many of my friends (you) as I could.
SIMPLE Eating, as I’ve come to call it, is intended to show you how to determine your own unique nutritional intake to accomplish your goals. It isn’t about a novel diet or a newly discovered fact about how to eat. I’m not presenting any new chemical compounds, foods, or preparatory approaches that will seemingly and magically remove fat from your body or add muscle. If you are looking for such an approach, a touted miracle of modern research, stop reading now and continue your search elsewhere. If on the other hand, you are looking for a no-bull, informed, and balanced approach to help you figure out what your optimal diet and nutritional plan should be, then keep reading!
The nutritional recommendations you will find here are more direct and basic than existing diets like keto, plant-based eating, veganism, the paleo diet, and others. It is also less prescriptive- I don’t tell you what to eat, but rather inform you so you can figure it out for yourself. There is so much nutritional data floating around that it is difficult, if not nearly impossible, to figure out something as basic as WHAT TO EAT to live longer and with greater health. The nutrition parts of this site are intended to help cut through that overwhelming amount of data on the internet, TV and videos, media, and print and general anecdotal misinformation to arm you with straightforward information about balanced nutrition.
The best part about the information presented on these pages is that it is complimentary with most of the diets you might be familiar with. If you have a diet or nutritional approach that you love and believe in, the information here is likely to be fully compatible with that dietary approach. If it’s not compatible with the underlying principles of SIMPLE Eating you might want to reconsider following that approach, but more on that later. The concepts presented here are also pretty darn simple, but simple doesn’t necessarily mean easy, and that’s why my goal in writing all this is to make SIMPLE Eating clear and actionable for you to adopt in the easiest way possible.
It’s important to note (again) that I’m not presenting anything new. The fundamentals I cover are backed by cited research from publicly available sources (like some pretty dense nutrition texts). Some of this research is new, and some is decades old (but still valid). Each source is included to enable you to do your own learning and to understand why each point is relevant. So you won’t find general statements like “…experts agree…” or “…research proves…” by themselves, because you can’t verify ambiguous claims that are not backed by citations to available industry research- and I want you to be able to verify everything written here and I encourage you to do so!
What I do present in the following pages is directly informed by research by independent sources from across the globe. Direct citations are included to enable you to read the same thing I did and come to your own conclusions. I implore you to NOT believe anything presented here just because it’s printed!
Believe in those searching for the optimal diet, doubt those who find it!
Food and nutrition science is a huge and ever changing industry and field of study, and what is ‘right’ today may be found to be not-so-right, or even wrong, tomorrow. Given that changing nature I attempt to summarize the basics of eating as best I can at any point in time. This understanding will and should change over time as super smart and well educated professionals pursue the investigation of the perfect human diet for each of us, and I’ll update things when I become aware of the changes.
As mentioned above, one of the best aspects of this approach is that it is not meant to replace or debunk any particular diet or nutritional approach. If you have a diet plan that you follow and enjoy, like Keto for example, the information provided here should be useful and complementary to that diet approach. The work I’ve done with this book fits under these dietary approaches and addresses border nutritional concepts rather than existing specific diets. In short, this book doesn’t provide a ‘flavor’ (pun intended) for your diet, or tell you what foods you can or can’t eat. Rather it helps you understand what to eat for your diet based on available research and what your selected dietary composition means for you and your health.
Why SIMPLE Eating?
This information is aimed to be a time-saving tool that summarizes the best information available to help you plan your nutrition and enable you to take meaningful action to accomplish the items in the following list. Note that these are incredibly common goals and expectations for just about any responsible modern diet. While it’s a good list of worthy outcomes, it shouldn’t be new to you if you’ve ever read about nutrition.
- Live a higher quality life
- Live a greater quantity of years (as long a possible through nutrition)
- Achieve both of the above in an enjoyable and sustainable way that is uniquely right for you
- Adequately address your body’s structural and energy needs (these are vasty different things by the way)
Since these are such fundamental tenets of SIMPLE Eating it’s worth a closer look at each of the above outcomes.
Higher Quality of Life
Your eating habits have a huge impact on how you feel at any given moment. Eat the wrong types of macronutrients or a suboptimal amount (i.e. too much) and you could experience moderate to severe discomfort on any given day. But do that for a long period of time and you could very well end up with more chronic conditions that restrict and limit your ability to live the life you expect.
Furthermore, food and nutrition is a great thing to optimize when you are faced with illness and disease. Getting an optimized nutrition plan in place may not cure an illness, but it will certainly make it easier for your body to cope and heal.
Conversely if you don’t have a deliberate nutrition plan in place or have the quantity and mix of macronutrients optimized in your diet you can certainly do harm and make it more difficult for yourself. A few notable examples of potential low quality of life pertaining to nutrition include constant hunger, weight gain, lack of energy, and headaches.
SIMPLE Eating will help you get your optimal plan in place to help maximize the quality of your life as it pertains to nutrition and fueling your body. Your days will be filled with both fewer annoyances like headaches and poor sleep and more energy and feeling healthier. In short you get a double win by eliminating common negatives while simultaneously adding positives.
Greater Quantity of Life
Yes, SIMPLE Eating can help you to build a diet that accounts for the latest information about longevity and life expectancy related to food. One of the specific areas that I will concentrate on is the type and amount of protein you eat on a daily basis- protein consumption is one factor that has been shown to simultaneously be inversely correlate with how long you live, AND positively correlated with longevity. How could protein be scientifically shown to be both good and bad for you? I went down the rabbit hole and found the leading information on the ‘right’ answer as of today, but more on protein later. Just note that these are the types of questions I was trying to answer, but couldn’t easily.
There are other nutritional factors that we’ll cover along the way that contribute to the number of seconds, minutes, hours and years you will live, but for now know that SIMPLE Eating diligently incorporates the most important and fundamental concepts to help you increase the quantity of your life just by eating.
Enjoyable & Sustainable
As if increased quality and increased quantity weren’t enough, I’m stoked to tell you that this is fun and enjoyable way to eat and follow on a daily basis. That’s because it doesn’t prescribe any particular set of foods for you to eat, or prescribe a complicated way of tracking ‘portions’, ‘blocks’ or some other units of quantity. There isn’t a fixed macronutrients ratio that you need to follow, and you can basically eat anything you decide you want to eat (though that doesn’t mean it’s good for you!).
Does that sound miraculous?!
I guess in some ways that may sound too good to be true. The catch (of course you can’t eat ANYTHING you want or as much as you may want) is that you will need to learn to eat very specifically at a detailed level in order to track your goals. Depending on your background, culture, and nutritional education, learning to eat deliberately may seem a bit daunting when you are starting out. By following the approach I did, however, you have a path to establish the knowledge you need to enjoy the foods you eat in a way that suits your life for decades to come.
So you might be wondering how SIMPLE Eating is different from what you are doing today. In short it focuses on the following guidelines, each of which is discussed in great detail a little later in Summary of SIMPLE Eating page:
Putting it as simply as I can, if you want to eat ice cream, go ahead. Just be aware of the amount of saturated fat and added sugar it has (both are bad), and the total calories you are eating. But by all means enjoy it as long as you stay under your daily caloric threshold. Got a hankering for your favorite cheese burger? Chow-down, but again make sure you watch the saturated fat, salt and total daily calories. In short, just like your mom probably told you, you can enjoy things in moderation as long as you don’t go too far with it.
Address Structural and Energy Needs Seperately
But what about fat vs carbohydrates (“carbs”) ask my Keto loving family? Aren’t carbs bad for losing weight? Why doesn’t SIMPLE Eating take a stance on the balance of carbohydrates versus fat?
We’ll get into the details in when I talk about Nutrition Science where I review the gory details of macronutrients, but, by and large, fat and carbs are equally friendly forms of calories. Yes fat (including oils) have over twice the caloric density by weight and can certainly pack on pounds of body-fat quickly if you aren’t careful, but for SIMPLE Eating the general ratio of fat to carbs is very flexible allowing you to get your calories from the food you chose on a given day. This flexibility between carbs and fat is one of the main reasons that this approach is so complimentary with most popular nutritional approaches, which I talk about in the Dietary Flavors page where I review the most common dietary ‘flavors’ and how they fit on top of SIMPLE Eating. If you enjoy a plant-based diet, Keto, paleo, vegan, Harvard, or any other dietary ‘flavor’, continue to do so- SIMPLE Eating is compatible with these and will help you get the most out of each nutritional approach. Be aware though that there are some concerns with a few of these ‘flavors’ that we’ll talk about later, mainly because some of them are heavy in saturated fat and the types of proteins in the food have been shown to have negative effects on the quantity or quality of life.
Beyond energy needs, eh hem, calories, you need to carefully address your body’s structural needs as well. Basically how much protein you eat (because protein isn’t really an energy source- it’s not a percentage of daily calories) and a portion of the fat (lipids as we’ll come to know them later) that you eat isn’t used for energy either (stuff like cell walls and hormones are built from fats). So how much you eat isn’t just about how many calories you need, it’s about understanding your goals and what your body needs to be fed to accomplish those goals.
How It’s All Organized
There certainly is a lot of material to cover, and I have tried to lay it all out in a nice and convenient way to help you use the information for the first time, or as a long-term reference. To get there, the nutritional information on this site is structured to accomplish two main goals:
- Provide knowledge as a foundation for your approach to nutrition. As a result the posts are oriented in a way that they build off one another sequentially. Think of it as a book where you go chapter by chapter (because I originally wrote it as a book).
- Serve as a long-term reference as you master your diet. In this way each post can be used as a stand-alone reference, but unlike a book I’ll be curating it over time to make sure the information is still accurate and aligned with the latest research.
The following pages will help you start digging into all the yummy details that I cover.
Summary of SIMPLE Eating
The summary page is the cliff-notes version of all of the nutritional content. If you don’t want to get into all the background or want to know why things are done in a particular way, then this page is for you. The summary page is also a fantastic reference to come back to for reference periodically.
This view is a bit more practical because it looks at scenarios we can all understand, like how your body selectively burns carbs before fat when there is an energy surplus (i.e. you ate more than you needed). It reveals the “why’s” behind SIMPLE Eating and makes strong use of the nutritional overview material from the next section.
Nutrition Science: Macronutrients, Water and Vitamins/Minerals
This page is the first of two big hurdles we need to overcome on your full journey to optimized nutrition- developing a foundational understanding of what food does in your body, both the good and the bad, is critical to understanding what’s going to happen each time you put a fork/spoon/straw in your mouth. In order to provide a basic understanding of how your body uses nutrition we need to talk about each of the three macronutrients (i.e. protein, fat/lipids, and carbohydrates) and what research says about each of them. In addition we’ll cover water and hydration, and vitamins and minerals.
The material in this page can be a bit daunting if you are unfamiliar with it, but just remember that whether you understand the material or not, EVERYTHING you put in your mouth impacts your health. Understanding those impacts (both good and bad) puts you in the driver’s seat to a long and happy life as far as nutrition is concerned.
Picking Your Dietary Flavor(s)
This page provides an overview of common dietary plans, what I call ‘Dietary Flavors’ on the site, that might dictate or inform your selected macronutrient sources and ratios. Dietary Flavors are helpful because they can be a bit more prescriptive about the foods you eat along with the quantities of those foods- as you are starting your journey this can greatly simplify decisions you need to make. For each Dietary Flavor I’ll talk about some of the benefits the Dietary Flavor offers along with some of the “gotcha’s” where it may not align with SIMPLE Eating.
Dietary Flavors can also be very helpful by providing a wealth of recipes and forums of proponents who can help you on your nutritional journey. Be forewarned however, some of the popular Dietary Flavors may not include healthy practices or nutritional advice, and they are covered in this book to help you make an informed decision about which one may be best for you.
Implementing SIMPLE Eating
As with any big life change, starting a new dietary approach can be daunting. Unfortunately while SIMPLE Eating is as simple as I can make it, it likely requires some change on your part. To help you in adopting the principles discussed here I’ve included a page on how to implement these concepts into practice. While I’d love to tell you that I included this content because I’m just a thoughtful guy, it turns out as I formulated this approach I did quite a bit of learning myself on what NOT to do as well as what worked for me. This content presents my best advice about how to put everything into practice the easiest way possible to minimize the change while effectively progressing toward your goals.
SIMPLE Eating is more of an approach than a specific diet, and this page walks through the details of that approach and how to complete each.
Expectation & Goal Setting
Your expectations for your nutrition are the most critical components of SIMPLE Eating. This page goes into the gory details behind appropriate expectations for your specific nutritional approach. More importantly though, it walks through how to set goals based on your expectations that directly tie to what you eat.
Estimating Daily Macronutrient and Caloric Needs
At its core SIMPLE Eating requires you to set the types of macronutrients and the amount of calories you want to eat each day. There’s a bit of measuring and math here that we’ll walk through, but in the end you’ll understand the daily nutritional needs of the calorie-burning machine that is your body quite a bit more and how it uses and manages raw nutrients and calories (Hint: about half of what you eat is used for structural purposed and NOT used for calories).
Planning and Scheduling Goals
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Tracking Progress Daily
From a tactical perspective SIMPLE Eating is focused on teaching you how to eat based on your unique goals and genetics. The only way to really accomplish that is to carefully track and record what you eat and what your body does as a result.
This is the second big hurdle you will face in adopting SIMPLE Eating- the day to day tracking of everything you eat for a temporary timeframe until you KNOW how to eat.
Tracking your intake daily also helps to keep your goals fresh on your mind to make sure that every time you lift a fork or spoon to your mouth that you understand how it impacts your progress and what you can expect for your next progress check-in. I’ll walk through some tools to help you track your progress and make things a lot easier in this chapter as well.
It’s worth noting that no Dietary Flavor, no nutrition book, or any other information source can ever just tell you how to eat given your genetics, activity level and current health condition. While the information in SIMPLE Eating can get you close to identifying your optimal diet on the surface, only you know your goals AND the types of foods you enjoy eating! With the knowledge from SIMPLE Eating you can literally have your cake, eat it, AND accomplish your goals because you’ll be informed and fully empowered when it comes to nutrition.
Staple Meals & Recipes
What nutrition book would be complete without giving you some recipes to start with?! Most of the recipes are lunch/dinner options and can be prepared with or without meat (more about why when we hit that protein section in Chapter 3). My goal in providing you with these meals is to give you a few meals you can use as staples as you start your SIMPLE Eating journey. Staple meals are things you can eat daily, or at least several times a week. I find most to be pretty tasty too, so you might just enjoy them regardless of where you are in your individual journey. Inevitably you’ll get bored with these meals after some time, and that gives you the ability and motivation to find new meals that you can add, but that meet your nutritional requirements.