Health is Holistic: Nutrition
When you read the word nutrition, what do you think of?
Just take ten seconds right now to think of anything that pops into your head…
Alright, what were they? I can tell you mine, diets, shakes, fat loss, restrictive eating.
What if I told you that what we get told about nutrition and eating is a complete farce, just a lie the new fad diet company wants you to believe…
Would you believe me? Or maybe you already know this, deep down and that is why you actively rebel against any kind of restrictive dieting after about a few days from starting it. Some of us will continue for a few weeks, those who are disciplined and really want to change, however the majority will always fall back into old habits, that is human nature for you.
And it is not your fault either, we are wired that way, when you go on a diet, you are literally thrown in the ring against your brain and thousands of years of evolutionary traits and you have to fight yourself!
I am not going to tell you what is right or wrong here, as I truly don’t think it matters, but I do want to tell you the truth about nutrition and how you can start to work with yourself to start eating better, by changing a few simple habits and behaviours.
Firstly, I want to share a story about why I am so passionate about making sure the truth is heard about nutrition. In 2015, I opened a gym with a business partner and I was running the place, working sixty hour weeks and trying to make ends meet. Running a business can be extremely difficult, especially when you are starting out and don’t have a team to lean on for support.
I found out the hard way when my days got so busy, I forgot to eat lunch most days and being a gym owner, I had to train and make sure that I was leading by example. Demonstrating that I was fit, healthy and full of inspiration, however it went downhill pretty quickly.
And of course, being young and reading up on nutrition, I was swept away with the fads of the time, one of these being a “no-sugar challenge.” The challenge was on the extreme side, whereby you were not allowed to eat any processed sugars, the only sugar you were allowed was the sugar in fruit, and even then, you could only have one piece of fruit a day.
I felt really good about two weeks in, I had lost a few kilograms, and was down to 82kg, the lightest I had been since I was eighteen years old. Everything seemed to be going really well…
Enter the fourth week of the challenge, and I started losing energy, holding myself up with a stick when taking classes at night to make sure I didn’t collapse from exhaustion. I had dizzy spells, blurred vision and my productivity went down-hill very quickly.
I was at the point where I was scared, I didn’t know what was wrong with me, was something more sinister happening to my body?
I went to my local GP and got a series of tests done, starting with blood tests, they came back fine, in fact better than fine. I completed a diabetes test, if you haven’t done it before, you get to drink this syrup, pretty much pure sugar/glucose and then have to wait around for two hours. Testing to see whether my blood sugars would crash.
The test came back on the borderline of pre-hypoglycaemia, my blood sugar levels I remember were 4.6mmol, which is deemed quite low, and on the borderline of diabetes. However, the doctor said you were fine, so I got referred to test my heart and get an ECG done.
After a month of testing, they still had not figured out why I was having dizzy spells, blurred vision and was just exhausted all the time. I had stopped training at this time, which was also affecting my mental health as well.
The ECG came back fine, my heart was as strong as an ox they said, so the last test was an MRI, to get some imaging on my brain. I have had plenty of MRI’s in the past before, due to having a benign arachnoid cyst since birth, so there was no problems from that part, however concern that the cyst had caused my symptoms were definitely playing on my mind.
The imaging came back all clear, the cyst was still the same size as it had been when they found it when I was eleven years old, and that was when the head doctor at the hospital came up to me and told me the words I needed to hear…
“Everything is fine, you are really healthy, you just need to eat more!”
From that moment, it clicked, and I did begin eating more, getting my health back in order and it really helped with the exhaustion, dizzy spells and I felt myself again after a month or two.
Of course, as I do, I went a bit far and actually started eating too much, until I blew out to 105 kilograms at the end of 2016.
The heaviest I have ever been!!
Looking back on it now, I actually don’t remember how I started putting on so much weight, but running the gym, just starting out officially dating my now wife and everything else in between, I got into a slump and looked after everyone else but me…
Now, going from one extreme to the next, how was I able to balance myself out and find the happy medium that I have today you ask?
I am happy you did, because it was a combination of factors, where I started studying a nutrition course, I started looking after me again and went back to running. There was multiple factors that pulled me from the two extremes from improving my sleep, nutrition and movement, however I want to focus on the nutrition for now. I will come back to sleep/stress management and movement in later articles.
The doctor said I needed to eat more and I saw that as a license to simply just eat more and eat anything I wanted really. Not great for me, especially considering I am a fat kid at heart. It was not until I started studying nutrition and realising how much the food we put in our mouth change us on a cellular level…
Let me give you a second to let that sink in, I mean truly, what you put in your mouth actually affects you right down to the trillions of cells you have in your body.
I don’t want to trouble you with the science of it, it will take too long to discuss and comprehend, however if you do want to understand more about how food changes your cells, and therefore your body, check out this article by Stanford Medicine.
The old saying, “You are what you eat,” really comes to mind here, as we truly are what we eat. As your skin cells die off and we produce new skin cells every seven days, the food and fluid we ingest literally become us!!
Interesting isn’t it, well you may not think so, but I do, anyhow the relevance of understanding this comes back to the bigger picture, nutrition is pivotal to your holistic health.
The best way to start to get a handle on your nutrition is to break down old habits that have been wired into you and build up new ones, which takes effort and planning. You simply cannot just start a diet like I did, because as you can see, even a fitness professional of four years fails, therefore, what chance will you have?
The reason I am telling you all of this is to make you think, to hopefully break down some of the beliefs you may have around nutrition and eating. And maybe, just maybe, to get you to start thinking of nutrition differently, rather than thinking of nutrition as diets and restrictive eating, think of nutrition for what it truly is…
Nutrition is a source of life, no more, no less, it is energy going in, energy going out, but it also a celebration of culture and life as well.
Therefore, the next time you think of starting a diet, I want you to stop for a second and think about doing this instead…
Slow down and THINK about your eating/meals. Slow down you eating as well, scientifically proven to make you feel fuller. (Opposite for those who need to put on weight, eat faster to fit more in).
Make life SIMPLE, do this by planning meals before hand and having it prepared before you start cooking.
Eat healthy 80% of the time (More vegies, wholefoods, less packaged stuff), and leave the 20% of eating to whatever you want!
Drink more water!! You are 65-70% water, therefore you need water!
Fuck Diets and if you are feeling guilty about eating a burger, ask yourself why? Life is too short not to eat a burger. Just don’t eat burgers ALL THE TIME.
Hopefully that helped and has given you a light bulb moment when it comes to your health, because when the doctor told me that I needed to eat more, something clicked in me, I realised that nutrition and eating was the single most important thing when it came to weight gain/loss.
However, when I just focused on eating more, and neglected the other things, I put on weight and went the other way, therefore I will be writing about movement next week.
We were born to move, our bodies need movement to stay strong and young. Without movement, you are more prone to multiple diseases, I cannot wait to share with you why I love movement more than anything else.
Until next time,
Take Back Control
