Proper Nutrition

Since proper nutrition is such a diverse topic and is best applied with an individual approach, here we will cover some brief yet fundamental topics.

Proper nutrition is something that is very overlooked whenever we think of human potential and it has been associated now mostly to weight/fat rather than good health, performance and increasing your overall positive experience of life. Here are just a few things I have discovered in my years of health, fitness, personal development and nutritional research…

The way nature intended: There are many diets and weight loss methods available these days that explain a very pigeon-holed and one size fits all approach when trying to give proper nutrition advice. The problem is that we are all different and require different nutritional needs. The aspect I am specifically referring to is eating appropriately for your metabolic type and ethnicity. There are so many ethnicities in the world and each of them come from a different environment. Dark skinned people come from typically hotter and drier climates, fair skinned people are generally from cooler climates and so on. So it’s only logical that proper nutrition applies to the individual and also takes into account the person’s ethnic and environmental background.

In addition to these environmental differences there are also other differences such as the availability of certain foods. In a time when there is so much importing, exporting, packaging and technology, most countries have access to every type of food available, even foods that have never been encountered in that particular region previously. This is before even worrying about preservatives, artificial flavour enhancers, pesticides etc. Even certain natural foods can cause a problem if your body is not equipped to consume them. Proper nutrition is not simply low fat, low salt etc.

Consider this, many thousands of years ago human beings rarely ventured outside of their own habitat. As a result, people had to eat what was locally and naturally available in each season of the year. Not only that but they also had to work very physically for their food, there were no sick days or savings accounts for them to fall back on when they didn‘t feel like working hard that day, they had to do the work daily in order to survive. These days we have a choice of hundreds of thousands of different things in the supermarket, this contributes to many health problems because people are now consuming foods that their particular ethnic type is not meant to. Proper nutrition has become confusing and mysterious and many people have just given up.

The advice here is to research and educate yourself on what your ancestors ate most of naturally, this is what your body is conditioned to. If you’re a native New Zealander then your ancestors ate certain starchy vegetables, lots of fish and other certain animal and plant life. An inland Aborigine from Alice Springs or Broken Hill is conditioned to eating only around 10% animal flesh and 90% plant life, this is their natural way of eating as determined by evolution. Proper nutrition for a 35 year old Sudanese man is not necessarily proper nutrition for an 18 year old American girl.

If you don’t know where your ancestors are from then find out. Research what kinds of local plants and animals were likely to have been consumed and in what proportions and match the major part of your diet to match it as closely as possible. A saying I like to quote all the time is “nothing tastes as good as healthy feels”. It’s up to you what’s more important, 5 minutes of a nice tasting burger or a life time of health and vitality, it’s your choice.

The calorie debate: Whenever you encounter diet and weight loss advice there is always conflicting arguments about how many calories to consume, macro nutrient proportions and overall portion size. Again I will refer to our ancestors since it’s only been a few hundred years since we stopped eating naturally and proper nutrition ceased to exist.

In the bush, dessert or tribal village, people had access to only the foods they could catch, gather and identify as safe to eat. In addition to this, the seasons dictated what foods were readily available at the time and how much food was available full stop. It wasn’t just the seasons either, there were certain days when the dominant male of the family would come home without a kill and his people may have gone days with very limited food supplies. On another day, he could bring home a massive mammal or a canoe full of fish for consumption, which would keep everyone’s belly full for days. On these days they would consume massive amounts of food because they were not sure when their next meal would be and in addition to that, meat without refrigeration does not last long.

Due to these conditions, human beings have developed certain protective mechanisms that in modern times are detrimental to health, weight maintenance etc. Modern conveniences have become modern inconveniences for proper nutrition.

If you do not eat enough calories your body will think it’s in a famine and will conserve energy and thus hold onto fat, this ends up slowing your metabolism. If you consume too many calories then obviously you will gain weight. It’s the protective mechanisms that are causing people to get heavier and less healthy. Now days we don’t need these protective mechanisms as much with such wide availability of food.

Another thing that causes excess weight gain and poor nutritional habits are certain hormones and enzymes, particularly the ones that control appetite. There are hormones and enzymes that tell your brain when you have had enough food. There are some people who have a deficiency of these and thus they become food addicts because they don’t have an “off switch” that tells them that they’re full.

This is another protective mechanism that was useful in parts of the world that often experienced famine. This was designed so that people could eat massive amounts of food when it was available in order to store fat and glycogen to prepare for the inevitable period of famine. Thankfully there are now treatments available for this sort of thing, such as hypnosis, NLP and drug therapy but there is still the issue of self control that seems to be lacking today.

Our approach is simply to consume a lowered amount of calories for several days to a week and then two or three days of increased calories. Keep in mind though that the foods you consume also need to be of high quality and as natural as possible. A good rule of thumb is to consume the calorie restricted diet for double the amount of time that you raise calories. So if you are moderately restricting calories for a period of seven days then three days of increased calories should follow. This replicates the body’s natural process of fluctuating nutritional availability. Another benefit of eating this way is that although you are limiting calories, you are also increasing them regularly, which keeps your metabolism from becoming sluggish due to entering famine mode. Using eating patterns like our ancestors combined with proper nutrition will ensure that your body maintains it’s metabolic rate so that the fat won’t come back unless you lose all self control.

Supplements, herbs and every other magical substance: This is an interesting topic isn’t it? Pick up any muscle or fitness magazine and there is always pages of advertising and dodgy research on so-called “miracle” supplements and herb extracts promising to cut fat, build muscle, grow wings and shoot bolts of lightning from your rear end.

The question is, do any of these things actually work? The answer is yes and no. There are many that don’t work, some that sort of work and others that work rather well (but at what cost?). The issue with these products is that most of the research done is conducted by or on behalf of the company that makes it. This is dangerous to trust because research results can be interpreted to mean almost anything depending on your motives.

Other natural substances are things you will find in a lot of foods and widely available and cheap herbs. Things like green tea are all the rage now, supplements are manufactured with the extracts and sold as fat burners and thermogenic agents. This comes complete with all the chemicals in the manufacture process. Green tea is actually an incredible substance with enormous health benefits. It has been shown to contain catechins, which act as fat metabolisers and recently have been shown to mimic the actions of certain cancer drugs. Even some regularly consumed foods contain enormous amounts of nutrition that is of higher quality than any supplement.

Another thing worth noting is that proper nutrition comes with the absence of excess. This means that anything in excess is not healthy. The western world though believes that if a little of something is good for you then 50 times more must be better.

Don’t be fooled by supplements, I would advise staying away from most of them and stick to the natural foods that mother nature intended for us to eat. Supplements are manufactured nutrients, they contain toxic substances that have caused many problems for many people. If you want to try any supplement, the only thing I would recommend is fibre because we don’t get enough of it in modern diets and proper nutrition includes grains that are high in fibre.

The last thing worth mentioning about proper nutrition is preservatives, colours, flavours and every other unnatural and harmful substance. Although I don’t recommend being super strict to the point of complete denial of all fat and sugar and a tasteless, boring diet, I do recommend certain things be all but eliminated from your eating habits. Things like packaged snacks, such as cheezels, cheese and bacon balls, twisties and all the rest of them contain flavours, preservatives, colours etc.

Take a look at the ingredients, the chemical names are so long that they need to be represented by numbers, this also aids in hiding what they actually are because most people aren’t really going to think about it too much. Well I’ve done my research and analysed just about every number I have seen on any food package. There are substances in there that really should be illegal to market for human consumption.

Did you know that Coca Cola can be used to clean oil spills and grease stains from your driveway and dissolve a human tooth in 24 to 48 hours? How about the fact that flavour enhancer 621 is MSG and that this contributes to many problems such as asthma, metabolic problems and even cancer? Have you seen flavour enhancer 635 on any food packaging? This often comes with MSG and increases its effect by 10 to 15 times! 635 also causes many food intolerances that are not detected because the effects don’t set in for many hours and people often believe they have a permanent condition such as a painful, itchy rash.

Most of these substances represented with numbers are extremely harmful, especially to children. It has been shown that the increase in behavioural disorders in children is related to many of these chemicals. You may even suffer from premature Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease because these products damage the central nervous system, sometimes even worse than the effects of alcohol or marijuana.

People have more diseases and so-called disorders now more than ever before. What many people don’t realise is that it’s often food and the chemical substances contained in packaged products that contribute or at least increase the effects of much of them. The easiest way you can increase your health and reduce any current ailments is to start with proper nutrition and eliminate all these artificial and harmful substances and eat more of what mother nature provides. After a while you will adapt and it feels better than any feeling you would get from eating a burger.

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