The Top 20 Food Rules You NEED to Know to be Truly Lean & Healthy
Everything you wanted to know about protein, carbs, calories, probiotics, vitamin D, cooking oils, foods that burn fat, foods that make you fat, foods that can kill you slowly, and much more.
Here is a series of Food Rules I will be presenting over the next few weeks. Please follow along and ask your friends and family to do so too. You can follow the series here on my FIT with”FUSS” facebook page or here on my blog.
This article is one that you’re going to want to bookmark to come back and reference at any time. And you’ll also want to share this page with all your friends and family to help spread what true healthy nutrition is all about. Seriously, there’s more great information about nutrition on this page than a lot of entire books.
I’m going to rattle off a bunch of random important facts (in no particular order) about food and eating healthy that you need to know. There are a previously published articles available on many topics that are underlined, and where a more full explanation might be needed if you want more details on that topic, simply contact me to have the relevant article sent to you.
Before we start this list, let’s establish a big picture view first, before we dive into various smaller topics like specific foods…
The Big Picture View (most people have never thought of food in this way)
Let me give you something to think about, and this is VERY big picture and VERY important… if we took away modern society and plopped you on a deserted island, what is the #1 most important thing in your life at that point? That’s right… FOOD! What will I eat to survive and thrive. At that point, you can forget about careers, technology, video games, television, nightlife, cell phones, and just about every other aspect of modern life… the single most important thing you need to focus on at that point is what to eat.
However, in our modern day, most of us don’t have to think about what to eat at all, and in fact, most people NEVER think about what they put in their mouths… they just eat whatever they see in front of them that they know tastes good, without any thought about whether it’s an appropriate food for humans to eat.
You can call that the “See-Food Diet”… you “see” the food and you eat it.
Isn’t that a major disconnect? Food is quite literally one of the most important things in our daily lives, yet barely anybody thinks about the ramifications of what they eat and how it will affect their health and the quality of their life (until, of course, they lose their health).
Since food is one of the most important things in our lives for our quality of life, don’t you think that it should be a priority as one of the fundamental topics that children learn about throughout school? It should be a priority, but it isn’t. Kids get a thorough education on topics such as Math, History, Science, Languages, etc, but never get more than a couple hours in their entire 12 years in school about the most important thing in our lives…what to eat.
If you think about it, that’s absolutely insane… One of THE single most important aspects of our lives is never really taught to children in school. And parents don’t generally pick up the slack and teach kids nutrition because they were never taught about it either. This is a modern day phenomenon because the abundance of food all around us in modern day life means that we don’t have to think about what’s appropriate to eat.
If you want to be lean and truly healthy, obviously you NEED to think differently than the average person who eats the “SEE-food diet” where they eat without thinking.
There needs to be some simple rules to follow if you want to successfully navigate the current food landscape out there where so many foods are making you fat and sick.
And THAT’s why I wrote this page for you… to simplify and give you some simple food rules to be lean and healthy, yet still ENJOY food.
Food Rules Simplified
Okay, so let’s simplify nutrition a bit here… everyone out there seems confused about what is the best “diet” to be on. People seem to love to always jump from fad diet to fad diet such as low-fat diets, atkins diets, south beach diets, grapefruit diets, detox diets, vegetarian diets, and other sometimes ridiculous diets that most times are based on one person’s opinion or marketing scheme (or personal agenda) rather than based on actual science.
The only “diet” that’s actually based on real science is the study of paleolithic nutrition (aka – paleo diet). But I hate to call it “paleo diet”, because it’s not like any other fad diet, since it’s based on real archaeological nutritional science about what our ancestors ate before the agricultural revolution came around. The idea is simply that for the first 99.5% of our existence (ancestors back as far as 2 Million years ago, homo erectus), we only ate wild plants and animals, while for the last 0.5% of our existence (since the agricultural revolution in the last 5,000-10,000 years), humans now almost entirely eat farmed plants and animals. The biggest change this represents is the massive inclusion of grains in our current diet (and what our animals are fed) now compared to our Paleolithic ancestors.
Many people think that we don’t know exactly what ancient humans ate… but this is false.
Nutritional archaeologists know pretty convincingly what ancient humans ate as they study a lot of evidence such as ancient feces remains as well as studying isotope ratios in human bone samples from all over the world through every time period in history to determine ratios of animals vs plants that ancient humans ate –which by the way, was always an omnivorous mixture of plants and animals, and a fairly high protein intake…there was no such thing as ancient paleolithic vegetarians…any Nutritional Archaelogist can confirm that they simply didn’t exist. We were all omnivores that ate different ratios of plants and animals based on what part of the world, what latitude we lived, and the time of the year.
So what exactly did our Paleolithic ancestors eat for the first 99.5% of our existence, representing what we are still programmed to eat? Simple:
- Wild meat, fish, and seafood (animals that ate the right foods, unlike our current farmed meats and farmed fish)
- fruits
- veggies
- nuts
- seeds
Grains were only a very TINY fraction of the ancient Paleolithic diet as there was no way to process large amounts of grain back in that day into flour, so amounts of wild grain would have been small such as a few grains in an occasional soup or stew. As you can see, this is vastly different from the modern human diet that includes grain at almost every meal and in very large quantities in cereals, breads, pasta, muffins, bagels, etc.
So with that big picture explained…let’s get into the details of my top 20 food rules, RULE 1:
Carbohydrates don’t need to be eliminated… they are not inherently “bad” in reasonable quantities. But grains and processed sugars in particular should be minimized. So to make things simple, you will be leaner and healthier if you get most of your carbohydrates from fruits and vegetables instead of grains and processed sugar.
The biggest problem with grains, aside from the abuse to your blood sugar regulation system (pancreas and insulin sensitivity), is that grains contain a lot of anti-nutrients which prevent your body from absorbing some minerals, as well as gluten and other substances that cause chronic gut inflammation. Potatoes, sweet potatoes, and other tubers have less problems in terms of digestive system inflammation than grains do.
What do I personally do? Well, I avoid grains as much as possible, except on 1 cheat day per week. That will always be a meal dining out, so that we’re never tempted with breads and cereals in our house. I eat whole fruits (never juice) and veggies daily, and might have an occasional potato or sweet potato once or twice a week.
See you tomorrow with some more simple rules to HELP YOU help YOURSELF !!