Week #2: Diet - What You Eat Matters
Want to get 14% smarter, 22% nicer, and 35% hotter? Diet's the answer!
If you’re new to The Curvy Road Project, read the Introduction post, then read our Week #1 post about Sleep. If you’re just interested in diet information, read on!
If you did read the sleep post last week and have been implementing those ideas, tracking your sleep, and reporting back to our Facebook Group, keep doing that throughout this second week!
Also, revisit the Social Score you gave yourself for sleep last week. If your sleep improved or got worse, adjust the chart. If you weren’t especially successful at improving your sleep, keep working on it this week. We’ll revisit sleep again next week.
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Week #2 Goal: Eat a Healthier Diet
Our goal this week is to eat a healthier diet. For many of us, we’ll be eating a healthier diet to lose weight. Some of us might want to gain weight. Still, others might be at an ideal weight and want to improve their health, improve their sleep, or help fuel exercise. Regardless of our motivations, the same principles will apply.
How We Measure the Goal
WHY we want to eat healthier will determine how we measure the goal. This one is a little more complicated than last week’s sleep goal because there’s a lot of variability in reasons.
If you want to lose weight via losing body fat: This is the most common reason, and the easiest to measure. Bodyweight is an obvious measure; just weigh yourself first thing in the morning at regular intervals. I recommend weekly. I also like to use the fat and skinny pants test. Find (or buy) a pair of pants that are way too tight. Try them on once per week. If you’re making progress, they’ll slowly start to fit better.
If you want to gain weight by building muscle: This is a tricky measure. The most accurate way is to take a slew of measurements (arms, chest, waist, hips, thighs, etc. A few other methods are explained here. Personally, I just use the aesthetics test. Look in a mirror. Do your muscles look bigger? Good job; you’re moving in the right direction!
If you’re a woman and you want to gain weight to increase bust and hips (ass) size: This can also be measured with a fit test or by taking measurements.
If you have some other specific goal, shoot me a message or post the goal on our Facebook Group and we’ll give you suggestions.
Diet Details: What You Eat Matters
Eating the right diet is the second pillar of The Curvy Road Project’s foundational ideas. Eating helps support the other foundational ideas by setting the stage for better sleep and fueling exercise. The three pillars have a symbiotic relationship.
Following a good diet helps us achieve and maintain the ideal body weight, and it sets the stage for optimal health. The right diet helps regulate our moods, helps prevent chronic illness, boosts immunity to fight off acute illnesses, supports pregnancy and breastfeeding, and helps us live longer.
Needless to say, a good diet matters.
Maintaining an ideal body weight also makes us more attractive, which has all kinds of social benefits, romantic and otherwise. No matter how attractive we are right now, a better diet will make us more attractive.
We’ll discuss this issue in great detail in future posts, but for now, just know that humans evolved to prefer the aesthetics of a person who ranks about a “4” or “5” on the scale below, both male and female. The body type has enough muscle to do a wide range of physical activities with enough body fat to survive famine.
One of the biggest fallacies people fall for is believing body type is controlled by exercise. It’s not. Body type is controlled by diet. The right diet will make you more attractive.
But what is the “right diet?” This topic is endlessly debatable in part because the science of nutrition is about as valid and reliable as the science of psychology. They’re relatively “new” sciences studying incredibly complex phenomena. We simply don’t know as much about human nutrition as headlines in popular media and “guru” doctors with youtube channels would like us to believe.
There are shockingly few ideas in the study of human nutrition that reach the level of universal consensus. There are a few ideas that almost all researchers agree are valid:
Humans need water to survive.
Humans need carbohydrates, fat, and protein to survive, though we can go pretty long periods of time without one or two of these.
We need about 16 minerals and about 13 vitamins in small amounts to survive.
To lose weight, we need to create a caloric deficit (burn more calories than we consume); to gain weight, we need to create a caloric surplus (consume more calories than we burn.)
Most researchers agree on these points:
Eating excessive amounts of refined sugar is bad.
Eating a lot of processed food is bad.
Variety is good, especially fruits and veggies.
This science gives us a pretty good framework for deciding what to eat.
We can study other fields besides nutrition to get some clues about the “right” human diet. Based on findings from anthropologists our pre-agricultural ancestors likely survived on plants they foraged and animals they killed. Based on findings from historians, our post-agriculture ancestors survived on, well, just about anything. It’s not uncommon to find populations of humans who survived on extremely limited diets of only a handful of foods. One of my psychology professors from college was fond of noting how human dietary flexibility was nearly identical to rats.
Of course, there are a million different diets out there, often with contradictory methods. That’s not surprising; we could develop a pretty long list of diets by considering all of the points I list above.
These diets usually have some research backing them, are promoted by educated people with relevant degrees, and actually do work. Usually. That’s not because any given diet is a magical solution that allows people to eat whatever they want, whenever they want, and in whatever quantities they want. All diets work because they cause the people trying the diet to observe what they eat and control how many calories they consume. The takeaway?
Lots of roads lead to Rome.
It doesn’t matter if you’re following a vegan diet, vegetarian, keto, paleo, Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig… whatever. They all kinda work.
The true test of the flexibility of our diet is reproduction. On any given diet, can we have sex, the woman gets pregnant, carry the baby to term, then successfully breastfeed? If so, our species can survive on that diet. It might not be optimal, but it’s good enough. The point? Don’t overthink this. If you follow a few simple guidelines, there’s no reason to become an orthorexic weirdo.
And for fuck’s sake, don’t make your diet part of your personal identity!
Our goal is to maintain a diet that’s easy, convenient, keeps us healthy, and keeps us at our ideal body weight. Given almost any “diet” will work, we can make up our own plan based on some guiding principles, which can be used to produce some rules to follow.
So What Rules Should We Follow?
These “rules” will, if followed, give you a pretty good diet that will support every one of our health and fitness ideas for the rest of The Project. It’s okay to break any of the rules on occasion; you’ll get excellent results if you follow them almost all of the time.
Rule #1: Avoid sugary and processed foods. This includes soda, fruit juices, pastries, candy, and anything that comes in a box or a can. Fresh fruit and honey are okay in moderation.
Rule #2: Drink about a gallon of water per day for men and about 3 quarts for women. Spread this out throughout the day. It’s usually useful to carry a water bottle, then refill it however many times you need to reach your goal. If you sweat a lot from exercise or climate, increase water intake a bit.
Rule #3: If you want to lose weight, eat less. If you want to gain weight, eat more. When you reach a point where you feel good, keep eating the same amount day-to-day. Remember, alcohol contains calories.
Rule #4: Eat a snack before you go shopping, and buy foods that are different colors from the perimeter of the grocery store. The snack will make you less tempted to buy junk food, and the shopping around the perimeter causes you to avoid processed foods (found in boxes and cans in the middle aisles) and buy mostly fresh fruits, veggies, meats, and dairy in the refrigerated cases. Fresh frozen foods (as opposed to frozen processed foods) are okay. The “different color” part assures you’ll be getting all of those required vitamins and minerals. Moderation and variation is a good thing.
Rule #5: If one particular food seems to cause you problems (allergic reaction, bloating, nausea, causes negative moods or emotions, etc.), stop eating it. We’re all an “experiment of one.” Odds are good there are some foods that you can’t tolerate very well. Don’t be a hero! Just cut that food out of your diet.
The Plan to Accomplish the Goal: Weight Management Ideas that Work
The toughest rules to follow are Rule #1 and Rule #3. The first one can be difficult if you eat a lot of convenience foods or snack foods. I’ve found the best solution is to find substitutes.
For example, I love sweets, especially candy and pastries. I’ve found I get the same satisfaction from dried fruit (which I dehydrate myself.) The fruit is still sugary, but it’s much easier to eat in moderation.
Another example - I also love soda (or “pop” for my Midwest peeps.) For a long time, I drank diet soda, but we’ve collected some troubling data over the years on a plethora of negative health implications correlated with diet soda consumption. o now I’ve switched to sparkling water.
Substitutions work.
Rule #3 can be trickier for most people, especially the ‘eating less to lose weight” part. We live in a world where cheap food is easy to acquire. It’s the major reason we have an obesity epidemic. The following is a list of psychological tricks or methods that will lead you to eat less. Once you get to your goal weight, you can increase the amount of food you’re eating until you maintain weight.
The Tiny Plate Trick
Replace all of your dinnerware with little plates and bowls. As ridiculous as this sounds, this method works really well. As it turns out, portion control is largely a visual issue. By using tiny dinnerware, piling food on a tiny plate or in a tiny bowl actually tricks you into thinking you’re eating way more than you really are. I recommend this set; they’re safe for real food:
The Half of a Meal Trick
Take whatever you’d normally eat, then cut the serving in half. When I use this trick, I usually save the other half of the meal for the following day.
The Skip a Meal (or Two) Trick
This is usually my preferred method. If you normally eat three meals a day, just skip one of them until you reach your goal weight. I prefer skipping breakfast because I’m not usually hungry in the morning, but it can be any of the three meals. If I’m really busy, sometimes I’ll skip two meals. With this trick, it’s important to not over-eat during the meals you don’t skip.
The “Fast Until You Reach Your Goal Weight” Trick
This is a tough one, but if you’re not trying to lose too many pounds, it can be effective. Simply stop eating until you reach your goal weight. This one has the bad side-effect of causing you to lose muscle mass along with fat, but it’s not dramatic.
The Gamification Trick
This one is pretty clever because it makes dieting amusing. There are a lot of ways to do this, but one of my favorites was proposed by my friend Chris Petersen years ago in a guest blog post on my Barefoot Running University website. This particular game is intended to simulate who our ancestors likely ate.
Get a deck of playing cards. Shuffle them well. Whenever you feel like eating, go for a three-mile walk, three-mile run, or do thirty minutes of alternating sets of pushups and air squats (you burn roughly the same number of calories for all three options), then draw a card at random. If it’s a face card (king, queen, or jack), you get to eat as much as you want! If it’s any other card, you eat an unflavored rice cake. Do this as many or as few times daily as you’d like.
The Actual Counting Calories Trick
I saved this one for last because it’s the most labor-intensive in regards to calculations. As a bonus, this method makes it easy to lose weight OR gain weight if that’s our goal. The idea is to figure out how many calories you need to live (known as your “basal metabolic rate”), how many calories you burn in your daily physical activities, and how many calories you consume in the stuff you eat and drink every day. The goal is to burn more calories than you consume. A good goal is to create a 500 calories deficit each day, which would result in losing one pound per week.
If you’re new to weight loss, I recommend doing this at least once for a week or two. It’s incredibly useful to get a sense of how many calories any given amount of different foods contain, which helps you make smarter food choices down the road.
Back in the day, this method was a huge pain in the ass because it required a lot of weighing and measuring of foods and drinks, then doing a lot of calculating. THANKFULLY mobile technology has made this process WAY easier. The MyFitnessPal app (for Android and Apple) is great for tracking this information. It’ll do all the calculating for you and has an extensive database of foods you can search or if it has a bar code, scan. It’s easy and convenient.
The “Eat Everything” Trick
This one is obviously intended for GAINING weight and is very simple. JUST EAT A LOT. It doesn’t have the precision as counting calories, but it usually produces results that are good enough. I’d recommend still following the same eating rules I discuss above, but you can break the rules a little more frequently. If you eat an entire chocolate cake on occasion, so be it.
What About Eating Out at Restaurants?
This post assumes you’ll do most of your eating at home. Shelly and I both love to cook, so we can prepare most of our food. That makes controlling what we eat pretty easy. If you can’t cook and eat out often (or, like us, you just love going out to eat), all the same rules apply. Just be aware that restaurant food is delicious because it’s almost always loaded with fat (butter) and salt, and usually has a pretty high caloric count. This is especially true of fast food. Eat prepared restaurant food in moderation, and get in the habit of only eating half of the meal. Bring the rest home and eat it the next day.
And learn how to cook. It’s not difficult.
What About Supplements?
Generally, I’m anti-supplement for two reasons. First, they’re largely unnecessary. If we're eating a balanced diet with a degree of moderation and variation, we’re getting all the necessary vitamins and minerals. If you get a blood test at your doctor and they identify a deficit, then add a supplement. Otherwise, you’re just pissing away cash. Literally.
Second, people who start down this road tend to get sucked into all kinds of multilevel marketing scams (cough, cough, Amway and Herbalife, cough.) Or they get sucked into an ever-deepening cycle of using more and more “health” supplements, which often has a detrimental effect on your health.
Third, weight loss products are almost always a really bad idea. The so-called “fat burners” and other such products are stimulants that speed your metabolism, which does actually cause you to lose weight faster than the methods discussed above. There are two problems with these products. The first is building tolerance. Your body adjusts to the drug, which requires you to need a bigger and bigger dose to produce the weight loss effect. Eventually, it becomes dangerous (due to overdose risk) and/or expensive. Second, you experience a rebound effect when you eventually stop. Your metabolism will slow down way below what it was before taking the drug, which ultimately causes you to gain the weight you lost plus more.
So stay away from supplements.
The Willpower Hack
When I originally published this post, my friend Amanda brought up the idea of eating what you crave. If done right, this can actually be a pretty good motivational strategy. While explaining that, I brought up a simple “willpower” hack that I’ll discuss in a lot of detail in a future post. Basically, it changes our decision-making from a battle between going the right thing versus indulging in our cravings to an exercise in self-compassion. For now, it’ll be incredibly useful to know how to use the hack. It’s explained in detail in this post.
How to Hold Yourself Accountable
Diet accountability is difficult, especially if you’re surrounded by people who have shitty diets. In a later post, I’ll discuss the magic of surrounding yourself with the kinds of people you want to become, but for now, that’s the simplest hack. Find people who have the kinds of dietary habits you want to implement, then spend time around them.
If you don’t have people like this in your social circle, find a partner or a group who are interested in the same weight loss or weight gain goals as you, then do this process together. Meet once per week and discuss your progress. Just having that obligation will be enough to keep you on track.
Finally, if those aren’t realistic options, use our Facebook Group. We’ll have quite a few people who are either just starting this process of improving diet OR have been doing it for a period of time. Some have been doing this for years and years. It’s a great source of support.
Conclusion
Diet is one of our foundational ideas for a reason - a good diet alone has the power to change your life. Combined with the other foundational ideas - sleep, regular exercise, and meditation - you’ll create an incredibly effective platform for every other improvement we’ll implement over the next year.
Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to participate in the Facebook Group!
~Jason
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