Often, when I write about the subject of nutrition and, specifically, the poor state of it among the general populace, I got out of my way to clarify that I’m writing about a western audience and, more specifically, the United States, in order to provide my perspective. However, as globalization increases, we’re finding that more and more previously uncorrupted areas are suffering the same experiences that we have in the states, so hooray for global reach, and what I’m writing may apply even more universally than usual. But in that regard, the food environment in the United States is absolutely abhorrent and has resulted in what has been termed “The Standard American Diet” (“SAD” for short…and in practice). There is no one single codified SAD, but it’s benchmarked by the qualities of daily eating being entirely ad hoc, no actual plan for what to eat for any meals, frequent snacking (with some quotes estimating people eating up to 18 times per day when we factor in ALL incidents of food going into the mouth), the majority of the intake being ultraprocessed food AND from sources outside the home (restaurants/door dash/etc). It is low protein, low fiber, high fat (primarily from ultraprocessed sources), high carb/sugar (again, ultraprocessed) and low in nutrients, resulting in an interested dilemma where the majority of Americans are overweight AND undernourished. This has been deemed as “energy toxicity”, wherein we are consuming too much energy (calories) such that we experience the health maladies associated with it (diabetes and heart disease) while also not consuming enough actual NUTRITION due to the hyperprocessed nature of the foods we’re consuming in order to actual achieve a meaningful degree of satiety or general health. Yes: the “foods” we eat make us HUNGIER when we’re done eating them and leave us LESS nourished when we’re done: Kafka couldn’t write something crazier and Satan couldn’t come up with a more ironic punishment for gluttons. And it is BECAUSE of this food environment that literally ANY dietary intervention proves successful as it relates to improving health markers, because, quite simply, the sheer act of THINKING about what you are eating is, in and of itself, enough to start mitigating some of the damage of the SAD. …and yet, somehow, when the ONLY option is “success”, beginner trainees manage to find a way to failure and it is, much like training, because they refuse to follow A plan and, instead, feel the need to construct their own!
Only 3 steps and you still manage to screw one of them up...and meanwhile, you CAN succeed on the "Filet o Fish" diet
Mitch
Hedberg was a comedic treasure that we lost way too soon, but he imparted on us
the gem that “I play guitar. I taught
myself how to play the guitar, which was a bad decision….because I didn’t know
how to play it, so I was a sh*tty teacher”.
And, in turn, a beginner that trusts themselves to write their own diet
after years of failing at dieting has already set themselves up for
failure. Because, inevitably, much like
building a training program, beginners just take a bunch of ideas from
successful diets and try to Frankenstein them together into the PERFECT custom
diet for them, not understanding that physical transformation operates off the
Gestalt principle, wherein the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I realize I’m bloviating here, so let me try
to just say what the actual problem is.
Beginners
want concrete, definite, finite answers, because it obviates them from having
to think, learn or understand nuance. So
what they seek is a mathematical equation to understand nutrition. This inevitably results in the pursuit of a
nutrition app which spits out numbers which become their “goals” in terms of
total calories and the macronutrients necessary to get there. Armed with these goals, the beginner then
wonders right back into the VERY food environment that got them all messed up
in the first place, and decides to set themselves up for success using the VERY
foods that got them all messed up. As
though the whole problem was simply a matter of not COUNTING the “food like
products” properly. Now that I KNOW my
macros, I know exactly how many Poptarts to eat for my carbs and fats and then
how much whey protein powder to take to get in my protein content for the
day. The perfect diet!
Hah! Eliminate the middleman!
The “If It
Fits Your Macros” crowd always likes to talk about how that is a hyperbolic
example, but that’s because they approach their nutritional approach with more
nuance than their soundbite of a diet name implies, because even THEY emphasize
that the majority of the macros SHOULD come from whole/unprocessed foods while
having SOME wiggleroom for junk as long as the macros don’t get exceeded. What these folks can’t fathom is just how
much a “babe in the woods” a brand spanking new beginner can be when they were
raised in a food environment where it was NORMAL to go multiple days in a row
eating “food” out of boxes that had a near infinite shelf life and in no way
resembled anything that could be found in nature: so far removed from reality
that the “fruit” in the Trix cereal has to be artificially shaped, flavored AND
colored to resemble the very fruit it’s trying to be. For so many of these trainees, they’ve been
so inundated with a ridiculous food environment that they’ve lost all
perspective on what actual for real food IS, and when left to their own devices
to construct their own nutrition, their diet STILL looks like the food choices
of an unsupervised 12 year old: there is simply LESS of it.
Folks, you
can’t get healthy eating the same stuff that made you sick in the first place,
even if you reduce the dosage. There
needs to be an actual DETOX that occurs to get you off the junk for a little
bit BEFORE you consider re-introducing it into your life (please try not
to). This is why ACTUAL for real
nutritional interventions work: aside from whatever gimmick they tend to
employ, they ALL hinge upon the principle of removing some or ALL of the poison
from the nutritional environment. Yes,
even the juice cleanse diets or the lemon water and cayenne pepper diets “work”
because you’re at least NOT eating Poptarts (man they’re an easy target) and
Doritos and other junk while you’re living off of condiments, but other
approaches (ketogenic, Mediterranean, vegan, vegetarian, carnivore, whole 30,
paleo, Atkins, carb cycling ala Justin Harris, Deep Water, Mountain Dog, The
Complete Keys to Progress diets, DASH, Dukan, Vertical Diet, Warrior Diet etc
etc) predicate themselves around the notion of unprocessed foods comprising the
MAJORITY of the nutrition, and then, from there, they vary. Or, at least, the successful ones do. There are ABSOLUTELY predators out there that
have found a way to make keto/vegan/paleo/every diet junkfood, using the exact
same ingredients that got us sick in the first place and finding a way to
engineer them into meeting the letter of these diets while completely violating
the spirit of them. Folks, take a look
at the ingredient on “low carb tortillas”: I’d MUCH rather just eat one that is
corn, water and salt and deal with whatever the carb consequences are of THAT.
You could definitely pick a worse diet
“But why
does it matter? If they meet their macro
goals, won’t they achieve their transformation goals?” Alright, well, for one, their “macro goals”
are often not, because if you ask this beginner WHY they picked those macros as
their goals, they’ll say “it’s what the app told me”, so they don’t even HAVE
an actual “goal” for their macro: just instructions. But, beyond that, Stan Efferding (writer of
the Vertical Diet, which I’ve reviewed and think it’s just flat out awesome)
said it best: “compliance is the science”.
And trying to comply with the goals of these apps while eating the food
that makes up the SAD is setting you up for NON-compliance. Again: this food is SPECIFICALLY engineered
to make you overeat. The same scientific
brains that worked to make cigarettes as addictive as possible pivoted to the
food industry and employed their exact same talents there to find the most
precise way to combine cheap ingredients ala low quality fats, carbs/sugar and
salt to create an umami experience that has never existed in nature in order to
override your body’s natural satiety signals and trigger binge behavior with an
impossible to match dopamine spike. Now
you’re hooked, and because the body is awesome, it adapts to this dopamine hit
such that you now need a BIGGER dose in order to achieve the same high, which,
when combined with a hyperpalatable food that never triggers satiety due to a
lack of protein and fiber, compels you to just eat more and more in pursuit of
this high. The ONLY tool we have available
to resist this situation in the presence of this food is willpower, and that is
a FINITE resource that, once expired, results in a compensatory binge that
tends to UNDO the results of the diet up until that point AND cause further
damage. We observe this phenomenon occur
in former Biggest Loser contestants who put on MORE bodyweight than when they
started, along with bodybuilders who finish the show and go on to put on
20-30lbs in the weekend afterward as they indulge in all that they had denied
themselves up until that point.
And none of
this addresses the terribly hormonal state all of this junk puts a trainee in,
making their attempts at physical transformation far less successful than they
would while eating similar macros from better sources. Getting the majority of your carbs from
hyperprocessed sources tends to result in far more significant insulin spikes
compared to something more natural, which, in turn, over time, drives down
insulin sensitivity, making fat storage more prominent and muscular gain more
difficult. And the terrible fat sources
being employed also wreck testosterone production/jack up estrogen, further
complicating matters. And then, feeling
like garbage from eating garbage food, especially in a caloric deficit, is
going to mean ineffective training, once again achieving less desired benefit.
Funny enough, these dudes think "cycling" is the solution
Because,
again, in the face of the Standard American Diet, literally ANY nutritional
intervention is a better option…but in terms of duality, it’s a balancing act
between food quality and food quantity that is the driver of results, and
beginners manage to find a way to balance both sides of the equation such that
they get the worst of both worlds and achieve the opposite of success. Don’t trust yourself to find a way out of the
mess you got yourself into: if you knew HOW to do it, you wouldn’t be there in
the first place. Don’t try to make the plan fit you: find the plan that FITS
you. Or become the person that fits the
plan.
No comments:
Post a Comment