Diet Cleanup

The diet of the average American is revolting. It seems to be made up primarily of carbohydrates. While it's trendy and easy to blame this on the food pyramid (the base of which is carbohydrates and top includes more carbohydrates), the average American diet is even worse than that. The side effect of this diet is easy for anybody with eyes to see. Everywhere you go is populated with obese people. The upside for us Americans is that there's an easy starting point for cleaning up our diet: cut back on the carbohydrates.

I've gone through several iterations of diet cleanup. My first one was simple. I all but completely stopped drinking carbonated high fructose corn syrup (commonly referred to as pop or soda). The only thing I didn't eliminate entirely was root beer. I'll drink two or three in a year. But the only things I regularly drink are water, milk, tea, and coffee. Simply cutting out soda can remove a tremendous amount of empty calories.

My previous cleanup efforts focused on two things. The first was my main weakness when it comes to food: salty snacks like potato chips, pretzels, etc. Like my efforts with soda, I didn't completely eliminate those junk foods from my diet. I prefer moderation over elimination for my diet. The second was eating more vegetables. Each weak I'd cut up a bunch of vegetables, put them into containers, and eat them with meals throughout the week. I ended up abandoning that effort because it resulted in some unpleasant digestive side effects. I still eat vegetables, but not as many as I was.

At this point my diet is pretty decent. I've eliminated most of the common American problems and am now focusing on tweaking things. My latest efforts have focused on further increasing protein intake. Recommendations for protein intake vary. I've seen numbers as low as 0.8 g per kilogram of body weight and as high as 3.1 g per kilogram of body weight. I'm aiming for a daily intake between 1.5 to 2 g per kilogram of body weight. Part of my diet being pretty decent is that I'm consuming enough calories to maintain (I'm neither losing or gaining) body weight. I want to keep it that way. In order to accomplish that, I need to increase the amount of protein I intake per calorie. Another thing I want to do is increase my intake of dietary fiber. I, like most Americans, consume an inadequate amount.

The first change I made was to what I call mobile meals. I need to drive into the office two days a week. I have three options for lunch on those days: eat out, pack a lunch, or fast. Eating out is expensive and eating healthy at a restaurant is challenging (actually damn near impossible). I'm already maintaining body weight so I'm not interested in fasting. That leaves the option of packing a lunch. On one of those two days I also have martial arts classes in the evening so I leave home in the morning and don't return until late at night. That means I need to pack dinner too. Since the dinner will be sitting in a lunch box all day, I also need something that will keep without refrigeration and doesn't require cooking (admittedly I could bring my small camp stove to cook on the go, but I'm lazy).

My wife and I buy half a cow every year from a friend of ours who raises beef cattle. When you buy half a cow, you end up with a lot of ground beef. This gives me a great option for mobile meals: homemade beef sticks. I bought a dehydrator at the beginning of this year specifically for this. Unlike store bought beef sticks, homemade ones don't need to be loaded up with salt, sugar, and other common ingredients I want to avoid. While they do require refrigeration (we don't use curing salts in ours) for long term storage, they easily survive the day without it. If you don't have a dehydrator and supply of ground beef, summer sausage also works well (but you'll need to keep the ingredient list in mind when buying from a grocery store). I also buy mixed nuts from the grocery store, which are a decent source of protein along with other nutrients. My mobile meals typically consist of a sandwich, homemade beef sticks, and mixed nuts. I might toss in a protein bar too (all of the ones I've tried taste like ass though so I only eat them when I need to in order to meet my protein intake goal).

The second change I made was to breakfast. I developed an overnight oats recipe that consists of rolled oats; vanilla protein powder; a mix of chia, flax, and hemp seeds; collagen; creatine; milk; and nonfat Green yogurt. When I pull it out of the fridge, I mix in a bunch of berries too. This ends up being a huge intake of both protein and fiber. It's also easy to prepare. On Sunday I toss all of the dry ingredients into mason jars. Every evening I add the milk and yogurt to a jar, stir the contents up, and place the jar in the fridge.

There are three key points I want you to take away from this post. First is the importance of diet. It's one of my three pillars of fitness along with exercise and sleep. All three pillars are weak for most Americans, but the diet pillar is probably the easiest to improve quickly because there is an obvious strategy: reduce carbohydrate intake. Second is improving your diet in stages. You don't need to drastically change your entire diet immediately. Most people who do this fail long term. Instead start with easy targets. Cut down on the biggest culprits like soda and candy. Then address the next biggest culprits. Continue this over time (the timeframe can be months or years) until you develop a diet that is pretty decent. Once your diet is pretty decent you can tweak it for specific goals. Third is moderation. You don't need to completely eliminate things like soda, candy, and junk food. You can, but simply cutting down the amount you consume over time is also an effective strategy.