How to Change Your Diet

I did not have a good relationship with food beginning from when I was growing up. I think a lot of people in lower income houses aren’t thinking about what they’re eating; they’re worried about if they’re eating at all. In a family of four kids, we had a working mom and we relied on fast food a lot. On the other side, my dad’s food philosophy was “Don’t eat that.” I didn’t get what it was I was supposed to eat more of.

Fast forward to when I started living alone, my eating habits were based entirely on cravings, and if I didn’t eat it was because I couldn’t afford to, like it had always been growing up. I learned how to be lazy instead of proactively cooking for myself, and the cheapest food you can get on the go tends to be the most processed. And still, you’re never fully satisfied.

We’ll get into in another post how we’re consuming so much “food” but starving for nutrients. For now I just want to impress upon you how I felt about food. I had an obligatory relationship with it. I’d put off eating until I was starving one day, and the next satisfy the first craving I felt for sugar, ignorant of my nutritional needs. I ate convenient and I ate cheap. I’m telling you this because we each have our own relationship with food, and whatever yours may be, many of us still do not own our diet. Many of us still do not make conscious decisions around our diet. For many of us, our meals are not our own creations, collaborations with nature.

I am still working to change my habits and improve the way I eat, but I first had to take two critical steps.

The first thing you have to do is train yourself to recognize your patterns. Once I understood why I was eating the way I was, it became simpler to break old habits.

One thing I learned that was really helpful to me was Eric Edmeades’ (the creator of Wildfit) idea which he shared at Mindvalley, called the Six Primary Hungers. We have many different reasons we eat, and being able to recognize these will help us understand what our body needs. We might be hungry because of: actual dehydration; emotion (wanting to change the way you feel); our natural inclination for variety (which is overwhelmed because of all the types of food that are available to us); low blood sugar (which we’ll talk more about in a minute, which is what causes that tired feeling you get between meals); the unnecessary desire to eat stemming from the physical sensation of an empty stomach; and finally, the only true hunger, which is nutritional hunger.

The second thing I learned was simply to stop focusing on what I shouldn’t be eating and trying to break up with those foods, and instead learning a new vocabulary and focusing on foods that make me happy and healthy at the same time. This is not a matter of compromise. This is a matter of centering around health. You have to remain open to something different and let the new eclipse the old. The key is making your focus wellness instead of sickness. Don’t try to cut calories or restrict your diet. Rather, fill it up with a strategic and comprehensive list of only healthy options.

It’s not a secret anymore that diets don’t work, that they aren’t sustainable. If we ate what our ancestors used to eat, which was simply what was around them in nature, you would build up your nutrition over time. Programs like the Transitions Lifestyle System are starting to tailor specifically to our genetic code and offer a lot more flexibility and freedom with food.

Once you change your palette and your psychology, it’s easy to make changes and avoid eating bad food because of emotion or an empty stomach. Edmeades said:

“The challenge that we have today is that most of us are not getting our core nutritional needs met, and so we’re walking around in a permanent state of hunger. The simplest way to handle this one is to follow the core principle that your health is far more determined by you getting the good stuff than it even is about you eliminating the bad stuff.”

This makes it more fun for me. I like to know the purpose of everything I put into my body (which you can learn from any content here on this blog) and know how it’s serving my goals.

There are three things that I focus on while finding the diet that works best for me:

Balancing blood sugar

We have two main sources of energy: sugar and fat. If you’re eating a lot of sugar and carbohydrates, your body will be primarily burning sugar for energy. As soon as you eat, you’re blood sugar will spike causing you to have a lot more energy, and then immediately afterwards a lot less energy. Low blood sugar will leave you with cravings for the same type of food. You want to aim for low glycemic-impact eating, choosing foods with a low sugar or GI count. If you’re tired of feeling tired during the day and would rather have a steady form of energy, you want to train your body to primarily burn fat. There are also supplements you can take to influence your metabolism and get your body into fat-burning mode. Doing this will also eliminate a major factor for your making poor food choices.

Alkalizing the body

I picked this one up from Tony Robbins. In order for our bodies to function properly, the pH of our blood has to be between 7.35 and 7.45. That’s slightly basic, or alkaline. If you’re blood is becoming too acidic, or has too high of a concentration of hydrogen ions, this causes your body to break down. Natural processes in the body produce a net excess of acids. Problems occur when your body is making too much acid, isn’t flushing out enough acid, or doesn’t have enough base to balance out the acid.

This creates an environment where toxins are more likely to cause harm and less likely to be removed through detoxification. I learned that this can lead to weight problems. It can cause your body to retain fat to protect your organs from damage from an acidic environment. This might be the reason you can’t get rid of those last ten pounds. This environment can also allow microbes like yeasts to grow and consume your nutrients, so you’re in a position like me where you can’t put on any weight.

You want a diet that is metabolically alkaline, or including foods that have a buffering effect in your cells’ chemistry. Tony purports that 70 percent of your diet should be water-rich foods, meaning raw, living foods. These are high in chlorophyll, minerals, and amino acids that help to neutralize acids in the body. Citrus fruits are alkalizing. Make lemon water and green drinks a part of your daily regimen. Coffee, soda, and beer are all acidic. Here is also another reason to avoid sugar: it erodes the body and strips away the minerals it needs to balance the pH of the blood. Avoid dietary sugars and refined flours. Balance your ratio of omega-3s to omega-6s. You want to be getting more omega-3s from sources like fish oil. Supplement with minerals like potassium and magnesium.

Building muscle mass

This one I also took from Mindvalley, where Lorenzo Delano talked about how the best way to support your health is to have a little extra muscle mass to protect you against aging and chronic disease, not to mention improve body composition. This is because muscle is the richest source of mitochondria in the body. Delano said, “ Strength training specifically is the only thing to have demonstrated so far in human history to actually cause a functional reversing of aging in humans at the molecular level.” He references the American Council on Aging whose publication on the ten bio-markers of health include strength and muscle mass as the first two on the list. That is how important building muscle is, because there’s such a deep correlation between muscle mass and other health markers. The tip here is to consume 1 to 2 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight. That number of kg’s is about half of your weight in pounds, specifically 0.45, if you need the conversion. This is while doing strength training, of course. A supplement with amino acids and b-vitamins is good for pre- or post-workout.

I read and listen a lot to people who have talked about the diet that works best for them, and they all talk about a gradual shift in perspective. It’s an organic process of naturally wanting the food that’s natural. When you’re living your best life, you will naturally want the best fuel for your body. That’s what I found when I started exercising, meditating, being conscious of my body, and also when I started supplementing and seeing results. There are things that I used to eat that I now don’t even consider as food.

I did find it hard to find motivation to eat differently, however, I did know that if I committed to changing the way I eat, it would be truly transformational. I’d become a different person. That’s precisely why it’s so difficult. Or, as my new hero Marianne Williamson would say: it’s not difficult, it’s just different.

Hope this helps.