8 Practical Shifts for Enjoyable Diet and Durable Fitness and Wellbeing
Go from confusion, restriction, and guilt to eating for satisfaction and durable fitness and wellbeing
Much like the word exercise, the word diet can mean different things to different people.
In our experience — including Cyril’s experience as a personal trainer — it is for many associated with the ideas of restriction, sacrifice, and weight loss.
This was also the case for us in the past before we started experimenting with the way we ate.
Indeed, part of our journeys to happier bodies has been to try and experience many diets: paleo, keto, high-carb, high-protein, vegetarian, vegan, fruitarian, raw, gluten-free, dairy-free, intermittent fasting, and quite a few others as well.
Through this experimentation, we’ve been able to discover and experience for ourselves the direct, tangible, and empowering connections between what we eat and what we get with our bodies, on so many levels, beyond the single notion of gaining or losing weight or abstract concepts of health.
So today, we’d like to share 8 shifts from common approaches to diet: they have helped us move beyond preconceived notions that once hindered us — and still do many — and they have empowered us to take eating and diet from somewhat of a random and restrictive thing to a fully deliberate and satisfying part of our lives.
PART I: Moving Beyond Confusion, Restriction, and Guilt
The first 4 shifts we want to share with you have allowed us to get rid of the feelings of confusion, restriction, and guilt we once had about eating and diet.
SHIFT N°1: Results connected to how we eat not only happen, they happen FASTER than many may think.
Let’s get this one out of the way right now: in our experience, both personally and as a personal trainer for Cyril, results connected to how we eat do happen. And they even happen faster than many tend to think.
Our bodies are constantly trying to optimize themselves according to how we use them, through processes such as homeostasis, autophagy, and overcompensation.
Beyond these fancy terms, this means that, when it comes to diet, results do happen, and they can start happening the minute we start eating, in really noticeable ways, and varying aspects:
- anywhere from instantly, when it comes to how satisfied and energized we can feel after a meal, for instance;
- to only 24 to 72 hours, when it comes to ease of digestion, body composition — including fat and muscle mass — and performance, provided we pay enough attention.
And even more so when we synergize with exercise, which we’re going to come back to in one of our next shifts.
And so we’ve personally come to call this overall phenomenon our bodies’ autonomous adaptation.
SHIFT N°2: Choosing what we eat does NOT have to be abstract or complicated.
There are quite a few different food types out there: meat, fish, vegetables, dairy, eggs, grains, fruit, nuts, legumes, mushrooms, seeds, and a few others, including drinks too.
We can also take into account the processing and cooking methods.
And so, as we’ve verified so many times, not all food types are created equal when it comes to what they let us experience with our bodies.
But it does not have to be abstract or complicated.
Thanks to our bodies’ super fast autonomous adaptation, we can easily detect the connections between specific food types and specific results, simply by purposefully experimenting through the core process of:
- increasing our intake of a specific food type or staying away from it altogether, for around 2 to 3 days;
- paying attention to the quickly emerging results, most notably in terms of mood, stress, energy, and ease of digestion.
For instance, this is precisely how we came to directly discover that we could get rid of recurring — and until then unexplained — aches and pains in our stomachs, backs, and joints by going gluten-free.
SHIFT N°3: The crippling association of diet to restriction and sacrifice does NOT have to be.
When we started paying closer attention to both what we were eating, specifically what types of food, and to how we were feeling in our bodies, specifically when it came to mood, stress, energy, and ease of digestion, we started discovering some amazing and super tangible connections we never suspected.
And so, in our experience, part of figuring these connections out is experimenting with what we eat so we can deliberately choose the food types which work for us and bring us the results we want.
Because it is a choice to experience enjoyment both as we eat and with the results that follow — instead of just one or the other.
For us, that’s just super empowering, and experiencing such genuine enjoyment with fast tangible results diffuses any notions of restriction or sacrifice.
As for cravings, well, if we don’t indulge them, in our experience, they do go away, after a day or a few hours.
And if we do indulge them, then it’s still our choice to do so, and we can always gather more experience as to what tangible effect consuming them has on our bodies, which then allows us to gain increased perspective and maybe do things differently when we feel ready for it.
SHIFT N°4: We can change our eating habits, experiment, and stay SAFE.
There are plenty of parameters we can experiment with and directly learn from when it comes to eating:
- Food types: trying to focus on a given food type, or drop it for 2 to 3 days, as we’ve mentioned in our shift n°2.
- Quantities: we’ve found that when it came to food types that gave us results we enjoyed, we experienced no downside to having as much of them as we felt hungry for, like, for instance, delicious fresh ripe fruit, providing us with balanced intakes of natural sugars attached to hunger-regulating and digestion-promoting fiber and water.
- Combinations: we found that different food types combinations could lead to different results. For instance, we’ve been able to put a stop to unwanted body fat storage by stopping the mixing of carbs and fats in our meals. Common metabolism theory predicts that elevated blood sugar — after consuming carbs for instance — is what triggers the storage response in our bodies, via the release of insulin. So when significant amounts of fats are also in the bloodstream — including fats we’ve consumed — they end up being stored as well. And so, in our experience, no fat storage occurs when the only thing in our blood is either fats or carb-derived sugar.
- Meal duration: we found that taking our time to enjoy what we were eating actually led to more enjoyment, and that chewing thoroughly dramatically improved our digestion.
- Meal distribution: outside of the typical breakfast-lunch-snack-dinner format we had been raised with, we’ve found our enjoyment with a different meal distribution, which includes intermittent fasting, resulting in something that looks more like a snack-snack-dinner format.
So we do recommend not being afraid to progressively try some new things and to just remember to pay attention to the emerging results and to how you feel.
We’ve never ended up with deficiencies by skipping a meal or dropping a given food type for a few days.
Just like we’ve never had a problem binging on fresh ripe fruit.
PART II: Maximizing Enjoyment
Since we’ve started talking about enjoyment, in combination with results, food types, choice, and safety, let’s keep going with our 4 remaining shifts, which have allowed us to take this enjoyment to the next level!
SHIFT N°5: There are so many enjoyable results that can come with diet, it’s NOT just about weight.
We’ve talked about getting rid of many aches and pains we used to experience, by going gluten-free, in our shift n°2.
And so we’ve found many connections between what we eat and the aesthetics, fitness, and wellbeing we can subsequently enjoy with our bodies and our minds, through the different food types and combinations in our diet.
These results include fat and muscle mass management, as we’ve discussed in shift n°4, as well as:
- ease of digestion: which we’ve found to be greatly improved by the presence of fiber and water in our food;
- skin clarity: which we’ve found to be improved when digestion is improved, faster, and therefore more efficient in detoxing;
- aches and pains: back, stomach, and joints, as we mentioned in shift n°2;
- even some allergies: that’s right, Cyril’s been able to get rid of some food allergies and hay fever by going dairy-free.
But we’ve found diet can also influence how we feel in our minds, by affecting:
- our energy levels: for instance, enjoying fresh ripe fruit beats eating grains — refined or whole — any time for us;
- our mind clarity: for instance, by going dairy-free, we’ve experienced relieved mucus-induced congestion in our sinuses and nasal cavities, making for a much clearer mind.
- our mood: which we’ve found to be improved when digestion is improved, and our energy levels and mental clarity are too;
- even how stress-able or serene we feel: well, yes, according to our mood, mental clarity, energy levels, ease of digestion, and just how much aches and pains we experience, we do find ourselves more or less easily stressed!
SHIFT N°6: We can maximize our enjoyment of eating in the MOMENT.
As we mentioned in shift n°4, we found that chewing our food sufficiently — as our stomachs don’t have teeth — and taking our time to eat not only dramatically improve our digestion, but also lead to more enjoyment out of eating itself.
Beyond, that we can switch it up and play around with:
- when we eat: before doing this or after doing that, in the morning, at night… We’ve also mentioned how we now enjoy daily intermittent fasting, in shift n°4, as it regulates our appetite, energy levels, and digestion, leading to even more enjoyment when we do eat.
- who we eat with: on our own, with colleagues, or friends, it’s important to us that whatever company we keep not get in the way of enjoying our meals serenely and as much as we can.
- what we do as we eat: do we focus only on eating, or do we read, talk, reflect, or watch something at the same time? Like with company, whatever we do, we don’t let it get in the way of our eating focus and enjoyment.
In our experience, all of these can go a long way into helping us get more enjoyment out of our approach to eating and food as a whole.
And we’re free to experiment and find whatever helps maximize our personal enjoyment.
SHIFT N°7 We can access and enjoy a powerful lifestyle SYNERGY with diet.
In our experience, there are tangible connections between diet, exercise, and sleep.
For instance, we’ve found that some food types directly put us in the mood to exercise, by providing us with more energy: that’s the case for fresh ripe fruit, rather than grains for instance, as we mentioned in shift n°5.
Beyond that, in our experience, an adequate diet also boosts the results we get with exercise: like, for instance, with weight loss and what we mentioned in shift n°4 about not mixing fats and carbs in our meals.
The same goes for sleep: we found that an adequate diet makes digestion less laborious — as we’ve mentioned in shift n°4 also — and fosters easier and more restful sleep.
And, in turn, sleep and exercise both help regulate our appetites, by boosting our mood and being genuine sources of enjoyment in themselves, which means they both help us make more empowering choices with our diet, more easily.
We wrote more about this synergy and our approach to exercise and fitness in this previous story, here on Medium.
SHIFT N°8, last but not least: We have the power to feel as SATISFIED with our diet as we want.
When faced with diet behaviors and results that are not genuinely satisfying to us, we’ve found that there is no need for self-delusion, i.e. telling ourselves that we’re happy with it when we’re not, out of fear that we may not find better or get what we really want.
In our experience, both personally and as a personal trainer for Cyril, we don’t have to settle and we can find genuine satisfaction with our diet and its results, even if it takes us off the beaten path or the paths we’ve walked before.
We’ve mentioned foods that make exercising easier and much more enjoyable in our shift n°7, well, we’ve never felt energized after eating pasta or energy bars — whether cereal or nut-based — no matter how much hearsay or marketing may promote these foods as energizing.
And we have found our fully satisfying alternatives, through fresh ripe fruit and even intermittent fasting, which helps us regulate our energy levels, and can directly foster some of our workouts, with light or empty stomachs that don’t get in the way of our movement and efforts.
And not letting go of our experimentations is precisely how we’ve been able to find these fulfilling alternatives feeding our personal enjoyment.
Something we’ve found quite helpful in keeping us on the path to figuring out what genuinely works for us, despite much of the ambient cultural noise and solicitations surrounding eating and diet, is this little mantra:
“I have the power to feel good, satisfied, and happy with my body every day”
Our Takeaway
Fuelled by our own desire to feel genuinely good in our bodies and minds, these 8 shifts have taken us beyond confusion, doubt, and guilt.
They have allowed us to redefine diet as the deliberate and experience-based way to unlock personal enjoyment with eating and its many results, and they’ve given us access to satisfying and durable fitness and wellbeing.
Now, the way we see it, new results require trying new things, whether in how we think or what we do.
So we hope that, if you’re not fully satisfied with your relationship to eating, diet, fitness, or physical wellbeing, these 8 shifts can empower you, as they have us, by purposefully:
- implementing the core practical process we’ve discussed in shift n°2;
- adjusting the multiple aspects we’ve mentioned in shifts n°4, 6, and 7;
- trusting your body, trusting your results, and trusting yourself, thanks to our shifts n°1, 3, 5, and 8.
Thanks for reading, we hope you’ve found inspiration in our 8 shifts for an enjoyable diet with satisfying and durable fitness and wellbeing.
If you’re interested in going even further, we wrote more about how we’ve been able to take our fitness and wellbeing to the next level with a practical and holistic approach, in this previous story, here on Medium.
Finally, you’re more than welcome to share your thoughts and experience by leaving a comment.
And, until next time, stay safe and stay happy!
About Us
We’ve made feeling genuinely good a priority in our lives, and share personal experiences and views, in open, transparent, and practical ways, that we believe others can try and enjoy too! You’re welcome to check out our outlets at cyrilandty.com, pop us an email, and connect with us on Twitter.
