Are you sure you aren’t eating too much? Or too little?
I recently went over to the dark side and joined CrossFit.
There. I said it.
Aside from the warm fuzzy feeling of joining a cult, the great thing is that you push yourself hard enough to start questioning the meaning of life all over again.
Separately, you do start spending more time in front of a mirror wondering where on earth are those abs you’ve been promised after sacrificing so many hours at the altar of fitness.
Those questions marinating in my head, I went in for my follow on body check up. One of our Trainers with a perfect body tells me to step on this fancy scale. Somehow this one is able to measure everything within you, heart rate, fat percentage and so on, falling only short of full DNA sequencing. But I’m sure they’re working on it.
“Here we go” I told myself. And I stepped in. The scale reader takes a little time to adjust.
Wohoo! My weight has gone down!
But the machine keeps beeping and doing things. A few minutes later the trainer is confused.
I did lose weight he says. But it’s all been muscle.
…
No wonder those abs haven’t been showing!
Under-eating is just as easy as over-eating
I had been under feeding myself ever since I started CrossFit. UNDER feeding. That’s like, not eating enough. Just in case it wasn’t clear.
As a result, I lost over 2 lbs (1 kg) of muscle.
I thought that’s completely crazy. Preposterous. Bonkers! I had been working out three to four times a week and keeping a close eye on my diet (calorie restricted low carb — with scheduled cheat days. The best days.)
These were not the results I was looking for.
For someone (me) who has been in some form of a diet for most of his adult life, the concept of having to eat more feels completely wrong.
But it’s a surprisingly common thing. In fact, regular under-eating can lead to inadvertent over-eating, or to the general messing up of your diet.
What I have seen regularly in myself and close ones is the following:
1 I don’t eat enough in a particular meal
2 I end up feeling really hungry a few hours later
3 I eventually need a snack or something to keep me going
4 On bad days, I binge on some silly snack I don’t even like
Do you ever feel so hungry you end up losing control and eating what’s in front of you? Well, you may well be under eating throughout the day, and then feeling the consequence then.
As it turns out, how much to eat is not easy to answer…
Our schedules vary. We eat out. Sometimes we work out. Sometimes we were going to work out and life gets in the way.
We also probably have the most diverse diets… ever. We have more types of food available in a single supermarket aisle than has been available to any human in their lifespan before the last century.
My ancestors would certainly not have been able to enjoy Avocados, Chocolate and Chilean Sea Bass on the same day. In fact, most likely my ancestors would not have been able to enjoy any of those items at all in their lifetime!
If you love food, you probably keep trying new things. This means it’s really hard to figure out how much of anything we should eat.
It’s so easy to eat too much or the wrong thing. Think: Guacamole. What a gorgeous, fresh dish packed with nutrients. But it’s so easy to stuff yourself, particularly when the restaurant gives you a proper Texas-sized portion.
If you’ve ever been on a diet, you’ve felt that shot of anxiety before a meal with a chaser of guilt just after it, as you try to rewire your brain on how much and what you should be eating.
Is this a pure first world problem? I don’t think so. Given how much nutrition contributes to our health, it should be completely painless to make these decisions.
This complexity in what we eat hides two simple things.
Firstly, we don’t really control portion sizes — someone else does.
Secondly, the food composition itself (how much relative protein/fat/carbs but also veggies, fiber, meat or not) is also often decided for us.
Both need to be accounted for and catered for our body needs.
Ultimately, it means that if we are under eating or over eating, it’s in great part the fault of a system that is not made to cater for our individual needs.
Take a second to imagine if you went to a clothes store and asked for a new shirt. But instead of choosing from what’s on display, the store manager says you must choose from a list with no pictures and little more than a short description. Further, they will give you the item in a box you can only open at home.
With that in mind I would love your thoughts on the following.
Should we have standard food sizes just like we do for clothes?
What if the lovely shirt store employee always gave you the same shirt size, no matter what? What are the odds it will fit you?
My girlfriend is pretty much half my size (I know, we make a really cute couple ;)). But when we go out to eat, we order the same amount of dishes. And I’m pretty sure the waitress is not sizing us up and scaling each of our plates proportionately.
What inevitably happens is that she feels stuffed by the end of he meal (even after I help her with her plate). I feel great. But often, just a couple of hours go by and I get real hungry again, while she’s still swearing she won’t eat for days.
If you think about it, this is really silly. If you’re inclined to nerding out for a second, then consider this. My girlfriend’s basal metabolic rate is 1350 calories, mine is just over 2000. Once you take into account how much we work out, she needs to eat about 1500 calories per day, while I need over 3000.
In other words, a nutritionist would tell me I need to eat literally twice as much as my girlfriend. Yet, when we go out we’re given similar portion sizes.
I am an L or XL while she’s S or XS.
On average, we are always served M.
Should we have standard nutrition profiles, just like we do for different cuts and shapes of clothes?
Back home you open the box with the mystery shirt. It’s a sleeveless Hawaiian. Are you ok with that or would you feel better with another choice?
Most often the food composition itself is being decided for us. This is true when we go out for food, when we buy something off the shelf, or even when we follow a recipe at home. Each recipe has a certain amount of carbohydrates, protein, fats. They also balance things like sugar vs essential nutrients.
Although food labels can guide our choices, the reality is still we’re at the mercy of someone else’s decision, which is often guided by criteria such as mass appeal, shelf life and ingredient cost.
Just like the way a shirt fits your body and looks on you, the composition of your meals will quite literally shape your body through time.
Is it just me, or is the way we choose what to eat a little silly?
This is it.
The moment we take this shirt analogy to an extreme. If you made it this far congratulations! Now bear with me.
Imagine your life in that dystopian mystery box world. How would you choose your clothes?
You find a couple of options on the “shirt list” via trial and error and you stick to them
If you care more about making sure the clothes fit on you in a consistent way, this is what you would pick.
This is very similar to what many health buffs do when choosing what to eat. They pick a couple of meals or recipes and repeat them over and over again.
In fact, it’s a well recommended diet strategy. And it works.
But if you like any diversity in your life, this sucks. Or if anything in your lifestyle changes, such as when travelling, or if start exercising more (or less), you are back to wondering what to pick again.
You decide that what you really need is a tailor who will custom make everything for you
When you can afford it, why not look as gorgeous as possible?
When you cook at home this is something you can do. If you are health crazy, you can weigh every single ingredient and make sure the macros balance exactly as you intend them to.
Meal prepping becomes the word of the day. It can be very cost effective. But sometimes you’ll do a big shopping spree only to have most of it go to the trash because you didn’t have the time to cook it all.
And the amount of time you spend in this game can keep increasing. If you like it, awesome. If you find it a pure chore though, it sucks.
You don’t care and pick something different every time
Your closet is eclectic. Some things fit you great, some ok. Some you should never ever wear but you still do on occasion.
It is true that just like some people seem to be able to wear anything and still look good in them, some people can seemingly anything and still look in shape.
Is that you though?
The difference between choosing how to get dressed and eating is that you can change your wardrobe overnight.
But your body and mind are shaped by the cumulative decisions of what you feed yourself through time.
Eating “Just right” should be second nature to each of us — but our choices should be easier too
Remember that CrossFit under-eating incident of mine? Another lady at the gym was recently told she should eat more. A lot more.
She went from eating 1200 calories per day to 1800 to 2200 per day. AND she tripled the amount of carbs.
The result? She lost 7lbs and 2% body fat in 7 months while greatly increasing her strength. And she felt waaaaaay better.
With some important tweaks in my diet, I have now gone back to be on track too. I’m now gaining muscle while losing body fat. Yay!
But it’s been a lot of effort, a lot of close monitoring of what I’m eating, to be able to get there.
The benefits of eating “Just Right” nutrition are self-evident: better health, bodies we feel proud of, stronger minds.
We need simple, easier ways to figure out what is “Just Right” nutrition for each of us.
Since I joined the cult, I work out a lot. My body shape is actually changing, and I’m changing what I wear with it. I go for slim cuts one size above now.
Making the change in what I wear was easy: I tried a couple of things at a store, figured out my size and shape. Now I can order online.
You see, we don’t live it that dystopian world. Ordering clothes is pretty straightforward: from clear sizes, to common shapes, styles and easy ways to return and exchange items, we have developed systems that cater to our needs as shoppers.
But it does feel like we still live in a dystopian food world.
I just love food way too much to restrict myself to only eat at home or always eat the same meals over and over again.
But there has to be better new ways, better systems to make it easy for us to default to eating the right, balanced portions that are good for us.
What’s your thoughts?
And if you know of anything that can help with making the right food choices, let me know in the comments ;)
