The quantity, diversity, and quality of the food we consume, together with our individual responses to our nutritional intake, makes the field of nutritional science a very deep rabbit hole down which to go.
Here’s where I am with it.
Diversity of my food choices
My breakfast is constant. One less decision to make.
Currently, I’m using Hemp protein with almond, cashew, or oat milk to achieve 35-40g of protein after a morning workout. Without a high protein breakfast, I find it hard to hit my protein target for the day of 135 g (calculated using 1.5 g per kg of body mass), which I find helps retain my muscle mass.
My other constant ingredients include.
5 g Baobab powder
10 g Maca powder
10 g Flaxseed powder
We have a fixed shopping list with a simple rotation of recipes. Nothing elaborate and someone else chooses the vegetables we eat.
Quantity of food
I see a choice between chaos and control.
Chaos for me is to overeat. When I was a kid. I had no control. I eat what I liked.
My choices were chaotic. I trained relentlessly. I didn’t care much for nutritional planning.
When I began to work on breath control, one of the changes that helped me to become an asymptomatic drug-free asthmatic, got me thinking about where else I could apply the thinking, chaos vs control in my life.
It seemed an obvious extension to explore fasting. I found I enjoyed the training, particularly running, on an empty stomach, feeling lighter and counterintuitively more energetic. The Zero app was really helpful in reinforcing a habit of holding off eating until I had trained in the mornings.
One thing that has really struck home with me throughout writing this is how I use applications, like Zero, or processes like protein content monitoring, to dial in a routine that works for me, establish that it does work, and then trust it. I did a similar thing with heart rate years ago. I’m now happy with my pacing and I no longer use a heart rate monitor. There is something to be said for not obsessing over detail once you know it works for you on the whole.
Quality of food
Food is an extension of my thinking on the quality-quantity continuum. Moving the dial towards quality, I enjoy taking the time to create connections with local producers of high-quality food, people who care about what they do.
As a family, we have chosen a simplistic rotation of food which we adjust seasonally, reviewing our decisions quarterly with the intention of moving us closer to eating locally sourced, organic, simple food more of the time.
What I do to help my Asthma
Asthma is an inflammation of the airways. Here are the supplements I take in my efforts to shift my nutrition towards an anti-inflammatory bias.
Omega 3 Vegan Oil 1200mg capsule
4 x 1000mg MSM capsules
Zinc 50mg capsule
Magnesium Citrate 500mg capsule
We are what we eat
To wrap this up. Nutritional science is complex and so are we. In the face of complexity, we could make everything very simple.
Simple can be the billion-pound industry that tells us what to eat. Of course, they don’t know who you are, but if you are happy to comply, they are happy to supply.
Simple, but not easy can be to accept that not all our choices are reflective of who we want to be. YET.
Not easy because the truth is not for everyone, and neither is owning our choices.
If you do choose to embrace the idea that what we eat is indeed a reflection of who we are then slowly and with good judgement we can change what we eat to better reflect who we are NOW.