Some days I spend my waking hours going on long and strenuous adventures (like this trail running marathon). When that’s my day, I know that my body has seriously depleted its energy reserves and that those need to be replenished.
Other days I spend my waking hours out and about or at home, simply moving through the typical daily tasks that we all take on.
No matter what my day involves, when it comes to what I put on my plate, my mentality is the same.
And it goes, simply, like this:
- How do I nourish my body fully today?
That is, how do I ensure that the food that I am consuming is sufficient to supply my body with the many and diverse nutrients that it needs to perform the many and diverse complex functions required to keep me alive and healthy?
That’s number one – the top priority.
To which, I’ll occasionally add the following:
2. Is there any way that I want to be strategically improving my diet to better support my own health?
That is, are there any ways that I could improve my diet that I am willing and able to test out at this point in time?
It’s this simple framework that I wish to speak to you about today. Let’s break it down.
How do I nourish my body fully today?
There’s an unfortunate truth that is useful to understand involving the way our society has programmed us to think:
We live in a society that is dominated by calorie balance as a framework for managing weight, which we tend to equate to our health. However, this framework is outdated and an oversimplification of the complex, biological being that you are, which explains why it has failed our society and why it is likely to be failing you.
Calorie balance is one of my favorite topics to talk about, so if you want to know more you can follow this link to sign up for my free course on energy regulation and energy balance. (Or, if you’re already a member of the Newsletter, you can access it directly from there!)
For this post, though, what I want to put our attention to is what we can do instead of living a life focused on restriction.
The first step is quite simple. When it comes to restriction, don’t do it.
Instead, try this:
Nourish your body with all the energy that it needs to support you!
The idea is simple, but that action may be difficult to carry out. Our society does a solid job programming us to think that we need to restrict energy intake.
But that restriction isn’t healthy – not physically and not mentally.
The reasons are plenty, but for now you can think of just one:
When you restrict energy intake, your body receives a signal that energy availability is low. It is likely to respond to that signal with physiologic changes that include:
- The lowering of leptin, resulting in hunger while your body holds on tighter to fat stores
- The activation of stress pathways:
- This could result in sympathetic activation, leading to elevated cortisol as you mobilize and go find food!
- This could result in the shutting down of systems as your body feels the need to hold onto energy
The bottom line: While we may restrict energy intake with the idea that this will lead the body to release fat and burn it off, the body doesn’t really work that way. Rather, the body is made up of many complex systems that regulate energy homeostasis in many ways.
Conscious restriction of energy does not seem to be the way to communicate with these systems in a way that supports healthy weight loss.
What could we do instead?
Let’s begin with a fortunate truth that you can try out:
Your human body is well-designed to support you and your health, because the human body has been supporting our species for tens of thousands of years.
It is only recently – in our modern society – that the body seems to have lost the ability to manage energy levels, and the result is a tendency for individuals to gain weight in unhealthy patterns.
Woah, let’s pause for a moment and dig into that statement.
- “the body seems to have lost” – note that I did not say “you” have lost “your” ability to consciously control your weight. This is not, in fact, a willpower failure as you may have been told.
Instead, it is a result of the complex systems that support the human body losing their ability to manage fat storage in a healthy way.
2. “manage energy levels” – I mean this from a systems perspective. When we talk about weight loss, most of us are probably thinking only about fat stored in subcutaneous adipose tissue, as this is the primary site of fat storage.
However, energy is contained within different biomolecules (proteins, fats, and carbs) within the body, and these are all processed, stored, and utilized as fuel sources in many different ways.
When it comes to the orchestration of all of these biomolecules (e.g. what energy is stored as fat; how much energy is stored as fat; how much energy is stored as glucose; how much energy is converted to glucose; etc.) you – as the conscious being that you are – cannot control what is happening in your body, and you certainly will not control this complex orchestration by thinking simply about restricting calorie intake.
Instead, what you can do, is this:
Nourish your body. Provide it with all the resources it needs to be able to carry out these many complex functions involved in regulating energy balance across these may different systems.
You can’t control these systems, but you can help your body do the job by providing it with the energy and resources required. If you’d like to learn more about this, I have a free guide on building a nourishing diet. You can access it from here.
So, are you showing up for your body with the intention to nourish it? Great, now let’s move on to a potential second step.
Is there any way that I want to be strategically improving my diet to better support my own health?
Now that we’re showing up for the day with the mindset that we’re fully nourishing our bodies, we can add in a second piece if ever we feel up for it: strategically tinkering with our diet so that we improve our health.
A couple important items to note here:
- This is step 2. It does not come before step 1. Step 1 – nourish your body – is the priority
- This is not something that you need to do all the time. Rather, it’s something that you can engage in when you’re feeling up for the challenge:
- Do you feel a strong pull to improve your diet?
- Are there any serious signals that your behavior has not been supporting your health and that a change is necessary?
So, as long as you’re already fully nourishing your body and are feeling the desire to improve your health even further, then proceed with this second step.
Let’s begin with this important human design principle:
The human body, like all biological systems, adapt when put under a stress. This is what enables biological systems (e.g. the human species) to survive for long periods of time. By responding to signals from the external environment, the human body is able to adapt – to improve – to be better able to keep itself healthy.
Now, that’s a long and technical way of saying that, if you want to improve, you need to stress your body.
Not a lot – too much stress causes harm – but just enough such that your body recognizes a need to adapt. (See notes at end of article for more on this, if interested)
For example, maybe you’ve noticed that you’ve been consuming more sugar than you think is healthy for your body. Maybe you want to work to restrict sugar intake because you understand the potential health benefits of this action.
A second example: maybe you want to try intermittent fasting because you’ve read about the long list of potential benefits from decreasing your overall eating window.
A third example: maybe you want to try tinkering with your macronutrient ratios. Maybe you’ve heard about the benefits of low-carb and want to try to improve your health by lowering insulin and increasing ketone production.
Note that any of these ideas could potentially improve your health.
The question is, how do you implement these ideas as behavior in your life in a way that is truly healthy for you, both mentally and physically?
Let’s wrap things up today by answering this question.
Integration – How to make truly healthy dietary decisions
Take a moment here to pause and recall step 1. Got it? What was it:
How do I nourish my body fully today?
That’s the primary question to ask yourself on a daily basis. Are you fully nourishing your body?
From this space, then ask the question, is there any sort of specific dietary improvement you wish to strategically try out?
If so, are you in a stable place to actually try it out?
A good way to answer this question is to think about your current stress levels.
Remember, a little bit of stress applied in the right way can be a great thing – that is how we improve!
However, too much stress becomes a bad thing, so if your body is already under too much of a load, then it may not be a good idea to add anything else on.
For example, on days or during time periods when my focus is on intense endurance efforts, I have almost no thought of adding any extra dietary restrictions.
Rather, in times of this heightened physical stress, I am relying on my current dietary happens while focusing exclusively on nourishing my body.
Other times, when my training load is low and other lifestyle stressors are managed, I may put in some extra effort to tinker with my diet:
- maybe focus on a lower carb diet to keep insulin lower and enhance ketone production
- maybe tighten up my eating window so I get longer periods of time in a fasted state
Now, here’s the most important question of all: how do you know whether or not you’re ready to try out any strategic restrictions?
Here’s how:
Feel the desire to try out a new dietary strategy?
- Pause – ask yourself why you are wanting to try out this dietary strategy? What is the health benefit you are trying to achieve. Is there good data to support this dietary strategy?
- Tune in – time to get out of your head and tune into an even more important space: your body. Your body is going to be your source for the best answers as to whether or not it is in a good place to take on more stress in the name of improvement.
- Take action – try it out. Give yourself a few weeks (perhaps 3) to take on this new dietary strategy, knowing that you can always pull the plug on the operation if you are experiencing any serious negative effects.
- Pause and tune back in: how did this make you feel? Did you see the benefit you wanted to experience, and did this benefit actually make you feel healthier?
When you’re done cycling throguh this trial, then you’re once again free to choose how you keep this dietary strategy in your life. Do you want to continue with it because it is making you healthier? Do you need to let up on it a little bit or completely because it was too stressful?
This is when you are truly integrating this new practice with your dietary behavior. This is when you get to decide whether or not this strategy really is an improvement.
Try it out, and let me know what happens 🙂
Notes
Stress on your body
If we isolate any particular variable in the body, it’s levels will look something like this, oscillating up and down and kept in a healthy operating window. This healthy operating window is maintained because your body has feedback mechanisms in place to control levels of all these different factors.
Sometimes, though, an external stressor will challenge that system such that this particular variable leaves the healthy operating window. When this happens, the body receives a signal that it needs to adapt so that the same stress in the future won’t be a threat to the health of the system.
In this way, the body improves over time as it adapts to external stressors.
However, it’s important that these external stressors never come on too strong. If a stressor is too strong at one time, then it may cause permanent damage to that system.
Pingback: A Spontaneous McDowell Mountain Marathon – Chasing Upward Slopes