Us humans love to over complicate stuff. Particularly healthy eating it seems.
More and more often these days, I receive calls from people looking for help in working out how to apply the massive amount of information they’ve accumulated. These days, most of us have a fair amount of knowledge of what healthy eating looks like – and the reason we don’t make a start is often because we’ve been bamboozled with all the information available and aren’t sure how to bring it all together.
So, let’s cut through the information overload and look at this really simple way of making improvements to your diet.
There’s a simple truth that real, whole foods are better for our bodies than processed food. They make for better fuel, they’re richer in nutrients like fibre, essential fats, vitamins and minerals. Generally speaking, whole foods will keep you feeling fuller for longer and create a better environment for fat loss too.
On the other side of the fence, processed food has additives, preservatives, fillers, sugar, unhealthy fats and excessive amounts of sodium. Often, you’ll receive a lot of calories and not a lot of satiation from processed foods, which creates a great environment for fat gain.
In fact, I’d make a bet that replacing processed foods with whole foods calorie for calorie would produce a good amount of weight loss.
So, it makes sense that making steps towards a more whole food based diet is a good place to begin.
But, there’s no need to do everything at once. Start with one or two changes you could make pretty easily, and get those ingrained before you look at more changes – and before you know it, all the positive changes will have snowballed.
Likewise, you don’t have to go whole-hog straight away – there’s something of a spectrum between whole food and highly processed food.
For example, you could take fruit or nuts in their natural form as whole foods, but if you turn them into a cake or a biscuit, then you have a processed not-that-good-for-you option. But rather than look at things as either whole food or not, there are some halfway houses along the way, and for fruits and nuts that might be dried fruit or nut butters.
We could think about the good old potato too. Boiled potatoes or a jacket potato would be whole foods, and crisps would count as processed. But along the spectrum, we’ll find roast potatoes.
A roast chicken is a whole food, and chicken nuggets are a processed food. Ready-cooked chicken would be somewhere between the two.
What about lentils too? They’re unprocessed in their natural form, and processed when made into apparently fashionable lentil crisps. Along the spectrum, we’re going to find lentil burgers, crackers and pasta too.
Give it some thought. What steps could you take to start moving towards a more whole food diet?