There is some wisdom in this statement but it’s becoming misunderstood. This is evident with the modern food and supplement industry putting a health claim on just about everything you can think of. It can be said that we no longer eat but rather we ‘dose’ certain items. This thinking has to change if we’re going to have a healthier and balanced attitude towards food and nutrition.

As a kid food is still food, you eat it because it tastes good, or because it’s ‘dinner time’, or because you might actually be hungry.

As we become adults many other factors come into play that start distorting our view of food. Some of us start medicating with food and use it to de-stress, or deal with emotional problems. It becomes a social tool, as well as a reward and punishment system. It can become an object to control when the rest of your life is out of control, and company when you are bored. It ceases to simply be ‘food’ and starts become ‘medicine’ for bad or for worse.

The most extreme distortion of food is when it transcends being food or medicine and starts to become a drug.

Food as Drug

If you view a food item as the sum of its vitamins, minerals, protein, carb, fiber and fat content, then you might just be seeing food more like a drug than as simply food or even as ‘medicine. You may be asking yourself: What is the difference between ‘medicine’ and ‘drug’.

This is what drugs look like

Medicine can come in many forms and provides a benefit in some way. Exercise can be medicine, a talk with a therapist can be medicine, a vacation from a stressful daily work routine can be therapeutic and considered medicine. Food can also be considered medicine when it provides a benefit to your overall system.

A drug on the other hand suggests a dose response. A dose response means that you can measure an increasing or changing effect and increases or changing doses of a given substance. For example: 5oo mg of tylenol will get rid of your headache, 50,000 mg might give you liver failure. This is a dose response.

Modern food and supplement marketing is starting to turn more and more foods into drugs. Now the chemical constituents of food can be extracted, concentrated and delivered in pill form. Instead of adding blueberries to meal, you can take the extract and get all the purported benefits. Or you can measure the exact ‘dose’ of blueberries required to get the supposed benefit.

This is starting to become common for more and more foods that we used to recognize simply as food. How many oranges does it take to get your daily ‘dose’ of vitamin C? How many servings grains does it take to get your daily ‘dose’ of fiber? How much chicken do you need to eat to get your daily ‘dose’ of protein and branched chain amino acids?

Viewing food as having a dose response changes it from being either food or even medicine into a drug. I think this is a destructive way to view food. Once you head down this path it is hard to regain a sense of what food is supposed to be. You will soon view all foods as a drug that is either for therapy or abuse. This leads to feelings of guilt and regret when you’re not eating the correct food/drug and the correct dose at the correct time of day…a truly miserable way to live.

There has to be a better way.

Food as Medicine 

This is what food looks like

Coming to a better understanding that food can be medicine but not a drug requires you to start viewing food as an interactive part of your life, but not something that must be dosed on a daily basis.

Eat the foods you like when you like but be mindful of the overall amount of food you eat.

Pay less attention to health claims and more attention to eating whole foods.

Focusing on variety and mixing different foods, spices and flavors instead of finding optimal doses of specific foods for specific health outcomes is yet another change that must be made to have a sensible and healthy view of what food should be.

Food can be considered medicine when you’ve got a balanced view of it. When you can eat it without guilt and still maintain your health and fitness goals. And most of all, when you stop viewing it as a drug.

John

The Orange came back and won in OT!

The weekend included all of the usual stuff associated with a college football game including tailgating and consuming lots of burgers, steak, and whatever else goes with a tailgate.

This brings up an interesting issue about eating and dieting. And that is about the company you keep. If you’re focused on attaining a certain body image or look then it’s in your best interest to associate and spend time with people who are also interested in attaining the same type of body image.

The company you keep on a regular basis will have a big impact on the look and shape of your body, namely you will start to look like the people you hang around with. Or better stated, you will start to look like the body shape and size that requires the least amount of effort.

You’re fighting an uphill battle if you’re the one person in your group of friends who really wants to attain and maintain a lean muscular fit looking physique. Odds are you won’t get there if you don’t have other people around you with a similar goal. This doesn’t mean you can’t spend time with your friends who don’t workout or share you  diet preferences, it just means you have to be aware of how much time you spend with them and how that time affects your body.

It’s not that anyone means to force you to break your diet, or blow off the gym, but the social pressure to do so is subtle and omnipresent when you’re spending time with people who don’t put diet and exercise as a high priority.

It becomes very easy to skip the gym and make an extra stop for ice cream when everyone else you’re spending time with is doing it. The onus is on you to lead the way to the gym, or find other ways to spend time that don’t involve mass consuming calories.

The issue arises because food serves multiple purposes. Food is social, people gather to eat, to celebrate, to enjoy each others company. Some people will even take offense or find the social interaction to be less pleasurable if you don’t partake in all acts of consumption with them. In other words, they might not have as much fun if you don’t go drink for drink and bite for bite with them every time they eat.

This is just the social aspect of food, paying no attention to the physiological and/or emotional aspect of food. We all know how much fun it is to go out and just feast with your friends/family and have a good time. But there is also a good feeling you can get when you’re on a roll with your diet and you can see it affecting the way your body looks and feels.

This second effect of food takes more effort, but the payoff is longer lasting, and it has positive effects on your confidence, self perception, and feelings of accomplishment…not to mention that you’ll just look and feel better too. But this is also the harder thing for people to accomplish with food. It takes more time, more attention, and some self control.

It’s hard enough to get into shape and stay there even with supportive people around. The social temptation to over indulge will always be there, and you must be aware of it, and accept that it’s happening.

For my road trip I was fully prepared for a big eating weekend. I enjoyed the time spent, and now it’s back to eating lighter and leaner. This is all part of the elusive state of maintenance.

The idea of maintaining a lean body isn’t to be perfect every day and have your ideal bodyfat % every single day. It’s really about having smaller swings in weight and bodyfat. Instead of going up and down 30-40lbs (or more) the idea is to pull that range down to 5-10lbs (depending on how tall you are).

After a few weeks of eating ‘loose’ I’ll gain a few pounds, at which point I tighten things up, reduce the calories, and those few pounds start to come off, I’d say it’s about a 5-7lbs range.

The idea is to stay within an inch or two of your ideal measurements or within a few pounds of the weight you have determined to be your ideal.

For me it’s a rough fluctuation around the 185lbs mark, as I approach 190lbs I know that I’m at my upper limit of my maintenance weight that looks and feels good. If I drop to around 180lbs I will look very lean (ready for a photoshoot etc) but it’s tougher to maintain at that level for extended periods of time, and I also feel a bit small at that size. Through experimentation I’ve found that approx 185lbs is the sweet spot for me where I’m lean enough to be happy with my look/definition, my size, and the effort it takes to stay there. The intersection of these three points (definition, muscle size, and effort to maintain it) is the elusive sweet spot state of maintenance that we’re all striving for.

Your job is to find YOUR sweet spot and learn what works for you to stay within a few inches/pounds of it while still enjoying all of the food related celebrations that life has to offer.

John

Would combining the fruit salad with the muffin make it healthier?

So when I simply ordered a muffin and coffee she responded with this statement “Don’t you want to add a fruit salad to that to make it healthy?”

To which I replied “oh that’s not necessary, I’m just gonna rip the top off the muffin and eat it, and throw out the bottom”

After I said that I got a lecture about being wasteful and starving people etc…as if my overeating on muffins and fruit salad is somehow going to solve the worlds food problems.

The moral of the story is that the prevailing mentality is that you can add more food and thus more calories to a meal in order to somehow make it more ‘healthy’.

Lets just look at the two options.We’ll take her option first.

She was suggesting I have a coffee (approx 100 calories) + a full muffin (approx 400 calories) + fruit salad (approx 150 calories) for a grand total of 650 calories for my morning snack.

My suggestion was to have a coffee (100 calories) + half a muffin (approx 200 calories) for a grand total of 300 calories for a very satisfying morning coffee and snack.

This is a classic example of the gap in understanding between what really matters when it comes to health, weight loss, and looking and feeling your best.

We cannot simply add more ‘healthy’ items to a meal to offset the supposed ‘unhealthy’ ones.

The total calories will always matter more than what those calories are comprised of.

This is to say nothing about the fact that I was not intending to eat only muffins and coffee all day. For my preference on that particular day, a coffee and half a muffin is exactly what I wanted and it fits with my health/fitness goals. There was plenty of time and opportunity for me to get my fill of veggies, fruit, and other higher fiber and so called ‘healthy’ items later that day.

The point is there is no perfect foods to eat, or perfect meal combinations to have. If you want a muffin go ahead and have one. If maintaining a particular body shape/weight/size/look matters to you then perhaps you need to pay attention to how many muffins you  eat, or how big they are (in which case you can use the muffin top only technique) instead of either eliminating them all together or even worse, adding even more food to your muffin snack just to make it seem healthier.

In the end total calories and how much you exercise is going to affect your overall health to a far greater degree than a complicated and calculated mix of ‘the right foods’.

John

This was becoming a somewhat difficult conversation for me to follow because I couldn’t understand what this person was really after. At first we were discussing weight loss and how much weight they could realistically lose over the next 6 weeks or so. Then the conversation ended up on things like phytonutrients, antioxidants, phytosterols, fiber, the glycemic index and on and on.

It became clear to me that they really had no clue where to even start as far as losing weight and tracking how the hell they were even going to go about doing it. Withing 10 mins of chatting both of our heads were spinning.

I had to stop them and refocus them on the topic at hand, which was supposed to be weight loss.

This story is typical of the type of questions and conversations I end up in with people who want to lose weight but don’t really know what is the driving force behind it (a caloric reduction).

Of course there are limitless ways you can choose to eat, and from a purely weight loss stand point I think it makes little difference. Many of our competitors in the Adonis and Venus contests have lost a great deal of weight doing all manner of diets (low carb, high carb, low and high protein, and all fat levels). There was no consistency to the type of diet, the only consistent thing across the board was a consistent caloric reduction.

There is a point when the type of food matters, but not for the reasons you've been told

Maybe…Maybe at the lower bodyfat levels (sub 10%) it might help to limit certain food choices that contain sugar and saturated fats to help the process. But this might be more of a water retention thing than a true fat burning thing. This isn’t to suggest that reducing the water you carry is irrelevant because it certainly matters. Being bloated with water could easily be the difference between a visible 6-pack or a smooth midsection. So even once the fat is low enough there is still an effect your food choices can have on your look…this is why bodybuilders are so meticulous about their diet and preparation in the final 4-5 days before a show.

For the most part almost everyone can get to a visible 6-pack without really worrying about the exact food choices as long as the total calories are less than you’re burning.

Getting a handle on your calories is the first and biggest hurdle…once you’ve got this taken care of then and only then can you start worrying about what specific foods to eat for their claimed benefit.

John

Pro Bodybuilder Lee Priest "Bulking" in the offseason

This is a concept borrowed from bodybuilders who followed a ‘bulk and cut’ cycle routine where they would eat massive amounts of calories during their ‘bulking’ phase and then gradually drop their calories for their ‘cut’ phase.

In some cases it could have been necessary to eat 5-6 meals if these guys were trying to eat 5000-6000 calories each day…that would be 1000 calories at each meal…that is quite a bit of food, and it wouldn’t feel too good to try and each that much food in only 3 meals…think about how gross that would be, 2000 calories at breakfast lunch and dinner!

The pseudo scientific claims of ‘insulin control’ and ‘revving up your metabolism’ followed as a reason for eating in this pattern in order to lose weight…but the reality is that the frequency of your meals cannot change your metabolic rate, and it won’t make any difference on your hormone or insulin levels (beyond the effect that changing the total amount of calories would have).

This concept of ‘meal timing’ has been thoroughly investigated in the scientific literature and shown to be completely irrelevant to metabolic rate, weight loss, energy levels, hormonal balance (and just about any other claim that the fitness media drum is still beating)

I go into a much more in depth investigation into this concept in my new weight loss program called “The Anything Goes Diet” that will be coming out tomorrow! AWESOME!

But what about the snacks?

Anyway I’ll be posting some updates this week and more info if you’re interested in picking it up (on sale this week).

This is the diet program I’ve been working on for the past year, and if you been reading my blog for any length of time you might have already heard about this (or at least had an idea that I was writing this thing)

The take home message on meal timing is this:

Eat as many or as few meals as you like as long as your total calories are where you need them to be for your goals (weight maintenance or weight loss).

John