Nutritionism – Living in the ‘what if’ instead of the ‘what is’

Forget about 'what if' and starting focusing on 'what is'

If you do any recreational reading of nutrition info and nutrition marketing you’ve likely read a lot of ‘what if’ stories.

‘What if’ stories are things like:

What happens if I eat all my daily calories from carbs

or

What happens if I don’t eat enough protein today

or

What happens if I don’t eat a balanced macronutrient diet and control  my insulin levels

or

What happens to my metabolism if I don’t eat enough meals per day

This is typical of nutrition/diet marketing. But none of it deals with what IS happening right now. If you took an inventory of your current state including what you’re eating and how it is currently affecting your insulin levels, your metabolism, your energy and muscle building you’d likely find that whatever you’re currently doing is already enough and doesn’t need to be changed.

Without establishing a baseline of where you currently are you’ll never know if you need to change anything and in what direction you need to make that change.

Worrying about ‘what if’ scenarios without knowing ‘what is’ happening will just cause you stress and worry that you don’t need.

John

Posted by johnbarban in Nutrition
Tags: healthy diet, Nutrition, nutritionism |7 Comments

7 Responses to “Nutritionism – Living in the ‘what if’ instead of the ‘what is’”

  1. Chalze G Says:
    June 10th, 2010 at 1:05 pm

    Awesome post JB

  2. Jason Says:
    June 10th, 2010 at 1:48 pm

    John,

    From a nutrition standpoint, I understand “What you don’t eat cannot be stored (as fat).

    But from a training standpoint, can activity ever “shrink” the muscle i.e. degrade muscle proteins from chronic overtraining or chronic endurance training, aside from the obvious glycogen depletion..?

  3. MovieFX Says:
    June 10th, 2010 at 2:00 pm

    I’m guessing that it comes down to the maximum amount of muscle your genetics dictate:

    A dedicated biker ectomorph would hit his upper limit with massive calves, quads, hams and glutes, but his upper body would become translucent, and his low body fat would reveal his lack of upper body muscle.

    I’m speculating ;)

  4. johnbarban Says:
    June 10th, 2010 at 2:18 pm

    Jason,

    Chronic long duration distance training (in the absence of strength training) will cause muscles to atrophy to some degree due to efficiency of blood delivery to the working muscle.

    In other words, the body doesn’t need to be heavy with big muscles to run far, so the body becomes more efficient at running long distances by reducing muscle size to some degree.

    But this can easily be reversed by reducing the amount of endurance training and doing weight training.

    Muscle size is just a transient state based on the exercise you perform.

    JB

  5. Jason Says:
    June 10th, 2010 at 3:07 pm

    Make sense, John.

    Okay, I would like to challenge the Calories In/Calories Out model.
    Not the factors that affect calories in or out, but the efficiency at which fat calories are absorbed. Proteins and carbs are about 75% efficient whereas fat is about 97% efficient. Now I know practically no one will eat 2000 cal of butter all day, but when you compare 2000 calories of low-fat foods vs. 2000 calories of high-fat foods, it can make a difference in the net calories absorbed for the day.

    In other words, while the difference still determines the outcome, it’s more accurate (but not as sexy) to say calories absorbed vs. calories expended (or fat cells storing vs. releasing).

    How these things affect hunger and satiety I’m still unaware of…though I doubt that calories are directly related to hunger and satiety…

    Jason

  6. FitXcel Says:
    June 10th, 2010 at 9:02 pm

    I find the same thing to be true of those who chronically change their lifting routine. They don’t establish a baseline, so they never know what really works for them, or what they like.

    -Drew

  7. usernametooshortnowitstoolon Says:
    June 10th, 2010 at 10:21 pm

    John, this is a great blog post. Worrying about something you’ll probably never do causes unnecessary stress. It’s the whole marketing angle of “creating a need/demand for the consumer.”

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