A personal journey of one obsessed nutrition coach on a mission to create a world where food makes us better.
Let me share with you something personal.
I don’t eat sugar, grains, dairy.
Ever.
When I look at some sugary, refined and packaged snacks in a supermarket — waffles, cookies, candy, cereals — I have zero emotions.
ZERO.
Imagine looking at a bunch of grass.
Do you feel hungry? Do you feel deprived because you aren’t eating it? Probably none of that. (Unless you are a very smart cow reading it)
That’s how I feel looking at isles and isles… and isles of all these packaged “goods”.
My body knows where nutrients essential-for-human-health are and it ain’t in a box of cereal. It ain’t food. It ain’t nourishment. We don’t need it.
Was it always like that?
Heck NO!
It took about a year of conscious building of my nutritious eating habits (and a couple of decades to learn it all, from books, from courses, from personal pains and professional experience) before it became automatic — when I look at any packaged nutrient-poor food-like substances and I have no desire to put in my mouth any of it.
Now, when at a party somebody offers me a dessert and out of politeness I say yes, I feel like I’m missing out on my veggies and salmon with these wasted dessert calories. I feel like it’s a chore created by some silly traditions of our society.
A confession.
For my birthday present, a decade ago or so, I was the person asking my parents to buy me lots of good chocolate. And I ate 1.7 kg or about 4 pounds of it in one day. (And there was nothing dark about that chocolate.)
And that was accompanied by about 700 g or 2 pounds of a honey cake — my mom’s most popular cake recipe.
I would eat sweets till it literally would hurt my stomach and I would feel like throwing up.
The first Brussels sprouts I tried was when I was 28 years old. Sardines? About 29. Now I’m 32 and I can’t imagine my life without them!
So not your lifelong veggie enthusiast.
I never felt better. I never looked better so consistently. Eating healthy never felt that easy and enjoyable.
And I’m not on some fancy diet, even though you can say I’m paleo or keto on most days, doing intermittent fasting.
I just eat only when I’m hungry. I just eat only foods that work for my body giving me energy and health. I just only eat foods that are naturally abundant in essential-for-human-life nutrients, foods that respect our human digestion, metabolism and neurochemistry.
And it ain’t a box of a cereal, or the next-gen meal-replacement drink.
If you are someone who:
- Snacks regularly
- Craves sweets and other refined foods, feeling they control you more than you control them
- Feels “violated” when somebody tells you some food you love doesn’t work for you
- Can’t physically endure without too much disruption to your physical and emotional state a day without ANY food
You got a problem. Your metabolism is broken. Your food “urges” aren’t natural anymore.
Do you want to have a chance to ever feel like a well-functioning human being?
It can’t come without optimizing your eating habits. You are built out of it!
The easiest path forward I found:
- Eliminate added sugars and sweeteners, eliminate industrial fats (yellow liquid in a transparent bottle) in all the cooking and all the ingredients, eliminate most of the things made into powder, especially if it comes from some grain.
- Eat mostly whole foods, cooked in an appropriate way to preserve maximum nutrition, avoiding substances that might cause harm.
- Educate yourself about the nutrients a human body needs, and learn to eat your macros (fats, proteins, carbs) and micros (essential vitamins and minerals) on a regular basis.
- Stop snacking — 2–3 meals are more than plenty. Any calories are a snack. Liquid or solid.
- Keep it consistent. You don’t have to be perfect from Day 1. You need to consistently track progress, so that your BEHAVIOR gets more and more consistent, getting better. (Otherwise you might be stuck in forever cycle of cheat meals, cheat days that sometimes would turn into cheat weeks, moths and years)
- Maintain overall a healthy daily routine: sleep, exercise, stress management and social connections, meaningful work.
And then you might have a chance to feel like a well-functioning human being again or for the first time in your life. A human being who wants to live a meaningful life, who stands confidently in their truth and loves themselves unconditionally, respecting others but not being hung up on their opinions.
I might sound preachy. Who am I to tell you what is right or wrong to eat, right? Just someone who is genuinely concerned with a food system that supports human health based on evidence and science about human biochemistry, digestion, neuroscience. And it ain’t what we have now.
If you are feeling confused — you have all the right and reasons to be. Our food system — our supermarkets, our restaurants and food courts, our recipes, our food products, our schools and medical institutions, our food guidelines — most of them aren’t designed to support our health — mental, emotional and physical.
But you know what they say, “It’ll get worse before it gets better”. We, human beings, somehow learn the best from our own mistakes. So now is “worse”. It’s time to make it better.
How do we start? Today? In a simple way?
Stop googling stuff. Build 2–3 daily meals around vegetables, green and colorful, with addition of a variety of animal products richest in nutrients — eggs, seafood, organ meats and different parts of animals, plus some fruit, some nuts and seeds, good cooking fats — unrefined coconut, olive oils and natural butters.
Watch my Instagram for ideas and never-ending quest to change our food system and to learn more, for recipes, for food adventures.
Start cooking or find someone to cook for you. Someone you can trust with your health.
Tune in to my podcast for adventures of one obsessed nutrition coach on a mission to create a world where food makes us better.
Eat food, that loves your back with gusto!
