Nutritionist’s top mind-hacks to your healthier dinner tonight.

Or how to avoid our “overfat” destiny.

10 min readAug 9, 2021

F*cked!

If we eat what’s the most convenient, cheapest, flavorful and delicious, with the best marketing — we are all f*cked!

Overfat, oversized, overwhelmed, getting sicker and less mentally and physically able day by day, eating the most mouth-watering and cheapest diet.

That’s the future!

We are all f*cked!

Over the weekend I was doing some studying at Precision Nutrition and stumbled upon this article about the rate of millennial young women putting on weight. And what’s the rate? The fastest. Compared to all the prior generations. And I bet, it’s not much more different for guys — it’s definitely not getting better no matter which gender you identify yourself with.

Does this sound surprising to you?

Look around yourself. Who’s in great shape? Who’s more like chubby and well-fed looking?

*(No body shaming on my side — just the reality of things)

And it’s not like our parents and grandparents were super athletes. But they definitely wore smaller sizes.

What changed?

Did we change?

No, not really. We got phones and all the technology, that made things faster, easier, more convenient but we, ourselves, when it comes to our biology, we haven’t changed that much at all.

We were “designed” to survive in the conditions of lack of food. Even our parents can remember times, when they had to work hard to just put enough food on the table. And even though food has been getting more convenient and abundant for quite a while now — today is the prime time of food abundance. It’s getting easier and cheaper to eat more every day than ever before in the history of humanity for more and more people.

Food is a great business model!

We can’t stop eating, we are in endless pursuit of food. It’s not like you and I can quit food. We need to eat. The questions is what we end up eating. And food companies want us to make choices in favor of their products, preferably consuming their products every day till the rest of our lives. The more the better.

Food marketing and design are getting more aggressive, trying to make us eat more, buy more, as much as possible, as often as possible.

And that of course isn’t in the interests of our waistlines and our health.

No matter how all natural, organic, low fat, low sugar, flavorful and exotic the food is — too much is too much. And if we don’t have a system in place to help us limit our consumption — we are doomed to get fatter and sicker.

Our food environment is designed to make us fat.

We don’t have any generally-agreed-upon food education about what is a balanced diet and how to eat it every day in a simple way.

We are food-confused society, drowning in calories and excess nutrition information, that we can’t possibly make any sense of anymore.

And we are busier than ever to have any chance to get out of this mess on our own.

And that’s basically why we make poor choices, even though we are all smart people.

Recently I finished this book.

And I personally didn’t learn much new as I’ve been studying this topic as a nutrition coach for a while, but I did get the confirmation, that all people working in the field have the same exact conclusions — our food environment is making us fatter and sicker, and until we design a better one, we need to learn how to “bulletproof” our food decisions from outside influences.

How do we do this?

Let me share with you a few simple tools from the book and my coaching practice. Tools, that will allow you to make better eating decisions and avoid the ones you know don’t really work for your health and fitness.

I’m not here to tell you what to eat. I’m here to help you make better eating decisions, the ones you already want to make yourself.

I’m not here to tell you what to eat. I’m here to help you make better eating decisions, the ones you already want to make yourself.

Let’s say you want to eat more fruit, vegetables, whole beans, grains, protein-rich foods, or anything you consider healthy. You want to eat more of healthy foods and eat less of unhealthy foods.

And somehow it isn’t happening.

Every day you want to eat better. Every day you end up eating the same stuff that’s kind of ok (everybody does it) but you keep putting on pounds, energy levels and confidence are taking a hit every day, and you have a feeling your fitness and health aren’t improving either with every year of your life passing.

Step one.

Plan it.

If we want to change anything in our life we need to make a plan for it. How exactly are you gonna do this? What exactly are you gonna do now? What does better even look like for you?

What meals do you want to have? Breakfast? Lunch? Dinner?

Write it down. Shop for it. Prep for it in advance.

What do you want to eat more of? Less of? How much exactly? What’s acceptable? What’s an absolute no-no?

You can’t just want to eat better. You need to know what that “better” looks like on your plate. And what worse looks like.

You eat worse than you’d like because you simply have no plan and rules for your eating habits. It just happens. In our environment, that means you gonna eat more than you need and worse than you want, since “boring” whole foods don’t have much marketing to make it on your plate seamlessly.

(If you need a balanced eating plan to start with, based on your health and fitness goals — reach out and let’s make it happen. Habits VS Diets.)

Step two.

Make decisions in advance.

When someone offers you a candy, what do you do?

When someone offers you a dessert for dinner, what do you do?

When someone offers you a free sugary drink (of course it’s all natural and with loads of vitamin C) — what do you say?

How many meals a day do you have?

Do you snack?

Do you put sugar in your coffee? How much?

Do you drink juice?

When offered seconds, do you go for it?

Do you go for all-out buffet on the weekends? Do you have limits? Do you compensate for that or just keep eating like you are getting ready for a hungry winter (that never comes)?

Food is gonna meet you at every corner. It’s gonna be more convenient and delicious than ever.

When do you say YES? When do you say NO?

You got to have all these answers before any situation occurs. Otherwise, when tired, stressed, overwhelmed, busy and hungry, you gonna make the worst decision every time.

Step three.

Make LESS food decisions.

Decide once and stick with it.

NO!

When it comes to daily food you shouldn’t be flexible — you’ll end up overeating, and that’s not gonna be broccoli.

You say, “But what about holidays, travels, celebrations?”

Back to step number two — make decisions in advance.

Decide upfront, what you have and what you don’t have for all the possible life situations. What your limits are, amounts of different foods, when you stop, no matter how much you want it, or how delicious your aunt’s freshly-baked cake is.

Ordering food online?

Decide what you order, what you don’t order. Don’t pay attention to deals of the day, unless it’s exactly what you want. Stick with it.

The worst times to make food decisions:

At night;
When hungry;
When tired;
When stressed and overwhelmed;
When you already made a lot of decisions that day.

Do you remember the time when you made food choices that you later regretted? Wasn’t it at one of those times?

When all the above are combined? You’ll make the worst possible decision available to you — the one that has the most marketing and calories.

One habit hack, that I often start with my clients, having troubles changing eating choices — we make all decisions in the morning.

You wake up, you plan your eating day, you organize as many things as possible in advance, and you don’t reconsider anything until the next morning.

Why?

You always will make your best decisions in the morning, when your mind is fresh, not fatigued by prior decisions and overwhelmed by daily stressors.

Even better?

Make all food choices for the day, while having your regular breakfast, that you figured out in advance. As we always make the best eating decisions while fed.

Step four.

Bulletproof your shopping.

Never go shopping without a list, while hungry, and late at night.

The best time to go shopping — after breakfast, fed and satisfied, with your mind not burdened by prior decisions and mental fatigue settling in later that day.

Why the list?

There’s always gonna be some marketing message that will make you want things that don’t serve you well, there always gonna be some deal to add more cheaper calories into your cart.

Let me repeat once again here — our priority isn’t to find and eat more calories anymore, to get as much food as cheap as possible. Our priorities switched a few decades ago, from trying to get more food to keeping ourselves from getting too much.

Our priorities switched a few decades ago, from trying to get more food to keeping ourselves from getting too much.

Better decisions around food, just like in any other areas of our life, are all about planning, priorities and making decisions in advance, decisions that serve us long-term VS satisfying this-minute cravings.

Let me share with you one more bite of food wisdom I learned over the years as a coach, studying behavioral psychology and psychology of eating.

The brain is designed to seek and maximize resources — food, time, money, mates, prestige and status — that’s our survival instinct. The problem is, food isn’t a scarce resource anymore, and we need to NOT seek more, but figure out how to “find” less.

The whole point of planning and making decisions in advance — to create automatic routines, aka habits, that the brain doesn’t question anymore, but instead executes on autopilot.

It isn’t more difficult or more complicated to eat healthier, once you create routines and habits, than eating what you eat now.

It isn’t more complicated for me to eat 99% whole foods, than it is for you to eat your regular meals.

And why do this? Why change?

To have great health, fitness, energy levels, waste less time being sick, have less chances get covid, have more confidence, do better work, sleep better and enjoy your life more?

Eating healthier is super simple.

Know what you eat. Make it simple. Make decisions at the best times. Don’t let marketing and deals of the day change the decisions you make in advance.

Every week I shop once. I walk through 1/10th of a supermarket to get my fruit, vegetables, protein-rich foods, canned beans, nuts and seeds, herbs and spices, kefir or yogurt.

It takes me no time to decide what I’m gonna eat every day because I made these decisions 2 years ago.

My cooking, and meal prepping and cleaning, it all takes about an hour every day. And about 90 minutes for eating.

I spend zero time thinking about what’s for dinner because I already know what’s in my fridge.

I don’t eat the same foods every day, but I have a structure that I follow because it works in my life.

Here are my foods for the last 3 days:

About 4 pounds or 2 kg of fruit, about 4 pounds or 2kg of vegetables, about a pound or 450g of beans and lentils, about 1.5L of kefir/yogurt, about 3 pounds or 1.2 kg of protein-rich foods, a chocolate bar and 5oz or 150g of nuts and seeds.

On average I eat 2000 calories, 100–120g of protein, 170g of carbs with 40g of fiber, 70–90g of fat from whole foods, getting more than enough of vitamins and minerals needed for a healthy body every day.

*(If you need to figure out a balanced diet for you, to reach your goals — reach out. I also can help you work through stress eating and food cravings)