The Art of Staying Lean.
If I get fat — blame Italy.
If I get fat — blame Italy.
It’s my twisted way of saying food in Italy is good! It’s insanely good! It’s like your taste buds are having an orgasm every time you eat. The flavors are so rich! And not fake-rich, that you’d get in junk and highly processed foods, not fake-rich, that you’d get from poor quality ingredients covered with sauces and dressings, herbs and spices by a masterful hand of a chef. Food in Italy, in Bologna, where I am is real, even when you crack a simple walnut with your bare hands (they are THAT fresh), and bite into it — it’s such a pleasurable almost transformational experience!
Flavor in real food is intimately connected with nutrient density. Italian food — vegetables, fruit, nuts and seeds, fish and meat, eggs, cheeses and basically everything — it all is just as rich in nutrients as it is rich in flavor. There’s something special about the terra here (the soil and environmental conditions). Maybe that’s why the Renaissance happened here? When you nourish your body on such a deep level you can’t stop yourself from creating something just as beautiful, just as rich, just as nourishing as the food here.
Food is celebrated here!
Art is a part of everyone’s daily life — you walk by it no matter where you go. Quality over quantity is never a question. “Arte di Vivere” is a way of living, not a concept to aspire to.
Of course, processed food, KFC and McDonald’s, tons of cheap and convenience foods made it here too (I wish they had strict policies about junk crossing the borders, not people), popular among younger generation mostly (It makes me worry about the health of our future generation). Hopefully, it’ll never get mainstream. Because it’s not better. It’s worse. Convenient, nutritionally-empty food is to survive, not thrive. Some things we do, make our world, our lives better. Some things we do, teach us how not to do things.
It’s time we start thinking not just of providing calories but also of delivering maximum nutrition and rich flavors with every bite and every calorie.
We can’t turn into Italian terra every corner of the world, but we can do our best to use the resources we have in every corner of the world, use the technology to deliver maximum health through food. We can gene-edit for flavor and nutrition instead of yields only. We can work on enriching soils instead of depleting them. We can distribute food better and stop producing nutritionally-empty foods, that are a true waste of our planetary resources and our human health, that has an added “bonus” of increasing costs of our health care system. We can learn how to process food not just for shelf life but also to preserve maximum nutrition, to make foods more compatible with the human digestive system and metabolism, not less (Like we did with dairy, maximizing shelf life and increasing health problems).
I help my clients to improve their health, their energy levels, how their bodies look and perform, and to increase the amount of joy they get out of every day! It’s all connected to food! And to our basic lifestyle choices.
My clients are often surprised, that at the core, healthy living, it’s so basic:
- Sleep well, like a human being, 8 hours a night on a normal for daylight creature schedule.
- Get outside and bathe yourself in sunlight and fresh air daily.
- Exercise regularly (You don’t have to join a gym or have hardcore workouts, you can just dance and do yoga).
- Eat when hungry, have meals, 2–3 a day, with gusto, stop snacking and grazing.
- Make vegetables your main dish, accompanied by protein and nutrient-dense animal foods.
- Eat a variety of foods: to eat more nutrients, to prevent deficiencies, to avoid food sensitivities and allergies.
- Go for quality, not for quantity: you’ll get more nutrients and will avoid unnecessary toxic substances, that might compromise your health and cut healthy years of your life. (Not to mention you’ll get exponentially more pleasure out of the process).
- Spend time with family, friends and loved ones — cook and share meals together.
And that’s kind of it.
It can be confusing and overwhelming in our crazy, turned upside-down not-so-good-for-you food environment, where you need to hustle, be more and do more, surviving on as little sleep as possible. (That’s changing though).
And that’s why people come to me, I believe, — to help them to get back to sanity, to themselves, at the same time embracing this new era of hyper-connected world and unlimited (and often overwhelming) choices, bringing the balance back, learning what a healthy balanced diet is, learning what a healthy lifestyle is.
What’s next?
What’s stopping you from doing the health basics, embracing your humanity?
How can you make it work?
Schedule our free call and I’ll help you to brainstorm some ideas and create a healthy living and healthy eating plan for your very specific life situation.
