Your journey to better health begins, simply, by building a nourishing diet – one that provides your body the nutrients it needs to function in a way that is aligned with its design. In other words, we want to think about delivering nutrients to our bodies in a way that the body can efficiently process.
Nourishing foods come in all different forms. They contain a variety of energy-containing biomolecules (fats, carbohydrates, and proteins) along with micronutrients that help the body use this energy in a healthy fashion.
As for which combination will serve your body best?
Well, that’s going to depend on your unique body along with your history and current lifestyle.
Because I don’t know what that unique combination is for you, I can’t tell you what would be best for you. And, even if I did know more about you, I wouldn’t consider it my task to prescribe you a diet (that’s the task of a well-trained dietician).
Rather, what I do believe is that it is each of our own responsibilities to determine which foods serve us best.
Don’t worry though, this doesn’t actually have to be that complicated. Actually, most of the work involves undoing much of the harm that diet culture has programmed into us. Once we are free of these non-scientific ideas, we can move forward making dietary choices that best support each of our own selves – body and mind.
Crafting Your Healthy Diet
As I mentioned, it is not my task to prescribe anyone a particular diet. However, what I can do to help you is provide you with a process for discovering foods that best support your body in a way that is aligned with The Reprammed Systems Approach.
Using this systems-based approach to healthy living, we explore healthy behaviors with a mindful approach that ties science to our lived experience of the world:
- we make mindful decisions about what may best support our health by looking at the data
- we apply this knowledge with an open yet critical mindset.
- open to solutions that we may have not thought about before
- critical of the quality of the information we receive and the results we achieve
What does this look like?
Well, instead of jumping around from one specific diet to another, what we are going to do, here, is focus on developing the skill that is learning to choose healthy foods for our own bodies.
It begins by understanding the well-established nutrition science about what the most nourishing foods are that best support the human body as we work to integrate these foods into our day. From this starting place, it is then up to you to do a bit of work to figure out an eating style that works best for your own, unique body.
This post is devoted to helping you understand this process.
Basic Nutrition Principles – What to understand before building your healthy diet
- Although typical advice, organizational guidelines, and common knowledge tend to base nutritional wisdom on simple models and concepts (e.g. avoid saturated fat, aim for lower caloric content, eat more whole grains), the reality of nutrition science is very different.
- Nutrition science is not nearly as simple as is commonly studied and taught; rather, the interaction of food with the human body is a complex, dynamic, non-linear problem. What this means is that having the ability to make accurate predictions based on how any individual will respond to a particular diet – well, this is quite the beast of a problem.
- To summarize the above statement, nutrition science is a problem of multiple variables interacting with innumerable components of the body with far-ranging effects that continuously change over time. This means that any broad piece of advice that arises from a small study is bound to be a bunch of bologna, and any attempt to target a wide audience with the same advice is bound to lead to many failures.
- Given #1, we have quite the problem on our hands when it comes to choosing a healthy diet. While we all would like to think that we can just follow any old diet book and achieve fantastic results, the reality is that figuring out that perfect diet that works well for each individual can be a real challenge. If we are to approach this challenge with the traditional reductionist method (in which food is broken down into its individual component and studied in specific scenarios), then coming up with a solution that works for you is going to take more time and resources than we have available to us at the time.
- The bottom line: If you want to make healthy dietary decisions and do not have data analysts and a supercomputer at your hands, then a different approach is needed than the traditional approach.
- Given #1 and #2, we need an approach that helps us conceptualize a complex problem without oversimplifying the information. Unfortunately, common models greatly oversimplify this complexity by focusing one’s attention on one specific aspect of a food (e.g. energy content, fat content, fiber content, etc.). When this is done, the complex nature of the problem is thrown out the window and decisions are made based on one or two components of a food and one or two effects on the body.
- To address this, The Reprogrammed Systems Approach does not shift your attention to one or two simplified concepts but instead recognizes that building a healthy diet is a process – a process with a logical starting place based on validated science, and a strategy for moving forward to improve results.
Key takeaways for making healthy dietary decisions:
- Understand that most dietary advice is based on oversimplified information
- I’m sure you’ve heard the following:
- we should all avoid saturated fat and red meat
- if you want to lose weight, just eat fewer calories
- eat less meat and more whole grain
- Sure, this information may be beneficial for some individuals facing specific health issues, but for most of us seeking to build a healthy diet – this advice is likely to lead us astray when followed blindly
- Instead, understand that any simple piece of information has a role to play in a much greater, more complex picture
- I’m sure you’ve heard the following:
- Understand that nutrition science is still in its infancy
- Yes, many individuals working incredibly hard over the past years have unearthed a mountain of information regarding food and its interaction with the human body. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to having the information and comprehension that is necessary to prescribe diets for each of us.
- This means that any time you see a headline referencing a single study and leading to dietary recommendations, you best be on your guard
- This means that anytime someone gives you nutritional advice and tells you to follow it because there is data to support it, you best put on your critical thinking cap and be ready to question the data before you make any serious dietary changes.
- Understand that you are a unique individual – your genetics, epigenetics, microbiome, and lifestyle are unique to you, and this means that your healthy diet is very likely going to differ from that of the man on TV advocating his diet or the woman in that book advocating hers.
- What works for your friend, neighbor, health coach, or doctor is not necessarily what will work best for you.
- To figure out what works best for you, you are going to have to do a bit of work playing around with different foods.
Got all of that? Good, now let’s get started building a healthy diet by asking the question, What is the healthiest diet?