Food - Tips For Healthy Eating

I have tried a number of popular diets. So many people promote various diets as a one-size-fits-all blanket solution for eating. In my talk The When And The Where Tell You What I did away with every diet book and made a case that no two people should be on the exact same diet. Only you know what you should be eating. I avoid the food conversation and focus more on the idea that your environment (specifically your light and tech environment) are of primary importance because negative light and tech environment have a negative effect on anyone to varying degrees regardless of diet. 
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In this blog I want to share some basic ideas on food that will help people to know what & when to eat. Since everyone is different, there are some ideas that make eating decisions easier. Theses are things that have worked for me. They are not in any particular order. I could embellish on each one but I'll keep it simple for now. 

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Intermittent Fasting-  
I have become a huge supporter of intermittent fasting. No matter what the diet is, a person will benefit from eating in certain windows of time. Some like an 8 hour window, others do 4 and some even go for 1 meal a day. I have been doing intermittent fasting on and off for about a year. I currently like to do a pretty extreme 2-4 hour window 5 days a week and a normal day of eating on a split (which are also the days I lift). This allows my body to keep from acclimating to reduced eating and on the days I eat I make sure to eat a lot. Intermittent fasting is great for weight loss but has a number of health benefits for longevity as the body has a chance to clean out the waste and also will better absorb the nutrients you consume when you eat much like a dry sponge. ​This also helps with self discipline allowing you to control yourself relative to food, which seems to be a rare talent these days.  
Here is another Post On IF. 

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Eat in the morning - ​
I have experimented with eating at different times. For a long time I would wait to eat until the evening. The way I would do this was by drinking lots of caffeine all day. I'm now off caffeine (I highly recommend trying 60 days caffeine-free for major life-changing benefits- Post on Caffeine here). The best way for me to deal with the lack of caffeine has been to eat in the mornings. This way I am nice and hungry by the time I wake up and have something to look forward to get me out of bed and my engine running. I feel energized and still enjoy dinner on the 2 full eating days each week. I have found that this keeps me energized and stable. I sleep much better since I'm not digesting food. The earlier you stop eating the better your sleep will be. Try it out and take not of your experience.

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The No Label Diet -

Eating whole foods was popular untill the meaning was lost, probably by a chain of stores that sells a massive amount of processed foods and is called Whole Foods....marketing at its best. The more processed altered and removed from nature food is, the worse it is. This is the problem with fake meat and many vegan food options along with farmed fish and so on. Whatever your diet is, avoid a long list of ingredients, things you can't pronounce, and lots of packaging. I personally like to keep things very simple. You will often find me eating eggs or beef or fish with a simple vegetable. The closer to nature the food, the more your body will get out of it. Nature makes things simple so digestion issues often come from throwing too many different things at the body all at once. Just because you have 25 healthy things does not mean that mixing them all together makes them more healthy, regardless of what marketers would like you to think. Just like you might enjoy eating ice cream, riding roller coasters, and chatting with friends but may have a very hard time enjoying all 3 simultaneously. It's chaos.

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Eat Seasonal And Local- 

Food is one way the inside of your body collects information about the outside environment. If you eat shipped mangoes in a place where mangoes don't grow, you better believe it will has a very different effect in your body than if you were picking it off the tree and eating it. Plants eat light and make sugars out of it. This light is then re-expressed in the body. Light is a frequency that contains information about the environment you're in. So veganism may be fine for a person at the equator where lots of plants and fruits grow, but not for a person near the poles. Just because we can access foods from all over the world in our modern day, does not mean our biology can make sense of these foods from afar. Prior to modern society all diets were determined by the local environment and in my opinion still should be. 

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Be Careful With Plants - 
Just because something is organic, vegan, non-GMO, sugar free, gluten free, and so on does not make it healthy.

Organic standards: 
-do not take light into account 
-do not take water into account 
-are often picked unripe 
-are often waxed or colored 

I believe plants are containers for light and water. You can grow a plant in fake light with worst water in the worst environment and not put pesticides on it so it can be called organic. I'm not saying organic is necessarily bad, but know that as soon as a rule is made, companies go to work looking for cheaper ways to get around that rule. 

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Eat Animal Products-

As a former sick vegan I now consume a lot of animal products and my health is steadily improving. I cover this in a blog post: Why I Eat Meat. Animal products are more stable than plants. Yes, quality matters so try to get good sources of meat. If you do eat natural animal products, I believe your health will improve. Be sure to include fish. I make sure to eat local eggs and grass fed beef often. 

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This is certainly not an all-encompassing list. Avoid GMO's, fried food, junk oils, fake food, fast food, quick food. Limit your sugar and avoid hidden stimulants like caffeine and be aware that the more oppressive the environment where the food comes from, generally the less natural and healthy the food will be.