Nutrition - The Why

(Original photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash)

Nutrition is one of my favorite topics.  It is complex, but in some ways simple.  Because of the complexity there is an endless supply of conflicting information out there about what food you should be eating, when you should be eating it, how much of it you should eat, etc.  All of this is interesting in my opinion, but far more exciting and important is the why.  

Why you should eat healthfully.  Why you should care what food you put in your mouth.  Many of you may already pay attention to what you eat.  If you do that’s great!  If you don’t, in this post I hope to convince you why you should.  I also understand that most of you probably don’t have full control over what you eat.  But when you do, I want you to make the most of it.  If there is interest, I can talk about the how and what in another post.  For this one I will focus on why.

Everyone kind of intuitively knows that you should eat well to look good and do well in sports.  The common comparison made is putting gas in a car.  You wouldn’t put low quality gas in a Ferrari right?  The idea is that athletes are Ferraris and higher quality fuel means better performance.  This might be kind of true on some levels, but it doesn’t go far enough.

Imagine if instead of just providing energy to move the car forward, the gas also provided the material for the car to rebuild itself.  So now you might be starting with a Hyundai Sonata (the car I drive 😃), but if you put in good fuel, consistently, for long enough, that Sonata rebuilds itself into a Ferrari.  A boy can dream.  When it comes to your body and the food you put in it though, this isn’t a dream.  It is reality.  

Unfortunately it works the other way around as well.  If you put in low quality food, that Sonata might become a rusted out 1975 Ford Pinto.  And nobody wants to drive that.  So build the body you want to drive by giving it what it needs.

Not only your physical shape and abilities are affected by what you eat.  Your food also shapes your mind.  This could be a long post in and of itself, but I’ll try to make a couple key points here.

The first is the impact food has on mood. I imagine you’ve been hangry, or angry because you are hungry.  But what you eat changes how you feel in other ways too.  In short, bad food can make you feel bad and good food can make you feel good.  To be honest, bad food can make you feel good also, but only very briefly.  For long term results, you have to stick with the good food.  I’m not saying that eating well will automatically make you happy, but it plays a huge role.

The second key point is that eating quality food can help you think better.  Your ability to focus, create and recall memories, solve problems, can all be affected by the food you eat.  I’m sure you’ve had a day where you got very little sleep the night before and felt groggy.  You are trying to do your math homework and your mind keeps wandering.  You can’t remember the formula for the area of a triangle even though you know that you know it.  Adding simple numbers is challenging.  

Food has a similar effect, but you probably don’t even notice it.  You may not be aware that you can think any better than you do now because you’ve never experienced it.  It is easy to feel the huge difference of missing most of one night of sleep.  But the brain fog created by a consistent low quality diet is hard to notice.  It just feels normal.

So, eat more healthful food and you will be smarter and more capable of managing the stress of everyday life.  That’s amazing.  I’m not saying that eating better will fix everything, but I will argue that it is the first step in achieving just about anything because it gives you the capacity to be your best.  To illustrate this point and explain why I believe this, I’ll share part of my journey that I’ve never shared with anyone.

I am an emotional eater.  This means that, if I am not careful, I eat not only when I am hungry, but also when I am bored, unhappy, etc.  When I was a computer engineer working in Kansas City, I was not happy with the way things were going.  I went through a period of time where I was eating a pack of oreos and pint of non-dairy ice cream (non-dairy because vegan crap is not as bad for me right?…spoiler, it is) almost every night for dinner.  Yes almost every night, not after a huge dinner salad, but as my complete meal.

During this time I felt down, a little anxious about the future, and trapped.  It seemed like there was no way to change things. Finally, I knocked some sense into myself and started to clean up my diet.  Slowly I had more energy and started to have a more positive outlook without changing anything else.  This led me to spend more time reading and learning, which in turn lead to more changes to my lifestyle, which made me feel even better so I could do even more.  

Food is the initial switch that started a snowball effect in my life.  Since I started this journey I have also read and heard from many people who have had this same experience.  This is why I’m so passionate about it.
 
I know "eating your vegetables" and staying away from all the junk food that is everywhere is tough.  But like any other change, it gets easier the more that you do it.  The hard part is taking the first step.  Also, this is not an all or nothing process.  Any positive change to your diet will have benefits.  Start small and don’t worry about it when you slip up.  I hope this helps you understand why healthful eating is important.  Take some time and think about what you ate today, or even better write it down.  Is your food helping you or holding you back?