As fitness professionals there is no shortage of opinion on how people should eat. There’s keto, paleo, gluten-free, vegetarian, vegan, raw food, clean-eating just to name a few. Now for some people, choosing to eat a certain way is a medical necessity for a pre-existing health condition they have. I’m not talking about those diets. I’m talking about the diets that we, fitness professionals, and the general public, try on to see if they work.
Each diet has its own prescription, its own framework for people to follow. And, it can be completely overwhelming to sort through all the different options. And for most of the people who try these diets, they’re almost impossible to stick to long-term.
Now, I’m a research person at heart….show me the data! And what I have learned about research in the nutrition/diet arena is that there is no consensus on how best to eat. For every research paper you find saying this diet is fantastic you can find another paper that shows it does nothing. Nutritional research is tricky….it’s really expensive and logistically challenging to have research participants all eat the exact same food, so most nutrition studies rely on people filling out surveys asking them about the food they eat which is then analyzed against various dimensions of health to look for patterns. People are notoriously bad at remembering what they ate and reporting it accurately.
So, most of that data isn’t much help.
So what do we do?
Well, you can follow the diet that I have recently started following. It really has been life changing….for real! Are you ready? Here it is…..
I follow the feel good diet. Yup. That’s it. I eat foods that make me feel good.
Over the past couple years I have tried a variety of different diets and protocols. Each had some elements that worked great for me and each had elements that weren’t so great. So what I’ve done is really paid attention to how I feel when I eat different things.
When I eat a lot of bread (I love bread) I feel terrible. So I don’t eat a lot of it. But I also don’t restrict it completely. My neighbour brings over a fresh loaf of homemade sourdough bread…I’m not turning that down!
So I encourage you to try the ‘Feel Good Diet”. Pay attention to foods that leave you feeling great and the ones that leave you feeling like crap. Eat more of the great stuff and less of the other stuff.
Recent Comments