What should I eat? One of the most frequent questions I get asked by my clients. Whether it be to improve digestion, performance or body composition, most people are looking for some sort of guidance around the question ‘What should I eat?’. This often comes from the belief that the answer is contained within a book, a course or inside the brain of a dietitian, nutritionist or health coach. If they can just figure out whether they should be eating ‘plant-based', ‘paleo’, ‘Mediterranean’, or 'carnivore', all of their food issues would be resolved.
So how do we answer the question, ‘What should I eat?’. I come from a position that there are no bad foods. Some foods are just better than others. There are good foods, better foods and best foods. How do we know what the better and best choices are for us? There are the three characteristics I look at:
1) How processed is the food?
There are a number of reasons why, regardless of the nutritional strategy you choose, whole foods are a better choice than over-processed foods. Here are just a few:
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Whole foods tend to have a lot more dietary fibre which keeps you ‘regular’. Dietary fibre also helps to keep you fuller, longer so you don’t overeat. Fibre reduces blood sugar highs and lows and their negative side effects. And lastly, fibre has been associated with reducing your risk for colon cancer.
- Whole foods tend to have more of the vitamins and minerals that our bodies need to function at their best. When foods are overly processed, many of these critical components are lost during processing.
- Whole foods help with weight management. In this Research Review, the authors discuss the thermic effect of digesting food. For those that aren’t familiar with the concept, the thermic effect is looking at the energy required for digestion, absorption and disposal of food. The study compared the consumption of two calorie-matched cheese sandwiches. Now, one could argue that a cheese sandwich in itself is quite processed. But we’re looking at good, better, best here, not good and bad. One cheese sandwich contained multi-grain bread and real cheddar cheese while the other was made with white bread and a processed cheese product. Eating the whole food version took 46.8% more energy to digest than its processed counterpart. More calories used for digestion means fewer calories available for storage!
- Not not only does whole food require more energy to digest than processed food, but we also tend to eat less of it. In a 2019 study, 20 volunteers were fed 14 days of ultra-processed food and 14 days of unprocessed food. The diets were matched for calories, sugar, fat, fibre, sodium and macronutrients. Subjects were told to eat as much or as little they desired. Then the researchers measured how much food was consumed. Those on the ultra-processed food ate 500 more calories per day than those eating the minimally processed food. This was reflected in weight gain while on the ultra-processed diet and weight loss on the unprocessed.
- Need some suggestions for how to choose whole vs unprocessed foods? Take a look at this infographic from Precision Nutrition.
2) What works for you
Regardless of what the media might be promoting, at the end of the day, the diet that is best for everybody is a diet customized to suit the needs of each body.
3) What you like to eat
You might think duh, of course, you need to like what you eat, but really, this is a key element that is often overlooked. Many people decide that when it comes to making improvements to their diet, they have to eat ‘gross, healthy food’. This thinking comes from a lack of understanding of what constitutes ‘healthy’, a lack of experience with preparing and trialling a variety of foods and the flawed belief that improving our health means never eating some of our favourite foods again.
We often overlook the fact that unless we want temporary results, we are looking at dietary changes that we’re going to be adopting until the end of our days. So we better pick changes that include the foods that we like! While we want the majority of our foods to contribute to our health goals and taste great, we should also include some of our favourite foods that might not do a darn thing for our health. This is what helps us stick to our lifestyle long-term without feeling deprived.
As a health coach, this is what I do. I help clients identify less processed alternatives to some of their favourite foods. I work with them to figure out what works for their body. Most importantly, I make sure that we’re designing a way of eating that is enjoyable, sustainable and moves them toward their goals. Figuring out 'What should I eat? combined with looking at how our relationship with food might be influencing the how, why and how much we eat is the health coaching sweet spot.
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