The 4 Diet Blunders and How You Can Fix Them

Simplify simplify simplify. In spite of some nutritional advice to obsessively track the macro- and micronutrients in our food, the key to a healthy human diet, one that promotes longevity as well as muscle growth and fat loss, revolves around understanding the diet that our bodies have evolved to thrive on. If you follow these four guidelines, you will find it much easier to meet your health and fitness goals, whether it’s doing a bodyweight snatch or simply getting sick less.

1. Your food is poisoned… and you don’t realize it.

What food or meal do you eat the most? Pizza? Burritos? Macaroni and cheese? Whatever it is, I can tell you one thing… IT PROBABLY ISN’T FOOD! Let me explain.

The food industry knows all about what flavors and textures we enjoy. It’s their job. Maybe it’s the salty taste of a porterhouse steak. Or the sweet taste of fresh strawberries. Or the smoothness of butter. (Mouth watering yet?) They have learned all the “hot buttons” that make our stomachs growl… and figured out how to manufacture them in a laboratory! The problem is that we have been eating meat, fruit, and dairy for thousands, even MILLIONS of years and our bodies are well adapted to processing them. The nasty chemicals they use to reproduce these taste sensations are an entirely new component of our diet. Just as herbivorous animals cannot thrive on a carnivorous diet, we as humans cannot do well on a chemical diet. In eating things that our body cannot deal with, we are essentially poisoning ourselves.

Next time you pick up that box of mac and cheese, take a good long look at the ingredient list. Sure, it may be tasty, but do you really think your body can handle that garbage?

Bottom line: buy foods with ingredients you can recognize. It has worked for millions of years, and it will keep on working.

2. You are wasting your time counting carbs, fats, and calories.

Most diets consist of restricting yourself in at least one of three areas: calories, carbs, and/or fat. Anyone who advocates any of these positions can’t see the forest for the trees. Look, it’s true that there are benefits to each of these diets (not to mention drawbacks), but the thing is no one eats plain carbs or plain fat. These macronutrients come in packages called “food” which are much more comprehensible to humans than these invisible compounds.

When “low fat,”  “low carb,” or any other diet fad catches on, you can bet that the food industry will be right behind them, producing food which conforms to the diet, but adding all sorts of chemicals to replace the real food they are taking out. For example, almost anything advertised as “low fat” will replace the fat with either sugar or high fructose corn syrup, two things that are MUCH more harmful than fat.

You must stop counting everything in your diet. No weighing, no calculators. From now on, use your appetite as your guide. Once you start eating real foods, it becomes a much more accurate indicator of how full or hungry you are.

From now on, if there’s to be anything restricted in your diet, it’s products from the middle aisles of the grocery stores. These boxed and canned products are so loaded with unnatural preservatives that they can survive without refrigeration for unbelievable amounts of time. Not a good sign.

3. You don’t know how to cook.

I know, I know. You’re a guy. You don’t like to cook. You don’t even know HOW to cook. But eating food you prepared yourself is the only way to ensure that you are eating healthy food that will promote muscle growth and not unnatural foods that will make you gain fat. As much as restaurants like to promote their “healthy” items, most of them are still loaded with Frankenfoods such as high fructose corn syrup and industrial vegetable oils.

Cooking doesn’t have to be some painful, time-consuming ordeal. In fact, it can be quite enjoyable. If you learn a few simple blueprints, you can apply it to many different types of foods, freeing you from needing a cookbook nearby at all times. You can even batch most of your meals for the week into one short session. And I can tell you from experience, there are few things a woman loves more than a guy who can cook. Just sayin’.

There are only three skills you need to learn to make you a bona fide chef (well, at least enough to make so many tasty meals that you’ll never get bored): grilling, roasting, and steaming. Roasting is a great way to prepare meats and roots such as potatoes and carrots. Steaming can take care of all the other vegetables. And grilling, well, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that damn near everything is better on the grill.

So run to the store and grab all the meat and veggies you can. You now have all the tools you need to make sure your fridge is always filled with foods that will help you stay lean and strong.

4. You Aren’t Eating Enough Meat

What did he say? Everyone knows that meat is high in saturated fat and cholesterol! Everyone knows that it causes cancer, heart disease, strokes, blah blah blah… Except it’s never been proven. Sure, countless studies have shown a correlation between increased meat intake and different diseases, but many other factors, such as refined grain consumption, also correlate. It’s all just a matter of how our culture interprets the findings of these studies, and when the “anti-fat” people are running the show, meat is the food that’s gonna take the blame.

First and foremost, and despite what PETA may have told you, meat has been an integral part of our diet since the first modern humans first started walking the earth, between 1.5 and 2.3 million years ago! Anthropologists believe that without an energy-rich diet including meat, our species would have never started walking upright and evolving the large brains we now have. So I’d say meat has a strong track record of promoting human health. Make no mistake: I am not advocating some far-out ALL-meat diet, but the “plant-based diet” gurus have been in charge of mainstream nutrition advice for so long now that they have tainted most people’s ideas on the role of meat in human health.

If you’ve been following along, you should be able to implement this easily. You know that you need to eat REAL FOOD, so you should get a steak or a roast from the grocery store and not some Salisbury steak nonsense. You know how to grill or roast that baby, so you can give the microwave a much-needed rest. Just make sure you grab some seasonal veggies to eat along with it. And don’t feel bad about throwing some butter on it. It’s a health food, after all (and I can prove it if you don’t believe me).

So there you have it, some common sense (and some radical) advice on the simple steps you can do to transform your diet into one that burns fat and builds muscle. Have you had any success implementing these things into your diet? Let me know in the comments.

Tagged as: carbohydrates, confusion, Cooking, fat, macronutrients, meat, protein, real food