What to eat? What on earth am I supposed to eat?

What to eat?

We’re all told constantly about what to eat. And really when it boils down to it, there’s only three nutrients, three macronutrients that we need to eat every day. Let’s talk about those.

Any time you look at the components of food, you have fat, and you have protein, and you have carbohydrate. So we’ll just touch on each one of those. When you look at these nutrients, some of them are essential, which means that your body actually can’t do its normal processes without them. And some are not essential. The non-essential nutrients are ones that primarily you use them for energy, or your body can make them out of other things.

What to eat part one. Get your fat.

Now everybody knows about fat. How could you not know about it, it’s the biggest culprit of this century. We should really never eat fat, because it’s killing us by the millions. Fat is the enemy, and needs to be avoided like the plague that it is. But did you know there are essential fats?

Of all the fats, there’s two that are essential – omega-3 and omega-6.

Omega 3 is found in animal tissues, primarily from animals that are eating their natural diet. It can be found in grass fed animals everywhere, but there’s really a lot of it in fish. Omega-6 is found in fish as well, but it’s also found in a lot of different grains. And we live in a society where we get a lot of omega-6, tons of omega-6.

Now your body operates best if there’s a normal ratio of omega 3 to omega 6. It should be about 1:1 omega 6 to omega 3. In our western diet we are a long way from that ratio – actually more like 15:1 to 17:1. This means we need to consume a lot more omega 3 and a lot less omega 6 to get back into the right ratio.

What to eat part 2. Hi (hello) protein.

Most of you know where protein comes from. It’s in your eggs, your meat, and even in some of your vegetables. there are at least 20,000 proteins in the human body. Amino acids are the building blocks that make up every single protein. There are 20 amino acids, and 9 of them are essential. This means that you must eat the 9 essential amino acids in order for your body to work the way it is designed.

The other 11 amino acids your body can produce on it’s own, and aren’t required in your diet.

What to eat part 3. Carb loading

And then we have carbohydrate. Now interestingly, there are no essential carbohydrates. Carbohydrates quickly convert to glucose, who’s sole purpose in the body is to provide energy. Fat is a good supplier of energy, and even protein can be converted to energy. So the fact of the matter is, you don’t actually need to eat any carbohydrate at all.

Interestingly, we live in a society where fat has been vilified. It’s the bad guy so you can’t eat fat. Well, a little bit. You can have a little, tiny bit of fat, but don’t overdo it. If you eat too much protein, it’s not really great for you. So really what you have to eat is a lot of carbohydrate. Ta-Daaaa – that is our North American diet. It’s what we’ve been told to eat.

What to eat gone wrong.

When you consume large amounts of carbohydrate over a long period of time, you wind up becoming insulin resistant. Insulin resistance means that your body doesn’t recognize insulin as well as it should, because you’ve been eating so much carbohydrate. Every carbohydrate you eat is converted into glucose in your blood (blood glucose?). Once you have the glucose flowing in your bloodstream, it is brought into your cells by insulin.

Over time this causes your insulin levels to go up and up and up. As you get older, they continue to go up and up and up. And we wind up being pre-diabetic, and eventually Type 2 diabetic, because we consume massive, just massive amounts of carbohydrate.

All because we’re trying to avoid those bad guys in fat.

Here’s the thing, though. When you look at the science, fat is not your enemy!

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