The Big 3 (The Emotional Drivers That Ruin Your Diet) – Nutrition Crash Course Part 1 of 7
This is Part 1 of a 7 Part Nutrition Series. You can find the other parts here:
- Part 1: https://grahamtuttle.com/2021/02/the-big-3
- Part 2: https://grahamtuttle.com/2021/02/nutrition-101
- Part 3: https://grahamtuttle.com/2021/03/fats
- Part 4: https://grahamtuttle.com/2021/03/carbs
- Part 5: https://grahamtuttle.com/2021/05/cholesterol
- Part 6: https://grahamtuttle.com/2021/07/gut-health
- Part 7: https://grahamtuttle.com/2021/07/what-to-eat
As we begin on this journey of improving you diet and eating, we start here with eliminating the big three: No Snacking, No Drinking Calories, and No Added Sugar. The important thing to understand is that this isn’t for logistical reasons (though they do play a role). We start here because each of these three areas carries an emotional link to the underlying stressors that pull you away from the choices you know you should make but don’t.
Far too often people try to muscle through weight loss or muscle gain through will power and determination. This only gets them so far. You just cannot outwork your emotional sabotage if you aren’t willing to address the deeper drivers that impact your decision making.
I have yet to meet someone who is unhealthy but doesn’t struggle with at least one of these three areas. Overcoming this is not as simple as “work harder”. We need to confront it head first so that the problem pops up quickly.
The stressful job, the unfulfilling relationship, the harsh inner critic, or any other emotional driver that pushes you to emotional eating, sweet tooth cravings, or numbing with alcohol will always be there to thwart your best efforts if not acknowledged and accounted for.
Making these changes requires true work, sacrifice, and adjustment, but they are necessary in your quest for health and happiness. As a start, the most important thing is that you recognize the why behind your actions. Once you can spot those triggers you can make a different choice.
Most people just live life bouncing from fire to fire, thrown about on a rough sea. They don’t respond to these issues, they simply react by binging, snacking, or sipping. By choosing differently you begin to build momentum that forms the foundation of your best self.
So rather than throwing a bunch of logistics at you, we start with these three to create the biggest improvement in your health with the simplest and least amount of change possible. In general, removing the worst parts of your diet will have larger impact than adding in healthy options. Think of it like a report card – removing the D’s and F’s will boost your grade faster than adding in a few A’s and B’s.
So why these three? Broadly speaking, poor nutrition habits generally stem from the fact that people tend to mix up their emotions and eating. Food becomes the outlet for stress, alcohol helps to numb the anxiety and frustration of work, and sugar quickly takes the brain captive in a sneaky form of addiction. My experience has been that everyone who struggles with their body composition (and yes, this means struggling to lose OR gain weight) has an emotional linkage to at least one of these three things.
By targeting the area you most struggle in, you can directly work to break the bad habits that are not serving you well. If you take nothing else away from this, understand that YOU CANNOT OUT WORK A BAD DIET. No amount of exercise, starvation, or “juice cleansing” will help you do what changing your eating choices will.
I define snacking as mindless eating. If you have planned a small meal or a snack right before a workout for energy, that is fine. But if you find yourself rummaging through the pantry in search of mouth pleasure when you’re bored, that’s not fine. Any unplanned eating that falls outside of the meal times is considered snacking and is off limits.
One way to break this habit are to brush your teeth after meals or do something that interrupts the cycle of eating. If you know that late night snacking is a problem for you, stop it before it gets started by signaling to your body that the time to eat is over. My favorite option is to chew gum. I get a brand of sugar free mint flavored Turkish gum called Falim Gum off of Amazon that is designed to be really tough to chew. This gets a lot of blood flow to the jaw and the added saliva helps with digestion.
Drinking calories is like burning money. First, there are no natural sources of liquid calories outside of mammalian milk for nursing babies. So your body doesn’t really know what to do with it. The entire digestive process is built around moving food through the system in a controlled manner to maximize absorption of nutrients. With liquid calories, the fluid moves through the tract much faster and the process is thrown off completely. This can lead to bacterial overgrown from in the large intestine. The bacteria feed off of processed sugar that has made its way further down the digestive tract than it normally would with solid food.
Additionally, when you drink calories you miss the satiety of the food (what fills you up), you don’t get any chewing stimulus for your jaw and face, and you consume more calories than you normally would without realizing it. The chewing is incredibly important, both for blood flow to the muscles and tissues of the face and head, but also for stimulating the release of saliva which plays a big role in digestion.
If you are the type of person who enjoys a glass of wine at dinner, this might be hard. My question to you is what is the purpose of drinking alcohol? Just one glass for taste and enjoyment is fine, but 2-4 to deal with your stress at work quickly becomes a problem. The same obviously applies to beer and liquor. I know it’s not fun to give up the things you enjoy, but the question you have to ask yourself is what do you really want? To have alcohol every day or to lose the weight? Change is hard, and sacrifice is necessary. So from an emotional point of view, identify what you really want and figure out if the sacrifices necessary to reach that are worth it to you. It’s your life and your body, you are the boss of you.
From a biological perspective on alcohol – it is a toxin. It’s hard on your body to process, it slows down fat burning from stored body fat, it messes up your sleep at night (yes, even just one glass has a big impact), and it can make it harder to practice portion control when you’re eating. There are no health benefits from alcohol (no, the resveratrol in wine doesn’t cut it) and is an added source of calories. Cutting back to drinking one day a week will save you time and money. You can thank me later.
Finally, sugar is a problem. While not technically addictive in that it doesn’t cause physical change in the brain, sugar has every other addictive quality. I’m sure you’ve experienced this yourself – the cravings, the ease of over consumption, and the strange behaviors around coveting and hoarding candy, desserts, and other sweet treats.
Mounting evidence shows that the repeated insulin response (the hormone released in response to glucose in the blood stream) is at the root of all cardiovascular disease. Sugar also has zero nutritional benefit, was not part of an ancestral diet, and has detrimental effects on our brain, mood, energy, and overall physical function.
An important aspect to note is that there is a difference between intrinsic sugars and added sugars. Intrinsic sugars are those that are part of the food – lactose in dairy, fructose in fruits, and cellulose in vegetables (though this is not digestible). These are generally paired with fat or fiber that offset the speed of digestion. Added sugars are those that are incorporated from a processed source – sucrose from sugar beet root, high fructose corn syrup, and dextrose from corn. In this context I’m talking about removing all added sugars from the diet.
Though we will cover this later on, all carbohydrates are ultimately broken down to their most basic building block form – either glucose or fructose. Processed sugars (added sugars) are already most of the way through this transition which means that they are quickly broken down and absorbed into the blood stream. This means that the body has to respond much faster to move these out of the blood, signaling a large spike in Insulin. Over time this repeated insulin response dulls your body’s sensitivity to the presence of glucose and lays the foundation for hyperglycemia and eventually diabetes.
The speed of digestion is the primary distinction between what are called “good” carbs and “bad” carbs, though I will later argue that this is arbitrary and misleading. Ultimately, all carbohydrates result in glucose in the blood. The question is how much and how quickly they are absorbed. As a first step, removing the most insidious, fast digesting carbohydrates will provide the biggest health boost.
Taken from another perspective, at no point in time would our ancestors have had such an abundant source of carbohydrates, let alone processed sugars. These have become a mainstay in recent human history and can directly be correlated to an increase in metabolic disease, obesity, and cardiovascular issues. Put simply – though your body can use them, it’s not ideal.
One last note here about fruit and honey. Fruit is fine, provided that it’s in season, locally harvested, and that you don’t eat the seeds. Fruit is broken down into fructose (absorbed similarly to glucose) and provides the added benefit of some nutrients and vitamins. From an ancestral perspective, fruit would not be available in most parts of the world, and most certainly not year-round. Eating fruit is a signal to your body that it is summer and that winter is coming so it’s time to add more fat to the body in preparation for the coming food scarcity. The fructose is obesogenic in that it signals to your body to hold onto fat.
Does this make fruit unhealthy? Not necessarily but understand that the modern-day array of constantly available fruits is absolutely unnatural. Most fruit is picked before it ripens, is shipped around the world, and artificially ripened with Ethylene gas. The issue is that this does not remove the lectins (natural plant pesticides that we’ll cover later) that would normally be broken down in the ripening process on the plant. In other words – fruit is seasonal, so make your consumption seasonal as well.
Finally, honey is also metabolized differently by the body. While not fully understood, bees add enzymes that partially break the sugars down ahead of time which alter the way it’s absorbed by the body. Honey doesn’t seem to raise blood glucose levels in the same way sugar does either. Additionally, local honey can help reduce allergies by providing antibodies to local allergens, has healing properties, and has been highly prized by indigenous tribes around the world, where available. I’m not saying it’s a free for all with honey, but choosing locally sourced, sustainably harvested honey can be a beneficial treat in moderation.
Past these three big changes, there are simple habits you can build that will go a long way toward supporting healthy function and weight loss. I know you’re ready to jump into a fancy meal plan, but the reality is that if you don’t have the actions and skills that support the new knowledge on what to eat, you’ll never be able to act on that to effectively make the change you want to see. These are my top three habits to help you achieve a better body composition and healthfulness:
1) Slow down when you eat – Instead of inhaling large quantities of food as fast as possible to move on to the next thing, slow down. Take a breath and set your fork down after every bite. This allows your body to catch up to your brain so your stomach can send signals of satiation, or fullness, as you reach that point. Another factor here is that you can actually taste the food and enjoy the process. You will learn a lot about how your body feels and responds to food if you pay attention to how you eat.
2) Eat until 80% full – Among other factors, your body sends the hormone Leptin to the brain to signal that it is full and has eaten enough. This is a slightly delayed process which means that if we eat too quickly, we can easily overeat. Instead, focus on eating until you are about 80% full, or slightly full. By changing the mental goal for satiety when you finish eating you can consistently avoid overeating.
3) Keep track of what you eat – To make any change you have to establish a baseline first. This does not mean you have to track every calorie. While that can be done accurately, it is really difficult to do well and is almost impossible to understand exactly how much your body actually absorbs. Instead, keeping a loose journal about what you ate or taking a picture of each meal for a period of 3-7 days can really help you understand how and what you are eating. Oftentimes the simple act of paying attention can be enough to drive change. Once you’ve got this down, you can move past this habit!
Last note on this section – I don’t want you to be miserable! The goal to start here is to incorporate these changes 6 days a week. On the 7th day, enjoy yourself. Yes, this does make the overall process a bit harder, but ultimately, I’ve found that this allows for a higher level of adherence to making these changes long term. Slowly over time your tastes, habits, and stress relievers will change. It doesn’t happen overnight. At the start I don’t place restrictions on what happens on the off days. Eventually with the bulk of your week centering around healthier choices, your cravings and desires will shift too.
Read part 2 here! All about Nutrition 101, the basics of what you’re eating!
