The fact is simple. You need to eat what your body needs, nothing more and nothing less. If you eat more than your body needs then you will see the symptoms of that impact you and eating less that what you need is the same. I think we all understand this at some level, there is enough material on proper nutrition out there that I think we have all picked up the bits and pieces necessary. The problem is that we just do not have a way to deal with it. So we turn to diet plans, programs, or abstinence from one food source or another, or periodically fast to counter balance our imbalance. You see if we eat too much, then we figure out by removing a few food sources we can reduce our intake and restore the balance a bit. Periodic fasting does this same thing, be reducing intake during select times you are effectively training your body to intake less and by so doing gain some equilibrium.
Well, actually, let me point out something pretty important. The human body is amazing in its ability to adapt to its conditions. Effectively, if you over consume, or under consume items the body needs then it will adapt accordingly. It will move things around, adjust, hold things in reserve. It will automatically isolate key nutrients for the most vital areas of bodily function. It makes all these decisions for you, it is quite keen on survival after all, despite the stupid choices that we make. It even stores excess nutrients as fat in areas of your body that will give you the maximum ability to stay on two fees, but distributing the storage in your center of gravity. The human body is just simply an amazing self regulated machine. We really take it for granted that we inhabit one of the greatest marvels in the known universe. There just is not any other system built by nature in existence that rivals the human body. Even a giant star, is really just a simple compilation of massive gas collections around a reactive core. We can duplicate that quite easily now, but duplicating the human body – just impossible for us now.
So as my mind send the correct impulses down the nerve endings required to expertly maneuver my fingers to type in rapid succession in synchronicity with the thoughts in my brain as I type this blog, I am considering what the fueling process is to complete this effort. That is actually the most amazing part of the human body. It comes all down to cellular function and that is an incredible feat of engineering for sure. The body is primarily an oxygen conversion machine. Oxygen and the oxidation process of the human body basically is what makes almost everything function. Contracting muscles, repairing cells, feeding our brains, nervous system function and all of that is tied to oxygen. We convert liquid and food to oxygen supply, but the human body does this mostly through breathing. Breathing also uses oxygen to expel waste product as well. The cardiovascular process of breathing in oxygen and expelling by product is the most important function in our body’s system.
This thinking has brought me to a very important conclusion. Any healthy living plan has to focus on the most core parts of our bio system first. You have to get those dialed in before you even need to worry about the others. So the first and foremost is breathing. Your cardiovascular system must be healthy, well exercised and functioning well. You cannot store oxygen, you cannot manufacture it. You can eat whatever you want, but if you do not have enough flow of oxygen to help process that food, then forget it, things just start to fail. Oxygen is #1. It is your primary concern. Keeping your cardiovascular health in tip top shape is always the most important consideration. Do not let any one fool you. You must move. You must require the heart and lungs to pump oxygen throughout your body and you must insist that it be really good at it. The problem is, that we take this for granted. Our cardiovascular system works really well, with little effort on our part. So we just assume that it will always work well. Remember, it was designed to support a lifestyle of hunting and gathering. Constantly moving, usually up right and constantly running around catching things. So if you sit around all day and do nothing, the human body is going to slowly prioritize other things and that is not good!
So when coming up with a plan for getting healthy, notice that the first major consideration has NOTHING to do with food. It has everything to do with moving around more and improving the respiration process. When someone first starts to attempt to run, for example, it is not their muscles that get in the way. It is their respiration process. They are unable to keep the flow of oxygen coming in to help transport and impact cellular function enough to keep the body moving. Things just start to melt down quickly. An experienced runner has a respiratory system that becomes really good at moving oxygen around the body. That is why, for example, my pulse rate as a runner is in the 40s. When I was a non-runner, it was in the 70s. That means my heart is pumping 30 beats per second slower, yet is still producing the same result, getting oxygen delivered to the cells in the body. So your diet plan should always be focused first and foremost on how to improve circulation, cardiovascular and respiratory function. That is and always has been the #1 consideration of a healthy lifestyle. No shortcuts!
The second most important consideration also has nothing to do with food. You need to have a regular and consistent source of water. This is the second major thing that your body needs. The first was oxygen and the process around getting it into your body and removing waste. The same is true for water. You bring water in through the process of drinking it and you expel it as well. That process brings in what you need and gets rid of bad stuff. Funny how the two most important things to the human body have the same result. Water is absolutely needed to regulate your temperature (this is bigger deal than you realize) and to keep things moist, lubricated and functioning well (think oil for the body). Water serves a major function in helping to protect vital organs, and also helps flush out a lot of bad by products from normal function in major organs. Kidney and liver function for example, needs a constant and steady flow of water to be able to constantly flush toxins out of your system. Water also dissolves things down so that basic nutrients like minerals and vitamins can be more accessible. Eating a vitamin packed food source will not do you much good if there is not enough water to break it down into a small enough particulate that can be absorbed by the body. So before you even get to food, you absolutely have to have a healthy and regular way to keep the body hydrated. You need to drink and pee a lot. That is just how the human body functions, you were designed to drink and pee, no way to avoid that!
So finally, I can get to food. You see, you can lay your body down flat on the ground and just lay there all day and survive. You would need to breathe in and out – supply enough oxygen and also remove the principle byproduct of cellular function. You would need to drink water. You need to regulate temperature, that is what will kill you first. However, you also need to provide enough liquid for things to function well, protect things and move some things out. So you can lay there doing nothing, as long as you can move just enough to remove the build up of urine in your body. However, if you laid there doing nothing for a very long time then things would start to go badly. This is what is amazing about the human body. We actually could just lie there for a very long time and not die. Given we had enough water and we kept breathing. Depending on your size, fat reserves, and glycogen stores in your organs and muscle groups you could potentially survive for months. I would not try this, but I think most humans could survive for at least 30 days. That is incredible if you think about it! This very large complex system could adapt and survive for that long a period of time, doing nothing.
Doing nothing. That is the key to understanding how to approach a nutritional plan. You see your body does absolutely need a food source to survive. Oxygen is the catalyst for causing the chemical reaction needed for metabolizing food and water the necessary nutrients for the transportation process to work. However, you still need a food source. However, you do not need as much as you might think you do. The easy way to think about this is to break it down to a common unit of measure, which we know to be a calorie. There is a danger of thinking of all food as calorie source, however, let me explain. You see as long as you had a energy source of food (fat stores, glycogen stores) then things will go great up until you run out of a key fatty acids, vitamins, and minerals. These are absolutely needed for survival, and we generally over consume them all the time. In the typical American diet, you are gaining far more than you will ever need for body function. However, when you get right down to it, the body needs certain components to pull off complex cellular activity, and depending on the cell, different elements maybe required. I think the first and most important is electrolytes such as sodium, potassium and magnesium. You just cannot function without these. If the are depleted, things go from uncomfortable to death very quickly. Eating food supplies these in abundance, under normal circumstances. Potassium is probably the harder one to get enough of, but most balanced food sources will have potassium worked in. Keep in mind you need very small quantities of these, just enough for basic cellular function. However, they are very important and probably the first things to show up when you are not getting enough.
We then get to trace minerals and vitamins. These are all absolutely necessary to survive. I will not get into them all, but you need very small quantities of them and we usually get them from good fruit and vegetable food sources. You also need certain fatty acids to live. These are used for a variety of cellular function and the human body is incapable of manufacturing them by itself. So if you do not get certain fatty acids, then you will experience cellular breakdown and things start to go bad for you. However, most of us get these in abundance and rarely does someone experience a disease associated with malnutrition these days in a modern society. However it happens, due to poverty and other factors. What is really bad is when people experience this because they are following an extreme diet and not getting enough fat in their body to provide these essential acids.
The final extra thing you need, besides just energy from food, is protein. This you need in a pretty sizable quantity. Most all food can be broke down by the body into a required source of energy, but the body cannot manufacture and assembly certain proteins. Every cell has a requirement for protein input from our food sources. No human diet could ever be protein free and expect the body to live and function normally. The brings us down to all other food sources which ultimately get broken down by the body into basic glycogen and other energy units to deliver to cells for function. You have to have energy to survive. You do not, however, need very much. If you were to just lay down and assuming you kept breathing, drinking and peeing AND you had enough protein, vitamins, and minerals in reserve then you body would burn what it had stored. It would burn the simply glycogen stores first and it would burn it at a consistent rate. We call this your base metabolic rate, BMR. The average person burns a little over 100 calories per hour. Age and weight play into this. The bigger you are and the older you are will impact this but for the most part – rule of thumb – about 100 calories per hour if you are doing absolutely nothing. I have also seen people calculate this on a per pound basis. Which seems generally accurate. If you weigh 170 pounds, and you at least walk around a bit, then you are probably going to consume 15 calories per pound per day. Which is 15 calories per pound per day. That would be 2550 calories per day. Divide that by 24 hours and you have 106.
So just think on this. If you were to do absolutely nothing, just breath, drink and pee you would survive burning just about 100 calories per hour. So if you start counting at midnight, and you wake up at 8am – you have burned just about 800 calories just lying there. Lets say you wake up and immediately eat a McDonalds Egg McMuffin, which is about 300 calories and an Minute Maid Orange Juice which is about 150 calories. You are now at 450 calories consumed. That is enough energy units to keep your body doing nothing for the next 4 hours, until noon. Actually, you could move around. Lets say walk to and from the car, sit up right in a chair, walk to the bathroom and do some minor amount of thinking. You would have about 450 calories from that food source and that would provide you about 112 calories per hour. This allows for you to move around and perform basic functions until about noon. For lunch you eat a big mac. This is about 600 calories. That food source can keep the average human body going for about 6 hours. Meaning that you could do sedentary activity until about 6pm. At that point you could eat dinner. If you at another big mac then you would have the calories to make until midnight again.
So if you ate 1 Orange Juice, 1 Egg McMuffin, 2 Big Macs – that is effectively all that the human body needs for basic function. You would eventually have problems with some basic nutrients and vitamins, but that would take a very long time. Eating this only will kill you, but it would take a long time. If you kept breathing, drinking lots of water then that is your food intake for the average person. Now I weigh about 40 pounds more than the average person, so I have to think about that, but the reality is that is how much food you need to survive. Here is the big problem, that a lot of us have. We eat way more than just 1 small OJ, 1 Egg McMuffin and 2 Big Macs.
Lets break this down into non-McDonalds terms. No sane person would eat the same identical thing from McDonalds everyday. However, look at it this way: 8oz of fruit juice, 2 servings of refined grain, 1 egg, 1 slice of cheddar cheese. That is the equivalent of 450 calories – take you to noon. Then you have 2 servings of fatty proteins, 2 servings of refined grains, 2 servings of cheddar cheese, 1 serving of vegetables. That is 600 calories and takes you to dinner, you repeat and that is it. Reality is what hurts us. We do not just eat that, we actually add a bunch of things. Coffee with sugar and cream, hashbrowns, a second egg McMuffin and a large orange juice. We add a large french fry for lunch and dinner. We add an apple pie and a large shake for good measure. We end up with a caloric intake far higher than our basic need.
If before you went to bed, you sat and thought about the next day. What am I going to be doing tomorrow? In my case I am going to run for several miles followed by sitting in my office for 10 to 12 hours, followed by a comatose viewing of TV for an hour. Hmm. I could look at that and see, well for that 24 hour period going from midnight to midnight, I am going to burn about 2,500 calories doing very little. My morning run will add a requirement for an additional 500 calories. Meaning I will burn an additional 500 calories than normal. That puts me at 3,000 calories for the day based on what I am planning to do tomorrow. Now I am a little different, in that I probably burn more calories sitting based on my physical conditioning and size then the average person. However, armed with the information of what I am doing tomorrow – how should that impact my plan for my food consumption? In this case, I need a solid energy source early in the morning, a couple of food energy and protein sources in the afternoon and then very little in the evening. The maximum dense nutritious food for me, and the exact quantity I needed might look something like this:
- 4 Eggs, 4 Cups of Blueberries, 4 Cups of Steel Cut Oatmeal, Butter
- 12oz Chicken Breast, 4 Cups of Chopped Kale, 2 Cups Brown Rice, Olive Oil
- 8oz Beef Liver, 2 Yams, 2 Cups Roasted Broccoli, Olive Oil
- 1 Small Square of Dark Chocolate
That is what I would have to eat tomorrow to have the perfect balance of food sources for me and the right time during the day as well. This would be maximum nutritional density and the amount of calories requires to propel my body through the tasks that I have assigned tomorrow.
This leads to me to my point. You have to eat what you need. There is no way around it. Consideration must be applied to your base metabolism, but also what activities you have planned. You must also consider having enough nutrients sources to keep you health. However, all of this means nothing unless your cardiovascular system and your hydration is working well. So in conclusion. You will solve all your nutritional problems by:
- Having intense and rigorous cardiovascular exercise in your day
- Drinking a lot of water with frequent urination
- Eating the correct quantity of nutritionally dense food for the activities you have planned
Sounds simple right? Geez. Only if that were true!
Guy Reams
