Comfort foods, emotional eating, guilty pleasures... let's straighten this out once and for all.

What is your number one "guilty pleasure" as far as foods goes? That one indulgence you struggle to resist once in a while, a little too often in fact, that is holding you back from achieving your goals in terms of weight loss or body conditioning?

How would you like to overcome that problem, RIGHT NOW?

That's not a rhetorical question. Before you read any further DECIDE and say to yourself "yes, as a matter of fact I would like very much to overcome that problem right now".

Good then.

Those are all trick questions by the way.

#1 eating whatever the hell you like isn't hurting anyone else. So why should you feel "guilty" about it? Unless your idea of "pleasure" is pulling the wings off butterflies or something horrible like that, it aint nothing to feel guilty about. We're here for a good time not a long time god dammit.

#2 still, guilty or not if there's a thorn in your side preventing you from achieving the goals you have set for yourself, that's a problem to be addressed. IS IT, though? Is that one meal or snack in isolation enough to bring your otherwise flawless efforts undone?

Nope.

If you're training effectively, and especially if you also have an active and busy lifestyle outside of the gym, you require a certain amount of energy. I say "require" as it is not really optional. You require a certain amount, and if you're in the habit of failing to consume that amount, you're really just running yourself into the ground. Now THAT is an unhealthy choice we need to stop making!

Even if your goal is to lose a significant amount of weight, this still applies to you. You need to meet that minimum requirement of energy and other resources from foods. Now, we can run some maths and apply what we know about sports nutrition to determine with pretty good accuracy what that requirement might be. Given that it is a minimum requirement though, and we're interested in producing tremendous results in changing body composition and condition through training (rather than destructively trying to starve weight off, which we all know doesn't work), your optimal requirement is likely to be considerably higher.

Now, if we're in the habit of consuming somewhere within those minimum and optimum intake targets, what do we know? We know that literally all of that energy and all of those other valuable resources are being taken up and put to good use. Regardless of the source of those resources, they are being utilised in producing your goal body condition. Whether they are from the most responsible, healthy and nutritious source, or whether they are from the most frivolous and indulgent choice, all of it is fuel and resources that your body REQUIRES.

I cannot  stress that enough. Your body requires energy, just as it requires protein, vitamins, minerals, water, oxygen, and so on.

Which is not to say just eat as much as you want of whatever you like with reckless abandon. We still need to arrive within our target range for total intake, with adequate protein, and enough fresh fruit and veg to meet our vitamin, mineral, and fibre requirements. Too many frivolous choices will make that goal less likely to attain. Some indulgent treats here and there, fit nicely into a plan that meets both your physical requirements as well as your psychological ones? Absolutely fine, and in fact more than fine. Beneficial. Required. Non optional.
 
Success in achieving your goal weight range and body condition isn't down to willpower, discipline, restraint or any other "moral" personality traits. It is down to providing a suitable energy balance to enable your body to perform at training, and to recover and adapt with the creation and maintenance of more lean muscle and bone tissue at the expense of adipose (aka fat) tissue.

For those of you who don't know, I have a nice system called "Flexible Fueling" which has helped a lot of people overcome problems with emotional eating, disordered eating and just plain old "trying really hard but not seeing satisfactory results from training and dieting" as well.

If you'd like to find out more about how you can eat without restriction whilst still losing weight click the link below and get started with the FREE pre-program, and you'll have priority access when I launch the next season of Online Coaching.  There's a great testimonial on that page as well, go see what my clients are saying.

Sign Up For VIP Access.

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Being in shape and a food snob does not make you better than other people.

Below, you can see a screen shot I took of the findings of a meta-analysis released last week, that looked at studies of all “named” diets. I highlighted the part that is most significant to the point I want to make in this entry.

Everywhere you look, people are telling you “this diet I sell is the only one that works, for these reasons. Everyone else has got it all wrong for all these reasons”. Well, the researchers wanted to find out which diet really was the best one, and if there was really all that much difference between one diet and another.

The result? As you see above. One diet is as good as another. People can be successful with any diet so long as total intake is not inappropriate. We knew that anyway, but now it has been verified and documented.

I am a bit disappointed that this study hasn’t caused much of a stir in the industry as far as I've been made aware. It is the best possible news for the people out there who have struggled with their weight, or with their relationship with food. Quite literally, this study has shown that everyone can be successful, by using whatever approach and whatever choice of foods best suits them… and this is the recommended approach, rather than trying to force everyone to “eat it, it’s good for you”.

This really takes all the usual talk about “discipline”, “will power” and so forth out of the equation. For reasons we can speculate on, this doesn’t sit so well with certain people. People who… I suppose they feel that their own results from training are proof that they’re a better and more virtuous person than everyone else. 

Bollocks.

At an advanced level of contest preparation, sure. People are going to need to stick to some tight and precise nutritional targets, and there will be days when it does come down to discipline in not giving in to a craving or the temptation of an indulgent food choice that is not a part of the plan. For people who's goal is simply to not be obese anymore, though? Come on.

Not everyone has such elite level goals, and why should they? For most people, it would be enough to be healthier and feel more confident in their appearance. Even at what might seem a quite advanced level of lean and athletic body composition, hitting somewhere within an appropriate range of total intake (with suitable macronutrient ratios) with reasonable consistency is all that's required.

It comes down more to organisation than anything else. Getting organised with a plan to meet your nutritional needs with the choices of foods that best suits you, on the schedule that best suits you. Willpower and discipline might be required if you needed to go hungry, to abstain from the foods you enjoy, or to force yourself to eat foods that you dislike. As we've established, none of that is actually required or helpful.

For the industry people and self appointed experts on the internet:

Have a look at this shit will ya?
#dickheads is more like it.

If your primary objective is really to help people, you’ll embrace these findings and work to enable people to achieve their goals via whatever choices best suit them. Otherwise, I put it to you that your real primary objective is in convincing everyone that they should be emulating your choices, your lifestyle, and validating your ego.

Honestly I feel like some of these “coaches” and other supposed authorities should just come clean and admit that they hate fat people and resent the notion that people can get results and achieve the goals they set for themselves, without proving that they “deserve” it by adopting some entirely irrational and bizarre level of food snobbery.
  
I suppose that when people think that being in athletic shape and "eating clean" makes them better than everyone else, it's hard to accept that it is actually meaningless. People are successful because they find an approach that works for them; that meets their energy requirements and suits them as an individual. If that means "eating clean", great... do what works for you and what makes you happy. It doesn't mean that it's the only way though, or that people don't deserve to be successful through other means. That's just ridiculous.

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Why it is important to challenge sources of misinformation

Serious talk here.

This is something that I can imagine is easy for people to misunderstand and misjudge people's motives on. There's so much vitriolic argument and debate over different approaches to health via training and nutrition.

Really, there are any number of healthy and positive approaches one could adopt or recommend for losing weight or otherwise getting into shape. We could debate that one is more suitable than another for achieving an elite level performance or condition goal, but then again... your goal might not be such an elite level, and therefore another approach might be more suitable to your needs and circumstances. Really, so long as it is healthy and positive and it suits you and makes you happy, there's not much to argue about.

Do what's right for you, and let others do what's right for them.

Misinformation is different though.

The reason to call people out for spreading misinformation isn't because you're likely to "win" the debate and have them change their opinion. It's not just because someone is "wrong on the internet" as annoying as that is, let's face it.

You're never going to get through to these people and change their mind. Some of them are using that misinformation to push some "health" product or program, and... well, sometimes it is pretty obvious, and other times we only speculate as to whether they actually know they're a scumbag and a scam artist, or if they've convinced themselves that the ends justifies the means and even if the information is not accurate, if it scares some people into a healthier lifestyle then the ends justifies the means. Either way, I'm convinced that in the vast majority of cases, if there is a product involved the "root sources" of misinformation are entirely aware that what they're saying is not true.

That's the top level of scumbags, the root source of deliberate misinformation or I should actually say disinformation related to health and nutrition. Your Dave Aspreys, your Food Babe Vani Haris and so on. Absolute charlatans making a fortune from lies.

Perhaps a level down from those are the people who've simply been duped. They've read an article or watched a video, found it interesting and plausible, and bought into it. Then they feel obliged to share this information. There's a bit of ego involved here but who knows, maybe you can reach these people. There's no shame in simply being mistaken, in believing some information that seems plausible but turns out to be incorrect under closer scrutiny. The same can't be said for indignantly insisting on a "fact" in defiance of all evidence to the contrary.

You do have your "self appointed expert" types as well. Basically you're talking about people who've maybe pondered a topic for two and a half minutes, speculated on an answer of how it all works, and then decided "yep, that's it. I've figured it out. Gosh I'm awfully smart". I'm sure I'll never understand how anyone could be quite so egotistical and arrogant to really believe that "me thinking about it for a few minutes" out ranks "the collective opinion of experienced professionals who've devoted their lives to researching and furthering our understanding of this field". There's no shortage of people who seem to think like that though, for some reason. You're never going to get through to them, either.

So why bother?

Speaking of dreadful advice that isn't healthy
and doesn't even work....

The reason it has to be done is to protect other people from practices that may be detrimental to their wellbeing. Since many sources of misinformation manage to reach a broad audience through fear mongering and sensationalism, there's the potential for widespread harm, particularly in the areas of health and nutrition.

Now whether the harm is that people simply are unable to make progress in losing weight due to following shit advice, or that advice is so irresponsible that it is tantamount to the active promotion of an eating disorder such as orthorexia nervosa, it is unacceptable and needs to be addressed.

There's a lot of money being made by unscrupulous people via promotion of orthorexia.

Unfortunately. And make no mistake, that's what all of these diet programs are. The idea that there are certain foods you shouldn't eat, because they cause illness, weight gain, premature aging, or whatever... and that there's a list of foods that don't have those effects which you'll have to pay for... nonsense.

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