Principle One: Don’t count calories (because not all calories are created equal)

 

For decades now counting calories has been the accepted method of regulating food intake for a healthy body weight. Unfortunately the practice is based in old science. While our bodies need calories (energy) every day to keep us alive, it is how those calories are comprised that is the most important thing to worry about. Food isn’t just calories: it’s also macro and micro nutrients that are essential for life: carbohydrate for energy and fibre; protein for muscle building, and essential vitamins, minerals and fibre. Our calorie count has to include nutrients that feed and nourish our bodies. Cutting calories for weight loss is generally unsustainable (largely because humans like to eat). Being deprived of food is what our bodies have fought against since the day we climbed out of the swamp as little bits of mitochondrial energy. Eating nourishing, nutritious food in healthy, satisfying quantities is a healthy way to live. Maximising nutrition can mean a fulfilling, satisfying eating life in which calories are relegated to a measurement of heat and not a measurement of food intake.

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Click here to read more about this principle

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Principle Two: Carbs are Not the Enemy

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Carbohydrates are critical to life. They’re not poison; they’re the basic chemical compound that keeps us alive. Every vegetable in the world is a carbohydrate! They are the essential food nutrients that your body turns into glucose to give you the energy to function.

 

Every seed, weed, root and shoot is a carbohydrate. If there is an “enemy” it’s how humans interfere with carbohydrates. Once carbs are processed and refined they lose much of the goodness that they contribute to our bodies. And that’s the problem. Eat carbs; love carbs – as long as they’re as close to nature as can be.

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Principle Three: Food from a factory is not really food

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Some of the the biggest corporations in the world are food companies. They pour billions of dollars annually into processing perfectly good food into pretty much perfectly bad food. And worse they spend billions convincing us to buy this food….mostly by trying to convince us that it’s good for us. Every process that a raw foodstuff goes through depletes the food’s goodness. And most of the factory processes actively remove most of the “good stuff” and then add back supplements that appear to make the product healthy.

 

The factory is the place where the laboratories combine a human being’s most favoured friends – fat and sugar – is perfect quantities so they can be marketed in the knowledge that they’re addictive. The minute raw foods begin to be “industrialised” they start to lose their goodness and when we eat them we’re swapping good nutritious calories for empty calories.

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Principle Four: Exercise for Health, not for Weight Management

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There is no disputing it. Exercise is critical for every human on the planet. Our bodies don’t operate unless they’re regularly exercised. But what about “exercise” as a method of weight loss, given that we know that being the right weight is the key to health. The unfortunate fact is, that working out, going to the gym and the other dedicated exercise we do contributes very little to wearing off calories.

 

Just operating our bodies, including our brains, uses up most of the fuel we eat. Walking around, doing our work, making a cup of tea; talking to our friends – that all uses energy (calories). Your one hour walk is going to burn the equivalent of a boiled egg and one and a half apples – or the same number of calories as the flat white you have when you’re finished.

 

Factor exercise into your life, not into a “diet”. Exercise a lot; it’s good for you, really good for you, but don't expect it to impact your weight.

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Principle Five: Your body will always win (You can’t beat biology!)

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Our bodies are marvellous creations. Our enormous (and energy hungry) brains are constantly checking, regulating, fine tuning and turning systems on and off inside us; making sure that we can walk, talk, eat, sleep and survive well. Most of what goes on we are not even aware off. It’s no surprise then, that “willpower” is an impossible dream.

 

There’s two major systems in our bodies that conspire to ensure that willpower is a hopeless companion in the journey to a healthy weight:

1. The feedback loop that detects we’re eating fewer calories and subsequently slows our metabolism to offset the decreased energy input.

2. The evolutionary imperative to eat fat and sugar! These two foodstuffs were very rare for most of human time on the planet. Now they’re everywhere and our evolution hasn’t caught up.

 

Food companies spend billions making foods that perfectly appeal to our ancient brains. You can’t beat bodily systems that you aren’t even aware of! These feedback loops carefully regulate hormones, enzymes, neuro modulators etc to keep us aware of our surroundings and fit to survive in the environment around us. But on the upside if we give our bodies the right fuel they pretty much look after themselves.

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Principle Six: Most of your food must have a direct association with the ground

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Did your food come from a plant? And more importantly, it is recognisable as such? If you can’t look at a foodstuff and be clear on its origins, it’s probably not worth eating. Ask yourself: “is this food a “root, shoot, weed or seed”? Humans have long alimentary canals designed to process plant fibre (cats and carnivores have really short intestinal tracts) and our teeth are for grinding, not tearing like carnivores.

 

While we are lucky that humans are omnivorous, nature has designed humans for ingesting a predominantly plant based diet. But not a diet where the plants have been processed into products that don’t resemble their component parts!