How to Choose What to Eat? Three Easy Guidelines

How do you pick what you eat?

"I listen to my body, I eat what I feel like eating" this is tricky since our natural drives (hunger, cravings, feeling full, feeling sick) are evolutionary traits that make sense in the context in which we evolved: food scarcity. When food is available all the time some of those natural drives are harder to read.
"I count calories" is a model that doesn't quite fit the purpose as discussed in a previous video...

Sources:

• For details behind glucose metabolism, fat storage, muscle gain through short high intensity weight training: Body by Science by Doug McDuff who also gave a number of talks and interviews available on Youtube. 

• Video from What I've learned describing visually the chemical reactions that take place in the body when you eat either alcohol or sugar.

• Self-tested techniques for fat loss, slow-carb diets, blood sugar stabilisation using low GI food and muscle gain using short high intensity weight training: The 4-Hour Body by Tim Ferris.

• Healthy eating in general with justification for each food type, detailed explanations on the role of hormones in fat storage: The Calorie Myth by Jonathan Bailor.

• Detailed explanations for the reasons behind cardiovascular disease, the role of sugar in inflammation as well as oxidation of certain categories of lipoproteins (cholesterol) and why it's not about saturated fat: The Great Cholesterol Myth by Jonny Bowden. 

• Nutrition and metabolism from a scientific point of view, detailed explanation of why thermodynamic calorie counting is wrongly applied to food, the risk in misinterpreting statistical results from scientific papers. The World Turned Upside Down by Richard Feinman.

• Food choices and supplementation specifically aimed at improving general mood and mental performance through fine-tuning of neurotransmitters, look up all Youtube videos by Steve Fowkes, in particular this Google talk. Steven's detailed breakdown of how body energy metabolism works is here (in the context of Alzheimer's). 

• For cutting-edge info about nutrition, health, self-experimentation (bio-hacking): the Dave Asprey's podcast Bulletproof Radio.

Nutrition and Habits: Do you Really Need To Eat Bread With Cheese?

Sources:

• Doug Mc Guff's Body By Science
• Tim Ferris' The Four Hour Body
• The Bulletproof podcast

Confidently Assert Fallacies with Statistics, Surveys and Luck

You can be as rigorous and thorough as you like, with a bit of luck you can prove relationships between things that don't actually exist.

Eating at Tossed

I got to try Tossed recently, totally by chance.

If you’re on a particular diet, Tossed is absolutely perfect because it allows you to fine tune what you eat. This is something you usually can’t do with places like Pret-A-Manger, where sandwiches always come with bread and salads with pasta.

Chipotle is not bad because if you’re targeting a slow-card diet, you can eliminate the tortillas, have more beans, peppers, a bit of guacamole, some lettuce and a choice of 4 meats. But you get bored after a while.

So I was happy to try something different. Tossed give you the option to include / exclude a base (the carbs). And most of the base options are slow carbs: whole wheat couscous, brown rice or whole wheat noodles… Then you choose 1 of 9 meats, 1 of 12 delis and 3 of 23 veggies. The create your own page is here.

You can also go for a ready-made salad and swap ingredients.

And they have peanut butter smoothies!