Be honest with yourself, how much real food do you really eat? How much is dead? What do we class as live food?
I was the typical personal trainer trying to gain muscle, living on shakes, bars, and supplements. At 37, I felt like things stopped working. I was gaining fat and realized what I was doing was unsustainable, so I did lots of research into eating real food. This focused on having very little processed or non-live food. The change was amazing; I gained energy, got very lean, and went on a streak of 1500 days without any illness!
I'm going to be honest with you now, this change was the single biggest health upgrade I have ever done. With the health benefits too many to list, I am going to tell you first why dead processed food messes up your body so much.
Like with medication, with poor food there is no free lunch, meaning there is always a side effect/cost. For example, let's take E120. This E number is found in juices and sweets with a red tinge to it, but do you know where it comes from before you put it in your mouth? It comes from the arse of a cockroach, yes, the arse! Side effects have been listed in some cases as: urticaria, angioedema, asthma, vomiting, diarrhoea, and anaphylaxis.
I'll let that sit with you a while to digest. Personally, I have no intention of eating bugs' arses for dinner!
Why Processed Food Can Make Us Tired
All processed food is dead, meaning it has no enzyme activity at all and fundamentally is more dead than you. So if you eat something that's more dead than you, it costs you energy and nutrients to process it, making a real drag factor. Most processed food has far fewer nutrients in it, and the body simply keeps looking for nutrition, so you can carry on eating without being full! This is why people have to drink coffee or tea after they eat because the food has such a drag factor it sucks the energy right out of you. They have to bring the energy reserve back up by using sugar, coffee, and stimulants, which will make you sick in the long run. This is a recipe for a bunch of side effects and a good way to feel tired all the time, leading to illness.
Ways to Cut Out the Junk
Buy Foods with Less Than 5 Ingredients
The first way to cut out the junk in your diet is to buy food with less than 5 ingredients or, better yet, single-ingredient foods. Fewer ingredients mean less junk in the food and fewer side effects.
Get Rid of the Process
Let's take fruit juice as an example. Linus Pauling, a Nobel-winning chemist and activist, showed in his research that within one minute of juicing an orange, 90% of the vitamin C will oxidize and be gone! So having fruit juice sitting on the shelf for days is just a bunch of dead sugar water. No offense, but if I want a bit of sugar, I'm not going to waste it on dead juice! Replace the juice with real fruit, cut out the process, and you will gain some quality live food with fiber, vitamins, and a bunch of nutrients that will be such a huge upgrade with no side effects or drag.
Don't Be Lazy, Cook from Scratch!
I think most of us can agree, we eat things because they are easy. How many of us use packet rice instead of boiling our own? Bread is easy, isn't it? If you look on the packet, they use rapeseed oil to preserve the rice, and the use of seed oils is very frowned upon by most nutritionists. Rapeseed oil contains erucic acid, which the Food Standards Agency quoted as follows:
"Overall, we consider the potential severity of illness reported that could occur as a result of excess erucic acid exposure via rapeseed oil in general to be medium (for example, moderate illness, incapacitating but not usually life-threatening and of moderate duration)."
Food Standards Agency risk assessment of rapeseed oil, October 2022
Don't be lazy. It takes 10 minutes to boil your own rice, and you will cut out the process and the junk they put in to preserve the rice.
The same goes for meat. Buy fresh, season it yourself, and cook your own. Most of the time, the pre-cooked meat has some form of E number, preservative, or sugar to season it, so cut out the process and cook from fresh.
Summary
I'm not asking you to be a robot; we all need some fun and a few treats, but I'm asking you to be better 80% of the time. 20% of the time, I do have a treat, but 80% I'm sticking to what makes me feel good, builds muscle, and keeps me energized and illness-free, and I'm asking you to do the same.
If you're busy, I understand. I am up at 4:45 am, work a 65-hour week 49 weeks of the year with a family and elderly parents, yet I still set aside time nightly to do meal prep so I can eat high-quality foods. We can all find time if it's important to us and if we hold this high on our priority list. I can tell you now if you switch to real food 80% of the time (fresh meat, fish, fruit, vegetables, herbs, legumes, and single-ingredient foods or less than 5-ingredient foods), you will be astounded by how good you feel and how energized you will be. The extra energy and nutrients will bleed into your workouts, and you will crush it in the gym and in your life, bouncing into those meetings as a high-functioning, high-energy, infectious leader.
Make the change, become illness-free, high-energy, and high-functioning.
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