Earlier this year when I was coaching the Cate School Squash team, while on a team trip a few of the Cate kids decided to enjoy fast food burgers for breakfast. As they very happily chowed down on their burgers and fries and cokes, I asked them if they would eat the burgers knowing they had rat poison in them. Each one of them said...NO. Then I asked if they could prove there was no rat poison in the burgers. To that they also said NO and kept eating.
Unless we surfed big waves, most of us would be lucky to hold our breath for 3-4 minutes. We would be lucky to survive a week without water. We could probably go without food for a month or two. This seems to be the hierarchy of our consumption dependence. Lets take air for granted and move onto food and water.
Since our life depends on food and water, then surely our quality of life might depend on them as well. At the extreme if you eat food that is bad or tainted, you would feel sick but still live. At the other extreme if you eat food that is really what your mind and body needs then you will have more energy and more brain power. Same goes for what you drink. This possibility doesn't take much scientific evidence to prove, all we need is a week or two of personal nutrition investigation to feel the potential.
Eating for optimal performance is a forgotten art, and its such a paradox, because we all crave higher performance - at work, at the gym, health, video games, socially, in bed! et al. But yet we so often forget to evaluate our fuel quality and continue to pump in the regular gas.
There are no magic diets out there - from Atkins to Vegan - non of them will work for us. Because we are each so different. Nutrition is not about following a diet plan or an archetype diet or a paradigm of eating, nutrition is a balance of what we eat, when we eat and how we each eat and the only way to know what our individual diet should be is to create it for ourselves. Through personal investigation we should figure out what makes us perform well.
A good start is to stop eating food that is processed with multiple ingredients. With ingredients we quite often don't know and even if we do, don't really know its individual effect on our performance. Whole foods like meat, vegetables and grains that have not been given or grown with any chemicals/antibiotics is where we should start and build from their.
Trace amounts of rat poison wont hurt us on any given day...we probably wouldn't even know the difference, but what would its effect be over time?
Unless we surfed big waves, most of us would be lucky to hold our breath for 3-4 minutes. We would be lucky to survive a week without water. We could probably go without food for a month or two. This seems to be the hierarchy of our consumption dependence. Lets take air for granted and move onto food and water.
Since our life depends on food and water, then surely our quality of life might depend on them as well. At the extreme if you eat food that is bad or tainted, you would feel sick but still live. At the other extreme if you eat food that is really what your mind and body needs then you will have more energy and more brain power. Same goes for what you drink. This possibility doesn't take much scientific evidence to prove, all we need is a week or two of personal nutrition investigation to feel the potential.
Eating for optimal performance is a forgotten art, and its such a paradox, because we all crave higher performance - at work, at the gym, health, video games, socially, in bed! et al. But yet we so often forget to evaluate our fuel quality and continue to pump in the regular gas.
There are no magic diets out there - from Atkins to Vegan - non of them will work for us. Because we are each so different. Nutrition is not about following a diet plan or an archetype diet or a paradigm of eating, nutrition is a balance of what we eat, when we eat and how we each eat and the only way to know what our individual diet should be is to create it for ourselves. Through personal investigation we should figure out what makes us perform well.
A good start is to stop eating food that is processed with multiple ingredients. With ingredients we quite often don't know and even if we do, don't really know its individual effect on our performance. Whole foods like meat, vegetables and grains that have not been given or grown with any chemicals/antibiotics is where we should start and build from their.
Trace amounts of rat poison wont hurt us on any given day...we probably wouldn't even know the difference, but what would its effect be over time?
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