Distilling my views on how to eat better into one page is tricky! Nutrition is one of those subjects where people become bizarrely tribal, entire businesses are built around convincing you that one food group is evil, and somebody somewhere is always announcing that the thing you ate for breakfast is slowly killing you.
But here goes…
Food is not just fuel. Obviously, it provides the energy and nutrients that keep us alive, but food is also culture, pleasure, tradition, celebration and one of the ways human beings connect with each other. Some of my favourite memories involve sitting around a table with people I love, eating far too much and talking rubbish for several hours. I have no desire to optimise that out of my life.
My own approach to nutrition also comes with a bias, and I think it is worth being honest about that.
Maybe because I have spent so much of my career working in the fashion and entertainment industries, maybe because so many of my clients have been young women, or perhaps simply because I have seen first-hand how badly our relationship with food can become distorted… I tend to prioritise the relationship somebody has with food alongside whatever physical result they are trying to achieve.
I have seen eating disorders and obsessive dieting mess people up, sometimes quite profoundly. So I have deliberately gone the other way. I want my clients to enjoy eating, enjoy restaurants, travel without carrying Tupperware everywhere and have a slice of cake without feeling they have committed some kind of moral failure.
If that means somebody’s six-pack takes a few weeks longer to appear, I’m absolutely fine with that.
My broad philosophy has always been to train hard and eat well enough to support what your body is being asked to do, rather than train softly and attempt to starve yourself into shape. I think that approach produces better athletes, healthier people and, rather conveniently, usually better-looking bodies too.
Before I give you any nutrition advice, though, I want you to ask yourself a few questions.
- What are your health, fitness and body-composition goals?
- Does the way you currently eat help you feel energetic, healthy and athletic?
- Are most of your meals made from nutrient-dense foods?
- Do you regularly eat far more or far less than your body needs? If so, why?
- How would you describe your relationship with food?
- Is there anything about the way you eat that you already know you should change?
- Where does most of your nutrition knowledge actually come from?
- What two food-related habits could you improve today?
I ask these because, for most generally healthy people, nutrition does not have to be enormously complicated.
You probably already know more than you think.
Eat plenty of minimally processed food. Eat protein. Eat plants. Drink water. Don’t live on biscuits. Don’t get drunk every night. Eat an appropriate amount for your goals.
None of that will sell many diet books, admittedly.
So, if you are overwhelmed by all the competing opinions, here are my general principles.
Eight principles for eating well
1) Build most of your diet around real, nutrient-dense food.
Fruit, vegetables, beans, pulses, whole grains, potatoes, nuts, seeds, eggs, fish, meat, dairy if you tolerate it… foods that broadly still resemble something that once grew, swam, flew or walked around.
You don’t have to eat “clean” 100% of the time. I don’t even particularly like the phrase clean eating because it implies that the opposite is somehow dirty.
Eat well most of the time and enjoy the rest.
2) Eat enough protein.
Protein helps us maintain and build muscle, supports recovery and tends to make meals more satisfying. If you train regularly, having a useful source of protein in most meals is a very sensible habit.
You do not, however, need to turn every snack into a protein-enhanced industrial product.
3) Eat lots of plants — and vary them.
One of the more interesting developments in nutrition over recent years has been the growing appreciation of the gut microbiome and the value of dietary diversity.
A useful target that has become popular is around 30 different plant foods across a week. That can include vegetables, fruit, beans, lentils, whole grains, nuts, seeds, herbs and spices.
Do not turn this into another thing to become neurotic about.
Twenty-seven plants does not mean failure.
The lesson is simply: eat a wide variety of plants.
4) Learn to cook.
This might be one of the most useful health skills you can develop.
The better you become at cooking, the easier it is to eat well without feeling like you are “on a diet”. You start understanding ingredients, flavours and textures, and healthy food stops meaning boiled chicken and depressing broccoli.
Cooking also makes you considerably more useful at dinner parties.
5) Eat an amount appropriate for your goals.
When it comes to gaining or losing bodyweight, energy balance matters.
If you consistently consume more energy than your body uses, you tend to gain weight. If you consistently consume less, you tend to lose it.
That doesn’t mean calories are the only thing that matters. Food quality, protein, fibre, appetite, sleep, hormones, activity and psychology all influence what and how much we eat.
But physics remains annoyingly difficult to negotiate with.
If you want to lose body fat, at some point you need to create an energy deficit.
6) Don’t drink loads of your calories.
Soft drinks, alcohol, sugary coffees and other calorie-dense drinks can add an enormous amount of energy without making you particularly full.
That doesn’t mean you can never have them.
I enjoy a drink.
Just understand what you’re consuming rather than pretending the six cocktails somehow escaped the laws of thermodynamics.
7) Drink water.
Not very exciting advice.
Still good advice.
8) Don’t let nutrition make your life worse.
Your diet should support your life rather than gradually becoming your life.
If you are cancelling dinners with friends, feeling guilty after every meal, compulsively weighing food or becoming frightened of entire food groups, then something has gone wrong — irrespective of how impressive your MyFitnessPal streak is.
Health should make your world bigger.
Not smaller.
What about low-carb diets?
Low-carbohydrate diets can absolutely work for some people, particularly because removing a large category of foods can make it easier to reduce overall calorie intake. But carbohydrates themselves are not inherently fattening.
They are also incredibly useful fuel, particularly if you train hard.
Rice, potatoes, oats, fruit, vegetables, beans and whole grains are not nutritional villains.
Ketogenic diets are an interesting tool and there are legitimate therapeutic uses for them, but I don’t think most healthy, active people need to fear carbohydrates or deliberately push themselves into ketosis.
That said, I’m a fan of intelligent experimentation.
If you are genuinely interested in trying lower carbohydrate or Keto livin’ then try it properly for 12 weeks and pay attention to what happens. Your energy. Training. Mood. Sleep. Hunger. Digestion. Body composition. It’s not for me, but I know loads of people who find their brain just works better this way.
Then decide whether it actually suits you, rather than whether somebody on Instagram said it should.
There is no universally perfect diet because no two humans are identical.
Counting calories & tracking
Tracking food can be extremely useful. It can teach you what is actually in the food you eat, show you where your calories are coming from and expose the difference between what you think you’re eating and what you’re actually eating. For some people, that knowledge is liberating. For others, tracking becomes obsessive very quickly. So know yourself.
I quite like using food tracking as an educational experiment. Do it for a couple of weeks, learn something, then see whether you still need it. If you enjoy tracking indefinitely and it genuinely makes your life easier, great. If it makes you anxious, obsessive or unable to eat normally without consulting your phone first, stop. Tools should serve you. You shouldn’t serve the tool.
My favourite nutrition resource
I really like ZOE.
I’ve used it myself, and while I don’t agree with every single interpretation that comes out of the personalised-nutrition world, I think their podcast and educational material do a truly excellent job. Like everything in this course, though, don’t outsource your critical thinking. Listen. Read. Experiment. Pay attention to how your body responds. Then make up your own mind.
Ultimately, eating well should make you healthier, more energetic, more capable and happier.
If your “perfect diet” is making you miserable, I would argue it isn’t very perfect.
See you tomorrow for supplements…