My Foot Is Too Big for the Glass Slipper: A Guide to the Less Than Perfect Life (9 page)

But not any old fat. Clean fats are the healthy fats that give us improved brain power, regulate hormones, help us thrive in stressful situations, and give us pretty hair. Clarified butter, coconut oil, avocado oil, and nut oils are all sources of clean fat, and if you don’t consume enough of them you will be perpetually hungry and never feel satisfied. Consuming too little of the good fats can actually contribute to overeating.

Food should taste good and make us feel good. It’s part of why humans were designed this way. Sex feels good so that we’ll keep the human race going, and food that’s good for us tastes good, so that our bodies will be well nourished and continue to serve us during our (hopefully) long and healthy lives.

If you were raised eating fantastic-tasting pasta everyday of your life, and you associate heaping plates of lasagna with
love, family, friends, and warmth, is a low-carbohydrate diet like Atkins
ever
going to be right for you?

Nope, nyet, never. Because to cut pasta out of your life is to sever you from your happy memories and your feeling of what it is to live a good life.

Eating well is not complicated. A common fallacy about living healthy is that developing proper eating and exercise habits is complex and difficult and we shouldn’t expect to see results right away.

While it’s true that there’s a period of operating in good faith, just as there is when you begin an exercise program, the day you begin to eat better food is the day you start feeling better. That night you’ll probably be able to sleep better. The next day you’ll have more energy. Over all, you’ll feel better.

You also don’t need to initiate some convoluted eating regimen. Just a few small positive changes in your eating habits, combined with a moderate level of routine physical activity, can lead to immediate measurable improvements.

Look at it this way: there are approximately 540 calories in a Big Mac, 450 calories in a medium order of fries, and 310 calories in a large Coke. People routinely order this for lunch and you can wolf it down in a few minutes. That’s 1,300 calories.

Instead of a burger and fries for lunch, try making yourself
a healthy meal replacement shake made with banana, yogurt, maple syrup, almond milk, and protein powder. A maple banana smoothie is just 284 calories and it tastes like dessert. It costs less than an average fast-food lunch, is more convenient, and, of course, much better for you. (Sound like too much work? Even a turkey sandwich is a better choice.)

This one change, giving up the daily ritual of a fast-food lunch, can reduce your caloric intake by over 1,000 calories a day. Since there are 3,500 calories in a pound, just replacing one fast-food meal a day with a healthy protein shake would have you on the road to losing two pounds per week. And that’s if you change nothing else about the way you eat.

And once you start eating better and feeling better your palate changes. The Big Mac that once had you salivating starts to taste like what it is: a highly processed, high-fat, high-sodium, low-grade consumable specifically created to produce what the food designers call “mouth satisfaction,” and nothing more.

Maybe you don’t need to lose weight, or maybe you’ve reached your healthy weight. Or maybe your basic diet of chocolate muffins, Hot Pockets, and cheese pizza has left you feeling icky and irritable from one day to the next.

If your weight is not at issue, your focus is feeding the machine.

The human body thrives when, in combination with daily exercise, it’s fueled with exactly the right number of calories in the proper balance of protein, carbohydrates, and clean good fat, combined with the correct amount of vitamins and minerals.

If you eat at least two servings a day of fruits and vegetables, combined with a lean protein and a moderate amount of fat, on a regular basis throughout the day, your metabolism will adjust to this predictable high-nutrient diet, and you will become a calorie-burning machine.

Pay attention to the eating behaviors of the fittest people you know, they feed themselves all the time (men and woman alike), because their bodies burn the calories, and they need extra nutrition to perform at their best.

Do they eat junk food? Of course they do, but in small doses.

The basic approach is to eat healthily throughout the day, and only when you’re hungry. Lots of fruits, vegetables, and lean protein, and don’t keep eating once you are full. Use basic common sense. Everyone knows eating fast food every day is simply just a bad idea. Most fast-food restaurants are not far from a grocery store; it’s just as easy to run into the market for a turkey sandwich and a banana as it is to grab a Whopper.

When it comes to eating healthy, there is no such thing as a perfect person. We all have cravings for foods that are not so
good for us. We all have at least one thing we love to eat that we would be better off without. But life is for living, and eating our favorite food is part of it.

There’s no reason to banish the foods you love. In fact, you should make a point of eating the foods you love. You should worship the foods you love! Just enjoy them in moderation. If you adore French food, make a ritual of making it once every other Sunday. Make sure your
gateau de crepes
is served with a vegetable and salad and you’re good to go. Giving up the food you love doesn’t work, so don’t even go there.

And while we’re on the subject of French food, why
don’t
French people get fat? Spend a single day in France and the reason will become immediately clear: they take time to enjoy what they eat. They love their cuisine, and they savor it. They take time to shop for it, to prepare it, and to eat it. They eat smaller portions, and don’t snack. Although McDonald’s has invaded France, and the French do love “McDo,” as they call it, for the most part, you won’t find them inhaling the 1,300-calorie Big Mac meal, or anything resembling it, on a regular basis.

Bottom line, your diet is
your
diet, and the foods you love are the foods you love. Just learn to control the quantity, in combination with regular exercise, and include a supplement program if you don’t have the discipline to eat the right amount of protein, vitamins, minerals, and nutrients your body needs to thrive.

Around our house we have an unwritten rule: if you eat healthfully eighty percent of the time, you can go crazy the other twenty percent of the time. The concept came from Paul Chek, an exercise kinesiologist friend, who specializes in high-performance training.

A regular day at Reece-Hamilton World Headquarters looks something like this: we are a smoothie-for-breakfast family. We make ’em all different ways, but the most basic involves frozen berries, a banana, ice, maca (a root plant that helps the immune system), bee pollen, and whey protein. These smoothies are robust, about five hundred calories apiece, and get me through the morning. Lunch might be a stir-fry or a slice of cheese on sunflower bread. Dinner is some kind of animal protein, a green vegetable and/or salad (a recent favorite includes heirloom tomatoes, steamed green beans, and hard-boiled eggs), and maybe some quinoa or sweet potatoes. Generally, bread and fried stuff isn’t part of the routine, but if I go to some great Italian place you can bet that I’m going to enjoy it.

Full transparency: we do have a sweets drawer filled with tubs of dark chocolate–covered almonds, caramels, and toffee. I don’t indulge very often, but my girls are allowed to choose something from the drawer on a daily basis. I believe in moderation, and am not about to turn candy into a forbidden fruit by getting hysterical about it.

Living healthy requires some consistent level of self-control. You need to embrace healthy behaviors at least eighty percent of the time and reduce potentially destructive eating habits to just periodic indulgences or celebrations. It’s easier than you might think. Try to use your favorite treats (those on the unhealthy side of the spectrum) as rewards for positive behaviors. If you like a big, thick cheeseburger with fries, establish this high-fat fix as your reward for not missing a single workout in a full week.

Think about it: you eat twenty-one meals a week, or close to it (not counting snacks), you can easily afford to splurge on a cheeseburger and fries, especially if you have exercised at least an hour a day all week.

Similarly, tell yourself, if I eat ideally for the next three days, the following day I’ll treat myself to my favorite lunch or dinner with a friend. That’s nine good meals to one not so good. This reward system is highly effective and helps keep the more negative elements of your diet under control. And it’s not punishing.

A friend of mine loves cupcakes, cookies, and pies. She could easily organize a religion around lemon poppy seed Bundt cake. Passing up the Snicker display at the checkout counter is easy; she has a much harder time saying no to the chocolate chip on offer at Starbucks. So she’s made a new policy for herself: she can have cookies any time she wants. She just has to make them herself. Since she doesn’t normally keep chocolate chips or pounds of butter in the house, this means she has to make a special trip to the store.

Most of the time going to the store and making the cookies and cleaning up the kitchen doesn’t seem worth the effort. So she passes. This keeps her from lunging for the cookies when she’s bored or tired or hungry for something else. But for her, knowing that she can have those cookies any time is a comfort. Also, without any heroic self-control (which only works for a while), she’s put the kibosh on one of her old habits: buying a pack of chocolate-covered graham crackers and wolfing them down while watching a
House
marathon.

Last year a study was conducted at the New Balance Obesity Prevention Center at Boston Children’s Hospital to find out which diets worked best and why. One of the discoveries of the experiment was that regardless what diet you follow—traditional low calorie, Atkins style, or low glycemic—hyper-processed carbohydrates make you fat and contribute to disease. One of the studies author’s, David Ludwig, said, “If you take three servings of refined carbohydrates and substitute one of fruit, one of beans, and one of nuts, you could eliminate 50 percent of diet-related disease in the United States.”

That statistic is mind-boggling. Especially when you consider that, in the great scheme of things, it’s pretty easy to dump the chips for a handful of raw almonds or pistachios, trade out that scone for a banana with peanut butter, or substitute black beans for fries. Health and longevity, here you come.

The reality is that a lot of us simply don’t want to change our bad habits. And why should we? It feels good to be rebellious, to thumb our noses at all this healthy eating bullshit. And we
should
indulge from time to time. Life is for living, and part of living is saying, on occasion, to hell with it.

Here’s me: I will never give up chocolate. Ever. And I’m not talking about the seventy percent cocoa, one hundred percent organic, fair trade, free range, pure and holy antioxidant rich dark chocolate that’s actually good for you. I’m talking Snickers. I have no other vices (unless you count dropping the occasional f-bomb) and I won’t apologize for my chocolate.

But we all can change one or two things about ourselves. Take a moment for a reality check, look at the way you live your life, and honestly consider what is the one thing you do that is most contrary to a healthier you, and eliminate it.

For most of us, just changing our worst behavior will be life transforming. Are you an extreme coffee drinker? While there may be some genuine health benefits associated with drinking coffee in moderation (reduce depression, lower blood pressure in some people), if you start your day with three or four cups at home, then fire up the coffeemaker the moment you arrive at the office in the morning, then again after you’ve returned from your lunch break, you’re not doing yourself any good.

The result of extreme coffee drinking is fatigue, lack of endurance, loss of muscle tissue, and, over time, more serious health issues (think about what this does to your stomach lining, for starters).

Cut back your coffee to two cups and your life will be transformed. If you’re able to make those two cups in the morning you’ll even have a shot at getting a good night’s sleep.

Late-night snacking is another thing that gets a lot of people into trouble. Popping a few caramels at ten p.m. is an excellent, guaranteed way to pack on the pounds. In fact, I have friend with one of those fast metabolisms who was losing weight during pregnancy. The simple prescription from her doctor? A milkshake at midnight. Sure enough, my friend began drinking a chocolate shake before bedtime and the pounds couldn’t pile on fast enough.

By taking in all those extra calories, every night, night after night, you’re training your body to store fat. You don’t give your body the time it needs to do all of the repairing and restoring it wants to do at night because it’s dealing with calories it doesn’t need. You wake up feeling groggy and unrested, and in the long run, you wake up feeling . . . fat. So just close the kitchen after dinner. Wipe down the counters, turn off the lights, and leave.

The simplest, most effective, single tactic to avoid overeating is to put only the proper quantity of food you need to eat on your plate. If you have cooked more than you need at that moment, before you eat, put the rest in the fridge or freezer
for another day. Once the extra portions are stored away, it’s a lot less tempting, plus more work, to get that extra serving. This is particularly important if you are a good cook, or if you have one in your family. If it tastes great, you are going to want more. That’s just natural human behavior.

Many restaurants build their reputations on offering great value, which generally means you get large portions for a low price. Given that monster portions aren’t going away any time soon, it’s good to get into the habit of sharing with a friend. Or as we discussed with the example of the hamburger, ask your server to put half of the food in a to-go container prior to bringing your food to the table. This behavior of saving half of your meal for another time eliminates temptation, reduces your food cost, increases convenience, and, most important, helps control calories while still allowing you to eat what you enjoy.