Arvind Ashok: Fitness & Nutrition Simplified

In the first two parts, we saw the poor trans­la­tion between goals (fat loss or strength gain, for exam­ple) and the work­outs pre­scribed — weights and car­dio. In this, I want to tackle nutri­tion. The issue with nutri­tion is not at the gym, but at a broader, sys­temic level. There are a lot of dif­fer­ent kinds of research, and var­i­ous ‘camps’ out there about nutri­tion, almost all con­tra­dict each other. This is true for work­outs as well, but stuff just starts to go crazy when it is about food.

The food pyra­mid: Apart from rice, the bot­tom layer — the major­ity of the diet — is the least nutri­tious and most toxic.

Let’s look at the food pyra­mid, for exam­ple. The most sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of the diet comes from bread and cereal grains, while veg­eta­bles are of seem­ingly lesser impor­tance. Meat and dairy prod­ucts are even less impor­tant. This is some­thing I dis­agree with. Even if we break away from the food pyra­mid, con­ven­tional wis­dom still fol­lows sev­eral other points, like

• Fats are ‘bad’, and so the diet is over­loaded with carbs. A typ­i­cal macronu­tri­ent split is 70/15/15 (carbs/protein/fat) — irre­spec­tive of the per­son or their goal. While in fact, fats are amongst the most nutri­tious foods avail­able, and the pre­ferred source of fuel for our body. And processed carbs are amongst the most noto­ri­ous cul­prits in a lot of dis­eases today, like meta­bolic syn­drome.
• A lot of high toxin foods are pre­scribed and con­sumed. For exam­ple, veg­etable oils, which imbal­ance your omega-3 to omega-6 intake ratio. This causes a lot of prob­lems, this study is an exam­ple. Reduc­ing omega-6 intake is a must, espe­cially since veg­e­tar­i­ans will find it hard to increase their omega-3 intake (as it comes from fatty fish — algae is the only avail­able source for vegetarians).

• Post-workout nutri­tion (for exam­ple), with ade­quate amounts of pro­tein and good car­bo­hy­drates has been shown to aid in recov­ery and max­i­miz­ing results. But con­cepts like nutri­ent tim­ing are not paid much importance.
• Sim­i­larly, issues like inflam­ma­tion, gut health, hor­monal dis­or­ders etc. are treated after the fact, when in fact they can be addressed by bet­ter nutrition.
• And there’s just too much con­flict­ing infor­ma­tion out there.

And I do con­cede that it is scary to exper­i­ment with one­self. It takes a small amount of naïveté to do that. In my per­sonal jour­ney, I met Raj Gan­path last year who had a very sim­i­lar dis­po­si­tion. And together, we have a work­ing frame­work. And while we obvi­ously expect new ideas to come and change a few things around, and keep us on our toes, eat­ing real food will always be a core part of our prescription.

• Eat real food — veg­eta­bles, fruits, meat, dairy prod­ucts, seafood, tubers.
• use safer oils — coconut oil, but­ter, ghee. Drop veg­etable oils.
• Cook food so that it retains all, or at least most, of its nutrients.
• Dont count calo­ries. If you eat real food, your body will take care of por­tion control.
• Diver­sity — eat a plethora of things.
• Main­tain your san­ity — cheat once in a while. It is bet­ter to be com­pli­ant 80% of the time for the rest of your life, than 100% com­pli­ant for 6 months.

With that, we do have a resource for you guys — Eat Real Food — a blog for recipes, based on our frame­work. We have three ladies help­ing us out with this as well. You might see a lot of sim­i­lar­i­ties between this and what the likes of Mark Sis­son, Robb Wolf, the Jaminets rec­om­mend — our goal is to take the best of all these things out there, and adapt it so that it is easy for Indi­ans (includ­ing veg­e­tar­i­ans) to fol­low. Our cur­rent idea is to have about 3 recipes a week — some will be entrees, some will be desserts, some might be a side-dish. Hope­fully, this will be the last diet you will ever be on!