Arvind Ashok: Fitness & Nutrition Simplified

I’ve never been crazy over­weight, I’ve never tried to lose 50kgs. But I have had prob­lems, truck loads of them, from try­ing to get in shape, to los­ing that last bit of stub­born belly fat, to improv­ing my sta­mina lev­els. The first thing I was told was “eat less, exer­cise more”. And am sure this piece of sh***y advice is given to almost every­one out there, by arm-chair experts and so-called nutritionists/dieticians. Unfor­tu­nately, this is not a work­able, long-term solu­tion. The rea­son peo­ple hate the word “diet” is because it is asso­ci­ated with ideas like under-eating, while in fact the dic­tio­nary defines it as “the kinds of food that a per­son, ani­mal, or com­mu­nity habit­u­ally eats”. While calorie-restricted diets will show weight loss (remem­ber this) ini­tially, the results will plateau soon enough. And most peo­ple will gain back the weight that they lost in a lot less time than it took them to lose it in the first place. There is a sim­pler solu­tion out there, and that’s the point of this post.

Why Crash Diets Do Not Work

But before we get there, let’s under­stand lit­tle bit more about the prob­lem. Let’s say “X” weighs 100kgs, and loses 20kgs mag­i­cally, within a short span of time. Now, at 80kgs, his energy expen­di­ture (mainly a sum of inter­nal heat pro­duced and exter­nal work) is obvi­ously lower than what it used to be at 100kgs. But here’s the deal — X’s energy expen­di­ture will be lower than “Y”, a per­son who’s been at 80kgs for the last few years and is at his nat­ural weight, and has never had the same weight issues as X. Evo­lu­tion has made this so — X just lost a bunch of fat stores (which is vital to sur­vival, from an evo­lu­tion­ary point of view) and so, in these tough times (or so the body thinks), the body reduces its over­all energy expen­di­ture. It is now a lot more fuel effi­cient, as some quotes from the paper linked point out.

Main­te­nance of a 10% reduc­tion in body  weight is asso­ci­ated with a 20–30% decline in energy expended in  phys­i­cal activity

The decrease in energy expen­di­ture is not due to reduced time  spent in phys­i­cal activity

And while there are a bunch of con­cepts here, one I would like to intro­duce is the hor­mone lep­tin. Lep­tin, sim­plis­ti­cally speak­ing, tells the body to eat less and exer­cise more! Lep­tin is pro­por­tional to the amount of body fat — so fat peo­ple will have higher lev­els of lep­tin than thin peo­ple. Isn’t that an awe­some sys­tem? If you are fat, the body sends a sig­nal to eat less and work­out more. Unfor­tu­nately, we screw up this sig­nalling by doing a vari­ety of bad habits. Cir­cling back, los­ing a lot of weight low­ers lep­tin cir­cu­la­tion, and cou­pled with a much more reduced energy expen­di­ture, it basi­cally leads to us putting on the weight again! The body tries to restore lep­tin cir­cu­la­tion to pre­vi­ous high lev­els, by increas­ing body fat con­tent. Stephan Guyenet puts this very succinctly,

The lep­tin sys­tem is a clas­sic neg­a­tive feed­back loop: the more fat mass accu­mu­lates, the more lep­tin is pro­duced. The more lep­tin is pro­duced, the more the hypo­thal­a­mus acti­vates pro­grams to reduce hunger and increase energy expen­di­ture, which con­tin­ues until fat mass is back in the opti­mal range. Con­versely, low fat mass and low lep­tin lead to increased hunger and energy con­ser­va­tion by this same pathway

To sum­ma­rize the problem,

• starv­ing your­self is a dumb idea
• con­stant hunger crav­ings, being irri­tated due to insuf­fi­cient food — bah!
• dras­tic weight loss by a crash diet can­not be sustained
• And this is weight loss, not fat loss! You are los­ing mus­cle and fat indiscriminately.
• In fact, the sure-fire way to gain body fat in pro­por­tion to lean body mass is to cut calories!

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Well Then, What Is The Solution?

Sim­ple — eat real food! Eat Real Food is a nutri­tional tem­plate that Raj and I are work­ing on to help peo­ple with var­ied dietary back­grounds (veg­e­tar­i­ans, meat-eaters, peo­ple with health issues like dia­bet­ics, peo­ple over 60, kids.. you get the idea)  meet their health and fit­ness goals — whether it is gain­ing weight, los­ing weight, main­tain­ing weight or some­thing else. While it is a work-in-progress, it is cer­tainly some­thing you can use today and see great results for your­self. All our clients fol­low this tem­plate, and hey, we still have clients, so it looks to be working.

What Is Our Goal?

• It must be pos­si­ble to lose fat (or main­tain weight or put on mus­cle) in a slow, healthy, and sus­tain­able fashion
• It must not involve delib­er­ate calo­rie restriction
• It must not have any detri­men­tal effects to long-term health of the individual
• It must not involve calo­rie counting
• Or keep­ing track of macro-nutrient ratios
• The food must be tasty and deli­cious. A spe­cial shout-out to three ladies, who are help­ing me and Raj cre­ate awe­some foods.
• There should be enough room for error and indulgences
• To be the last diet you will ever be on. Seriously.

Like I men­tioned, this is a work-in-progress, one that we will con­tinue to refine over the years. Here’s the gist of it,

Eat veg­eta­bles, meat, seafood, eggs, dairy, fruit, and nuts. Stay away from junk (processed food, of any kind), grains, legumes, veg­etable oils and sugars.

There’s noth­ing mind-blowing, or new about it. In fact, it is kinda old school. But hey, it works! And while we don’t have long-term data on it, I am will­ing to bet my rep­u­ta­tion that it will out­per­form stu­pid s*** like the food pyramid.

A larger list, from our web­site, follows.

Eat

• Veg­eta­bles - Any and all veg­eta­bles. Fresh or frozen only. No veg­etable oils, store-bought veg­etable juices etc.
• Fruits - Any and all fruits (in lim­ited quan­ti­ties). Fresh or frozen only. No fruit juices, jams, extracts etc.
• Starches - Pota­toes, sweet pota­toes, yams, white rice, taro, tapi­oca, beets, squashes, carrots.
• Meat - Any and all meats, prefer­ably pasture-raised, grass-fed.
• Seafood — Any and all seafood, prefer­ably local and wild-caught.
• Eggs - Any and all eggs, prefer­ably free-range and organic.
• Dairy - Whole milk, whole milk yogurt, full fat kefir, heavy cream, full fat sour cream, fresh whipped cream, all unprocessed cheeses includ­ing paneer and halumi cheese.
• Soy (in fer­mented form) - Whole cooked edamame beans, miso, tem­peh, natto, and soy sauce (in lim­ited quantities)
• Nuts - Any and all nuts (in lim­ited quantities)
• Dried fruit – Any and all dried fruit (in lim­ited quantities)
• Oils - Coconut oil and butter/ghee as cook­ing oils. Olive oil as dress­ing or for mak­ing room tem­per­a­ture condi­ments (mayo etc.)
• Spices - Any and all spices
• Sug­ars - Honey and raw sugar (in very lim­ited quantities)
• Update: Legumes and beans – Any and all legumes, lentils and beans
• Oth­ers - Cocoa, raw almond milk, ten­der coconut, coconut milk, coconut water, whey pro­tein (for athletes)

Don’t eat

• Grains – Any and all grains (except rice) In case this is not clear, no pasta/bread!
• Legumes and beans – Any and all legumes, lentils and beans
• Indus­trial seed oils & Veg­etable oils – Any and all oils made from veg­eta­bles includ­ing canola oil (except olive oil)
• Processed foods/Junk – All. Any­thing from a box.
• Fla­vored non­sense – All. Any­thing that is flavored/colored etc.
• Low-fat/Non-fat crap – All. Any­thing that has fat stripped off artificially.

An update: Again, this is a work-in-progress, and while some of these foods will fall into a gray area, rather than a strict no-no, you sim­ply have to wait for it. For exam­ple, prop­erly prepar­ing grains, legumes, lentils will make them a bet­ter food than in raw form. We will be updat­ing what this process is, over the next few weeks.

We are well aware that while some peo­ple will be ready and pre­pared to take the plunge and fol­low our tem­plate, cer­tain aspects might be very hard for peo­ple who’ve been eat­ing this way for 50+ years. One of our goals is to allow for these prac­tices and indul­gences, and while it is near impos­si­ble to make every­body happy, we are deter­mined to get close.

A good way to give this diet a shot would be as close to max­i­mal com­pli­ance as pos­si­ble for a month to 6 weeks. After that, scale it back down to what­ever com­pli­ance level you want. A 80/20 would be solid! Choco­late malts, deep fried chicken, tons of mex­i­can food — some of that stuff is pretty darn deli­cious. I know you will sneak in some of that — as long as you are eat­ing real food for the major­ity of the time, you will be mov­ing in the right direction.

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Eat Real Food!? That’s It? How? Why?

Over the course of the fol­low­ing weeks, I will detail how and why we came up with these list of foods, why this method­ol­ogy is supe­rior, and why this will be the last diet you will ever need to be on, and what is ideal/optimum, as well as how the rec­om­men­da­tions will vary based on spe­cial needs. But briefly,

Real Food = Clean Food. Shoo To Tox­ins!

Cereal grains, sugar, processed foods, and indus­trial seed oils are extremely toxic to us. Toxic need not apply only to rat poi­son and the like. If water in high doses can be toxic, you shouldn’t be sur­prised that grains, with an in-built defense mech­a­nism against preda­tors (you), are toxic at a much lower dose. Cereal grains have sev­eral defense mech­a­nisms that include

pro­duc­ing tox­ins that dam­age the lin­ing of the gut;

pro­duc­ing tox­ins that bind essen­tial min­er­als, mak­ing them unavail­able to the body; and,

pro­duc­ing tox­ins that inhibit diges­tion and absorp­tion of other essen­tial nutri­ents, includ­ing protein.

Issues like inflam­ma­tion, insulin resis­tance, impaired lep­tin sig­nalling, dis­rupted thy­roid func­tion­ing — the list is pretty long — can all be tied to tox­ins from foods that we con­sume daily. When you EatRe­al­Food, you elim­i­nate these tox­ins from your diet!

Happy Gut = Happy You

All dis­ease begins in the gut — Hippocrates

Eat­ing toxic food leads to poor gut health, which in turn leads to a host of prob­lems. Research strongly indi­cates that gut health is a major fac­tor in over­all health, and bad gut health con­tributes to a wide range of dis­eases includ­ing dia­betes, obe­sity, rheuma­toid arthri­tis, autism spec­trum dis­or­der, depres­sion and chronic fatigue syndrome.

By help­ing you restore the integrity of your gut, by eat­ing real food, your health will improve dra­mat­i­cally. All this with­out doing a cleanse diet — imag­ine that! Note: Cleans­ing diets are a joke/scam. They are prob­a­bly the worst things you can do for your gut. But that’s another post, just go with me on it for now.

Keep That Inflam­ma­tion At Bay

While inflam­ma­tion is a nec­es­sary and invalu­able mech­a­nism of the human body, chronic lev­els of inflam­ma­tion is extremely harm­ful. In fact, get­ting fat and obese, dia­betes, auto-immune dis­or­ders — all of these can be tied to chronic inflam­ma­tion. And it also wors­ens the dan­ger of heart dis­ease! So, keep­ing inflam­ma­tion below chronic lev­els is extremely impor­tant. I know am sound­ing like a bro­ken record but eat­ing real food does this. It is almost like magic!

Besides that,

No More Pesky Calo­rie Counting

Your body is pretty smart. When the food qual­ity is improved, your body will rec­og­nize when it is full. So, you will eat when you are hun­gry and stop when you are full. This is because your hor­mone sig­nalling are all work­ing as they should, when you are eat­ing well. Eat­ing till sati­a­tion means you stop eat­ing when you are about 80–90% full. It does not mean stuff­ing your face, nor does it mean you should remain hungry.

Load Up on ‘em Nutri­ents!

Real food is nutri­ent dense. This keeps you full, ensures you get all the nutri­ents you need, and remain healthy. Sim­ple. While some sup­ple­men­ta­tion of vit­a­mins and min­er­als might be required on a case-by-case basis (veg­e­tar­i­ans, for exam­ple, might need fat-soluble vit­a­mins), if you eat a vari­ety of foods, you prob­a­bly dont need to worry about defi­cien­cies.

Screw ‘em Macro-Nutrient Ratios

There are detailed stud­ies and anec­do­tal evi­dence of var­i­ous cul­tures with high-carb diets, and high-fat diets. Pacific islanders with peren­nial six-packs eat a high-carb diet rich in starchy veg­eta­bles, while the Inuit (used to, before west­ern food influ­ence set in) eat a 80% fat diet! And yet, they are extremely healthy. While some peo­ple will need to pay atten­tion to macro-nutrient ratios (ath­letes, for exam­ple), if your focus is health, just stick to eat­ing real food and you will be fine.

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To sum­ma­rize,

Eat Real Food, and the rest will take care of itself

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Alright, am done here, for now. Now it is your turn to start eat­ing real food. I know we are right, but don’t just take my word for it. Try it out for a month. What do you have to lose? What do you have to gain? You can thank me after a month, but for now, it’d be cool if you could share this with your friends! Appre­ci­ate it.