D - Diet

A diet is not something you try out for a few weeks to see if you lose weight. A diet needs to be a set of principles based around food.
It is how we eat and why we eat.

Some people take their approach to eating very seriously - I have seen "extremist" vegans and paleos and many in between.

Ultimately, I think we need to adopt a common sense approach to "diet"
How did that meal make you A) look B) feel and C) perform
A little bloated from that order of general Tso's chicken last night? Maybe not the best food choice. Or maybe it was something else - this is rarely super straight forward until you start to really gain control of this self-experiment that is diet. Track your food intake and outcomes. Eliminate certain things that may bother you (Paleo diet says grains, legumes and dairy are difficult to digest for most humans - eliminate them for 30 days and then re-introduce one at a time to see what effect it has on your body).

I look at food a few ways...
1) How beneficial is it vs. how harmful is it?
- a food like oysters has many nutrients that are hard to get from other sources and little negatives unless they are high in metallic content which seems rare from research studies and biochemists.
- a food like quinoa has many exciting benefits the media loves reporting on, but I do not trust it. In listening to biochemists (the guys who really understand the effect these foods have on our body), quinoa is a saponifier, meaning it may cause little holes in our digestive system... without going too far down the rabbit hole let's just say I generally avoid it as the benefits do not seem to be overwhelming.

2) How fresh is it? Furthermore, how well sourced is it (wild caught, grass fed/finished, pasture raised). This isn't always easy to determine or read through the lines or even find (living in NYC - although there are a ton of great options). One has to get good at reading labels (or eating things with no labels :) and the more you know the easier these decisions should become.

Be careful what you listen to when it comes to food. There is a lot of bad information out there. The whole low fat, heavy on the "hearthealthywholegrains", cholesterol is bad for you, eggs are dangerous... so many myths out there - I will have to delve deeper on these in an upcoming post. Start reading and making up your own mind.