Why We Can't Eat Right

Quote of the day--from Chad Waterbury, via Alwyn Cosgrove, from this TMuscle article: 

If I told you to consume one gram of protein per pound of body weight, fibrous vegetables, water, green tea, 12 grams of fish oil, and spread those out over the course of six meals each day, you'd be anything but impressed. But if I held you in captivity and forced you to do that every day for a month, you'd be blown away by the results.

Mike Boyle said something similar at a Perform Better conference I attended a few months ago--the principles of diet are so bloody simple.  So simple.

What screws us up?  I discussed some of the theories here--one that I've been thinking about lately is the "hormonal argument" which occurred to me while I was talking to a female friend who's on fertility drugs.

"I'm INSANE on these things, Andrew," she said.  She had gone to her doctor that day, who had told her that the whole POINT of hormones was to help you override your rational impulses.  No one, I know from experience, rationally wants a baby:  they're expensive, time-consuming, energy-sucking, distracting little beasts.  This ain't the 1700's, when another baby meant another pair of hands to work the land--no, for a good eighteen years or so, babies are a liability.  

So people have to want one irrationally:  they're cute as hell, they smell good, they make cute sounds, it's a wonder to watch them grow and learn and start to look and act like people in your family.  For those of us who have had kids, hormones override everything else.

It's that same hormonally-driven survival-of-the-species impulse that makes it so tough to abide by Waterbury's absurdly simple rules.  Their function is to make us do things our conscious mind doesn't want us to do.

If we're trying to lose fat, what's to be done?

Well, as far as diet goes, the fewer options, the better:  I've never really tried South Beach or the Zone or Raw Food or Veganism or really any diet with more than a paragraph's worth of 'rules.'  I know people who swear by elaborate 'systems', but I like a system that tells me very simply whether something I'm jamming down my gullet is thumbs-up or thumbs-down so that when I'm contemplating something at an hors-d'ouevres table, I know immediately if I'm on or off my 'diet.'  

But the other thing is to stay armed against irrationality by, yes, that boring old rule, eating frequently enough so you avoid the mighty crash that tells your body to eat the whole pizza with extra anchovies. 

Which is a guideline that's actually listed in the rules above.  Imagine that.