On the post My Exercise Program – April 2010, I got a great comment from DHammy regarding my statement that I am much more confident in my knowledge of nutrition than I am in fitness.
I’m going to take a shot here and suggest that it would be wise to be much less confident in your knowledge of nutrition. The more I learn the more humbled I become. We all subscribed to the idiotic lipid hypothesis for decades and look how wrong we were. Most of the population still follows that ‘conventional wisdom’.
Here’s what I know and I think you’ll agree to.
1. Processed foods bad.
2. Sugar BAD, including cane sugar, HFCS, etc.
3. White flour, other highly refined carbs, bad.
…
4. Now MAYBE we know the difference between good fats and bad fats now. I think I do. But how can we be certain?Beyond that who the hell knows? I am certainly not confident in how many fruits and vegetables should be in my diet. What are ‘appropriate’ omega-6:omega-3 ratios and does it even matter? I’m sure as hell not confident.
My confidence that I’m nutritionally on the right path comes from a change in approach I took in 2008. No longer would I seek the optimal path, but I’d make slow and steady changes and then observe the results. In the post I’m Not a Vegetarian, I chronicled how I went from one rigid diet to another seeking the optimal path.
Now I know there is no such thing as a nutritionally optimal diet. Rules change. New evidence emerges. Even the location of where you are eating will dictate different rules.
The gradual physique hacking approach gives me the flexibility of always making slight improvements, knowing that I don’t know – nor can I know everything. My nutritional confidence comes from understanding I have a methodology that has worked for me for two years now that is superior to everything I’ve done before.
So I don’t know the perfect Omega 6 to Omega 3 ratio. I tweak my diet one thing at a time and experiment. I believe that by design we are supposed to be healthy and achieving that through diet should not be complicated or require massive amounts of willpower. One of issues with the paleo blogging community in the past year is they have taken something simple and made it overly complex. This may be interesting to a handful of us, but I think it sends the wrong message.
I can’t knock the physique hacking approach. After all, it’s what we all do to some degree or another. We seek to find the foods that give us the most pleasure/results or some balance there and see what happens with out bodies. Your diet looks great in as much as I can tell and it’s very close to my own.
But lets avoid overconfidence in things here. Like I said I certainly don’t know the ideal omega-6:omega-3 ratio. It may not even matter at all or it may be the key to avoiding metabolic syndrome, etc. Are vegetable oils the worst thing one can eat? I don’t know how much fruit is too much or which ones should be avoided, if any. I don’t know if I really ‘need’ to eat seafood since I’m not a big fan of the stuff. I don’t know if eating dairy is ideal although I enjoy that.
We should seek to be humble in our approach. The last thing I want to become is someone preaching their own brand of dogma. At that point we’re no different or better than the drones on TV espousing the low-fat conventional wisdom nonsense.
Maybe my confidence is less about what I know that works and more about how I can see the failure points of other alternatives. Being able to distinguish between the short term and long term effects of a diet is something I’m much better at now.
I’m about 90% of where I want to be. I fully expect that last 10% will be the toughest. I still have lots to learn. Good thing I enjoy this stuff.
I’m curious on what you see as the end goal is for you, MAS. What exactly are you trying to achieve and why?
TigerAl -
I want to be a little bit bigger and a little bit leaner. Why? Cause I’m a dude and we tend to have silly self image issues.