Eli's Comprehensive Guide On Nutrition

Modern food is very frustrating. Just walk into a grocery store and look around. 95% of the "food" inside should not exist – it should not be put in your body. All of this ridiculous garbage keeps us feeling tired and unhealthy.

So much of the general wisdom about what is healthy and what isn't has not been the case for me – some of this I feel is universally wrong, but you'll have to figure that out for yourself. Our bodies all work differently, and we need the discipline to run personal experiments, which I have done for many years.

This is my comprehensive guide on nutrition.

General Rules

Non-optional

1. Enemy number one is SUGAR: eliminate it from your diet, and you will be shredded.
2. If the food is salty, sugary, or preserved, don't eat it.
3. As long as you aren't breaking rule 1 or 2, eat as much as you want: nobody ever overate on potatoes.

Optional

1. Eat twice a day: skip breakfast.
2. Low variety: I eat black beans, homemade bread, and milk for 80% of my calories every day.

After eating super clean for a while, I can just tell when a food is healthy or not by the way it makes me feel right after I eat it. I think it is literally and metaphorically a gut thing.

An extreme version of this is the food coma feeling you might have had after leaving a hibachi grill. For example, you might start to notice that burgers also give you this same feeling, just to a lesser extent.

Specific Foods

If a food is especially hidden or controversial, meaning general wisdom says it is healthy or unhealthy and I think the opposite, I'll denote it with an asterisk: fruit*.

Don't Eat

Frozen foods*

If it's frozen, it is loaded with salt and chemicals to make it keep. This is the sneaky stuff that really frustrates me – you are eating frozen chicken or frozen breakfast food... healthy right? Wrong. It won't bloat you to 300 pounds, but you'll be 10% more sluggish and fat.

Cereal*

Sugary garbage. Not healthy in the slightest.

Fruit*

Another bs food we have been told is healthy. Fruit is nature's candy; eat something else.

Snacks

We all know these are bad for you i.e. chips, cookies, snack cakes, candy, and basically any food that was invented within the past 100 years.

Drinks that aren't milk, water, or coffee

Sodas, juices, and anything that is liquid calories should not be consumed.

Fast food

This is the biggest scam of all. Fast food is super high in calories, engineered to be unfulfilling, and expensive.

Greasy food

Generally avoid burgers, pizza, etc but these are more acceptable every once and while. Beat yourself up for eating sugar – be easy on yourself if you grab a burger.

Do Eat

Bread*

Do not eat grocery store bread. It is fake bread, and I'm not kidding. Make a homemade loaf of bread and tell me that is the same thing you are getting from the store. Bread is literally my favorite source of healthy calories. (Again, if you buy it in a store, we might as well be talking about two separate foods.)

Beans

This is the most underrated food on the planet. Super cheap, super easy to prepare, and they never get old. Get the unsalted cans, so you get to choose how much salt you add.

Milk

Milk is a really great source of calories when your meal just needs that little extra something.

Rice

Remember, preserved rice is not okay. Rice can be kind of a pain to prepare.

Meat

This is great but expensive.

Vegetables

I suppose these are probably good to eat. Honestly, not too many vegetables make it into my diet. No frozen vegetables.

Potatoes

Solid food, easy to prepare.

Pasta

Be careful with pasta, and I wouldn't eat it too often. If your sauce is yummy, it has too much sugar – might as well eat cookies. Sugar is sugar.

Butter

This is my biggest food vice in terms of sugar I'm willingly allowing into my diet. I freaking love butter, especially honey butter. Luckily you can only put so much on one slice of bread.

Cheese

This is a great way to spice your food up. There are so many great and interesting cheeses out there. Get creative and out of your comfort zone.

Eggs

This is a classic but beware eggs will get old fast.

Peanut Butter/Nuts

A great snack.

Caffeine

Pound as much caffeine as you can before 5pm. It is a miracle drug of free energy.

Dark Chocolate

If you need something sweet, do dark chocolate.

Final Thoughts

Eating right is hard, and it isn't totally your fault. There are literally research teams full of PhD super-geniuses whose only job is to figure out the optimal combinations of sugar, fat, color, and texture that will make you pick up their abomination and not put it down. There is a reason the average person is about 20% fatter than the average person 40 years ago, and it has nothing to do with your willpower.

That being said, it is still your problem to deal with. Personally, it pisses me off to think of these greedy corporations trying to clean out my wallet while simultaneously killing me with weaponized sugar – more so, it makes me furious that it's working on most of the people I care about. The anger helps.

I'm not perfect either. I still have some form of sugar for dessert after almost every meal. Hopefully, I'll kick that eventually. I have successfully removed preserved food from my diet entirely. Godspeed. Let me know if I can help in some way.