Transform your relationship with food and massively boost your energy levels.
I see a lot of people struggling trying to eat healthy. These unhealthy eating habits massively contribute to most of the health problems plaguing our society today: obesity, mental health issues, burnout, and diseases like cancer and heart disease.
All of these problems are affected by the food you put in your mouth on a daily basis. This doesn’t mean that the foods you eat are causing all of these things necessarily, but they play a big role in your overall health.
You could see the food you’re eating as fuel, with your body being the engine.
If you put some fine diesel in your gas tank every time, it's going to work great, and it will last a long time. But if you put bad diesel with dirt and trash into your tank, it will hardly function and it will break down the engine a lot faster.
This is exactly what happens to your body with the food you eat.
When you eat good foods, they provide you with longevity, and you will live a longer and healthier life. Also for the time you are alive, the engine will run much smoother, which will give you more energy, more clarity, and a better life.
But if you fuel yourself with bad quality foods all of the time, no wonder your engine breaks down faster and works far worse. You will live a much shorter and much more miserable life. Your energy levels will be low, which means you will be tired all the time, and your body will look like shit so you won’t have a body that you can be proud of. Also, many hormones that provide happiness are made in the gut, which means eating unhealthy can also lead to depression.
That's why I cringe at people who don’t really care about being healthy and think that it's fine to be fat because you’re going to die anyway.
It’s not about when you die, it’s about how you’re going to live, and life is much better if you’re healthy. You’ll have more energy, thus you can be more productive with your time, and you’ll feel better too.
Shifting your mindset
The reason why you can’t stick to a diet or start eating healthy foods right now, why you can’t control what you eat, and always opt for bad foods is because you’re thinking about food the wrong way.
The easiest way to start eating healthy on a consistent basis, for the rest of your life, is to change your mindset towards food. Let me explain:
You have been made to believe that you should like food based on how it tastes. Just for short-term gratification, to fulfill the craving you feel at that moment. Many people believe that food should taste good, that it should have lots of taste. This is why your diet looks like shit. Because the foods that have lots of good taste are full of refined sugars, salt, and seed oils, which are incredibly detrimental to your health.
If you truly want to eat healthily and do it without any effort, you should stop thinking about the taste of the food. See taste as an irrelevant factor.
Take for example black coffee, for me and probably for most of you, black coffee was horrible at first. It just doesn’t taste good, plus it's very strong. The thing is, that once you get accustomed to the taste of black coffee by consistently drinking it, it becomes more easy to bare.
After a while, it actually tastes nice, and suddenly for the rest of your life, you can drink black coffee and like it. That is exactly why taste is irrelevant because you can get used to things that don’t taste nice at first.
If you don’t like black coffee, if you don't like ginger, but you still want to consume it because of the benefits it gives you, you can just get used to the taste of it, and after that taste won’t be an issue anymore.
How you can shift from taste to feeling.
Now what is the mindset shift you need to make sticking to a lifelong diet the easiest thing in the world? For this trick, you don’t need to alter anything physically, it doesn’t even matter what you eat, whether you’re going to eat vegan, carnivore, omnivore, or keto, doesn’t matter. This works with any diet you can imagine.
Instead of eating food because of how it tastes, only think about how that food makes you feel.
I’ll use an example of what works for me: If I eat a meal loaded with carbs, or some cake, or anything with lots of sugar or lots of seed oils, multiple things happen:
I get really tired immediately after my meal and notice that feeling for the rest of the day, I will get headaches or other unpleasant feelings, and I will be even more hungry once I’m done eating. To be honest, I’m almost certain you notice the same feelings after those meals as I do, but you just never pay attention, most people never do.
But if I eat a healthy meal (preferably for me a low-carb meal, I work best on those) like some eggs, meat, or fruit, I don’t feel that same dip. I actually feel full and satiated, and my energy levels stay stable, they don’t fluctuate between highs and lows throughout the day. This is what effect the food you eat can have on your body. It’s not just about body composition and losing or gaining weight, it’s also about how you feel every day.
Once you become aware of this principle, that the food you eat makes you feel a certain way, you will start chasing the feeling, instead of chasing the taste.
The real pleasure won’t be in the good taste anymore, but the real pleasure will be in the feeling you get after eating it, and for the rest of your day.
I can seriously mess up my day just by eating something unhealthy loaded with carbs or seed oils, so I try to avoid those foods at all costs.
Why this beats every other diet in the long run.
The method you use for weight loss, promoted by cookbooks, influencers, and people in the health and fitness industry is not important at all for multiple reasons:
First, a diet is not a one size fits all. Every person functions differently on different foods, so you should experiment with various foods and diets to see what works for you. You could use some diets as guidelines, but most of them you’re going to have to change up based on how your body responds.
Secondly, none of these diets take into account the principle of feeling, and will all fail because your mindset on food is still based on taste. So following these diets will seem like a chore, instead of something you want to do.
When you shift your mindset towards the feeling you get from food instead of the taste you experience, the diet you pick won’t matter. If the food from a certain diet makes you feel great and produces great results for you, then wonderful.
Derive pleasure from good food by paying attention only to the feeling you get from it, regardless of the taste of the food.
If it isn’t inedible but it makes me feel amazing, I will eat it, regardless of taste.
But what foods make you feel amazing varies from person to person, that is why you're going to need to experiment.
Fuck around and find out.
The important part is finding what works for you, because everybody likes different food, and everyone's body reacts differently to different kinds of food and diets.
If a certain food gives you immense energy and makes you feel great, then eat it, doesn’t really matter what it is.
The only thing that you have to pay attention to is that you don’t eat anymore based on the taste of the food. Taste has to be an irrelevant factor.
The only thing that matters is how you feel after eating your food, so if there’s a specific type of food that makes you feel great, then eat it.
The only catch is, you can’t just read this and believe you’re cured, you need to experience it. You need to connect the dots yourself by experimenting, and consciously thinking about the feeling each food gives you.
Fuck around and find out.
Good luck.