Intentional Eating

Brandon Baldassi

April 15, 2020

Take control of how you look, feel, think, sleep, and perform

Pretty big claims right off the bat. Cut to the list of magic foods and remedies that you must be missing? Not quite. This is more about coming in-tune with your body and its needs, so you can make informed decisions around foods that can be enjoyed too. Life isn’t a rigid path, and the way you eat shouldn’t be either. This isn’t about diets, meal plans, or food scales. These are more like guiding principles that allow practical and intuitive eating regardless of the current goal. Equipping yourself with an understanding means having the tools to dial things in when you need to perform, tuning things up if you feel off-track, and enjoying yourself along the way.

Why do we eat what we eat?

“Does it really matter what I eat, as long as I get enough protein and balance calories?”

The answer to this really depends on what you are intending to do. There is definitely an energy balance component in your bodyweight, but there are numerous metabolic factors that influence the makeup of your body’s weight. Unless you’re about to weigh in at a competition, you’re probably not really attached to a certain number when you step on the bathroom scale. What you really want is to be leaner, feel healthier, and grow stronger - all of which are going to be more about improving your metabolic health and less about tracking the numbers.

Let’s be clear, I am certainly not issuing a license to eat in an excess - we live in a world of crazy abundance and most of us are fortunate enough have an effortless supply of tasty at our disposal. The thing is that your body learns to do a pretty good job of self-regulating the calories it consumes when it’s working well and what it consumes is proper stuff. The goal, then, is to optimize function, provide proper inputs, and let millions of years of evolution take care of the rest.

The gut

Our gut forms our most complex interface with the outside world - yes, our digestive tract can be considered the outside world (feel free to picture it if you need to). A huge population of living stuff makes up our microbiome and interacts with whatever gets to pass through. As a result, the elaborate ecosystem that makes up our gut is largely responsible for what happens to the food we put in our body.

The gut also serves a ton of other important functions - like producing and regulating hormones and neurotransmitters. These compounds go on to dictate everything from key metabolic health factors such as insulin sensitivity, glucose tolerance, fat storage, and appetite, all the way to mood, cognition, impulses, and cravings. This means that the nature of the stuff you put in your body really matters - not just the quantity.

Nothing in the body works alone, and our digestive system is no different. Inflammation and dysfunction in the gut is going to be associated with inflammation and dysfunction in nearly all associated systems too - and as far as our body’s concerned, everything is connected. Whether it’s managing stress or anxiety, joint pain and muscle soreness, or just not performing the way you think you should; the gut plays a role, and you can almost certainly make improvements in this one area that will benefit all other outcomes.

As of now, managing the health of this complex system may seem like an overwhelming task. We all have more than enough to worry about, and adding the trillions of microbes in our gut to this list is just not realistic. Or is it?

Feed the gut first

With gut health in mind, identifying what to avoid eating may often be more important than choosing some healthy food start eating.

For most practical purposes, approaching gut health can be boiled down to doing two things:

Eliminate the sources of trouble
Enjoy the sources of nourishment

Eating for health and performance is often less about adding some special ingredient, and more about avoiding certain irritating foods. It’s easy to take for granted the way we usually feel is the way that we have to feel, and most of us have been eating certain problem foods for so long that it’s become part of our normal way of being.

Awareness is the critical first step in identifying which foods might be causing low level problems and taking away from your (gut) health, and since the effects of are often much more subtle than drinking a glass of expired milk, we need to recalibrate our sensitivity to our body and the feedback it provides. From there, it becomes easier to cut through the noise and get a feel for what’s really going on. Here’s how to do it.

Audit your eating with Ten-day trials

Do your own experiments. While it is possible to get any number of lab tests to investigate ‘food sensitivities’, I’m confident that you are perfectly capable of conducting your own experiments around food. Here’s how:

Pause for a moment and take note of how you feel. Make a self-assessment of your motivations for why and when you eat
Identify 1 or 2 suspected problem items in your diet that appear most frequently in your current day to day (the list at the end of the article can be a great place to start)
Using the Notes app on your phone (or better yet, an actual notebook), make a record of how you feel before, during, and hours after you eat. Assess any problem areas, such as sleep, energy, enthusiasm, muscle and joint soreness, digestion, etc.
Commit to eliminating the item(s) for 10 days, without substituting a new food item (for now). If the item usually makes up a fair portion of your foods, make up the difference with substitutions from the list, such as extra white rice, meat, or olive oil
Take note of how you feel in all of the same areas, as well as anything else you may notice
After 10 days, review your notes. If any of the problem areas have improved, great! You are probably onto something. Leave the item out, pick another, and test again. If you have not been able to notice anything, reintroduce and repeat step III

Test and retest, rinse and repeat. It’s really that simple, and the cumulative results can be quite significant. Keep in mind that it may take up to two weeks to notice significant changes as the gut needs this period of time to recover.

Optimizing function

If we use the analogy of physical training, then fasting is to the gut what rest days are to your the rest of your body. A heavy workout is often followed by a period of recovery, with regular rest days and deloads. Rarely will you train as heavy as possible day-after-day-after-day. Eventually, your body’s pleas for recovery will become difficult to ignore, and rest becomes imperative for repair and a stronger return. Your digestive system is no different. It’s tasked with dealing with everything thrown at it and extracting enough of the important stuff for you to survive. But surviving is a low goal to set for most of us in the modern day. Thriving is a much more realistic and attainable goal, especially if we want to live to our full potential.

Fasting and Time Restricted Feeding

Just like muscles and joints, the gut tissue needs an opportunity to recover from wear and tear. The amount of recovery needed largely depends on the amount of ‘heavy lifting’ it’s been doing. Fasting is effectively a ‘deload’ period for your gut. Just as a regular scheduled deload period serves to allow the body to recover and recuperate for consistent high-quality training, fasting allows the digestive system a chance to heal, recover, and recalibrate so it can do its job without compromise.

For practical purposes, fasting means some period of 24 hours or more without consuming any calories, just water and sea salt. My favourite way to implement a 24hr fast is enjoying a meal Saturday evening, and waiting until Sunday dinner before having my next meal (no need for an all-you-can-eat sushi binge after a fast). It’s basically a quick reset on the system, and it helps boost metabolic health while clearing the sugar-fuelled bacteria that can really disrupt the gut. Sugar cravings and the inclination to frequent snacking between meals may be a tell for this, since it’s often this bacteria in the gut that needs a snack more than we do, and it signals the brain accordingly (see gut-brain axis). Fasting can prevent this bacteria from thriving, while helping us build metabolic flexibility.

We discussed the extensive roles of the gut earlier, so its no surprise that your body is willing to drive considerable resources towards maintaining its function. Without any “off” time, resources put towards things such as repairing muscle tissue or fighting off a flu will be chronically limited, and our body will struggle to keep up with repair in other areas. The body is amazing in its abilities, but its resources are finite. Lessening the burden through fasting is a great tool in your nutritional toolbox - use it for maintenance and improvement of the key metabolic factors associated with health and performance.

Time restricted feeding is a quasi fast that many people use daily. By the numbers, it looks like eating for 8h of the day leaving 16h without calories. The amount of time you spend fasted is basically proportional to the benefits for health and longevity, so use longer or shorter fasted periods depending on how you feel. For me, it usually looks like waking up and going about my day before eating a few hours later. Sub a litre of water with salt for ‘breakfast’ and finish your last meal a few hours before you sleep. It’s simple, and can serve to maintain many of the benefits of longer fasted periods. It can also support regular training quite well, considering you will still feel well fed around your evening training sessions.

When to eat what?

Like I said, these are all tools to be used for a specific job. Heavy and frequent training is going to require more food compared to days where you move less, so adjust accordingly based on how you feel. Not only will your body look for things like carbohydrates in response to physical exertion, the metabolic response to them is also greatly improved when paired with exercise. Because of this, I tend to eat more carbs around strenuous activity and less otherwise. In addition, rest days with low intensity physical activity or deload periods are great candidates for longer fasted intervals. All of these strategies help to promote the metabolic health we are after to feel and perform better than yesterday.

What to eat

We’ve come pretty far without even mentioning any particular foods or diets. In reality, all of the principles we’ve already discussed will guide you towards health and performance regardless of your food preferences. However, there are definitely some notoriously problematic foods that are worth experimenting with/without right off the bat. Here are some ideal candidates for 10-day trials, with accompanying alternatives :

Experiment without:

Grains

Sugar

Fried foods and seed oils (canola, sunflower, peanut, etc)

Dairy

Eggs

Beans *

Nightshades *

Soy

Peanuts

Coffee

Certain fruit like bananas and tomatoes*

Certain veg like cucumbers, broccoli, cabbage *

*see notes to learn more about cooking options

Instead, try:

Olives and olive oil

Avocado and avocado oil

Coconut, coconut kefir and coconut oil

Grass-fed butter

Walnuts

Wild caught seafood

Grass-fed pasture raised meats (incl. organ meats)

Mushrooms

Pickled and fermented veg

White rice

In-season fruits like black berries or raspberries

Oats

Ground flax, chia, hemp

There is obviously going to be plenty of nuance here, so try your own 10-day trials and cook some new combinations to compare how you feel. Food should taste great and make you feel just as good, so respect the feedback you get from your body.

Certain foods like beans or greens can be prepared in ways which minimize the trouble they cause the gut, and like milk, individual tolerance to any food can vary widely. Keep things simple and try to source local meats and produce when possible - it’s great to know where your food comes from. As always - test, retest, and learn about your unique responses to foods. Don’t take my word for any of this!

If you’ve made it this far, you’re now equipped with the fundamental principles and perspective needed to optimize health and performance through eating. Whether it’s leaning out, lifting more, or feeling happier and healthier, you’ve got the tools - use them as needed.

In the future, I will be sharing some of my favourite meals built around everything discussed in this article. In the mean time, check out some of the resources below to to take a deeper dive into the topics discussed here.