Nutrition Hacks - Weaning Off Foods

Food is an addiction. You laugh at that statement now, but after a session of critical thinking, you start to realize just how intense your attachment to food really is. Try saying no to a food you enjoy eating every day and pay attention to the mental dilemma and anxiety you start to feel all over your body and into your very soul as you prolong the time you deny yourself of it. Then notice the calm and joy you feel once you give your body what you want. That's addiction my friends.

Source: breathelhc.org

Food can be / is just as addictive as hard drugs. The only reason the general population doesn't talk about it in such a light so intensely is because the harmful and detrimental effects aren't necessarily as pronounced and aren't readily seen right away, and because food is so deeply integrated into our human psyche, so essential to who we are and life as a whole, that those who we would need to perpetuate the idea of denial of great tasting foods enjoy food themselves....and are therefore blind to the severity and importance of the topic.

To conquer nutrition is to conquer your greatest enemy........yourself. Your body is so perfectly engineered to store calories and make you lazy that it can completely incapacitate you, crush your soul, come up with every justifcation in existance, and even create alternate realities in your mind to make you believe that eating that cupcake is a matter of life or death and /or not a big deal.

Food is also engineered to be addictive. The ingredients put into many of today's processed foods are made specifically to make you crave them more and thus eat more. Said ingredients make your taste buds go absolutely ballistic and fast track you on your way to a broken diet. With such options available in excess all around us, along with the discussed propensity of the human body to want to store as many calories as possible, we are set up for nutritional health failure and a poor bodily aesthetic.

While many people I know are focused on taking instagram photos of the weights they lift and the workouts they do as though that were the most important aspect of a fitness routine, I've always been on team nutrition (I wonder if there's a hashtag for that on Twitter?). I've always felt that the road most necessary to travel on your way to fitness goal accomplishment is the road of nutrition. Unfortunately, it's also the hardest and scariest road to travel.



Pictured Here: EVERY FREAKING GIRL ON MY FACEBOOK FEED
Source: 24.media.tumblr.com
 

But fear not fitness warriors. I've played this game for a long time. I've come up with a plan to every so often make a post on things that I've for years called "nutrition hacks". What is a nutrition hack you might ask? I'm glad you asked that, and if you didn't you should have....because they're great.

A nutrition hack is a way of doing something centered around your nutrition that can be either mental or physical that forces or tricks your mind to stay on track towards your fitness goals, and allows you to eat (at least mostly) clean. I've developed a bunch of these over the years that have worked for me, and I'd like to start sharing them with you. So let's get into my first nutrition hack!


WEANING FOODS OUT OF YOUR DIET

So you've woken up one morning and told yourself, "TODAY'S THE DAY! I'M GOING TO CHANGE MY LIFE AND EAT HEALTHY FOREVER!". The first day goes by pretty well, and you start posting statuses and telling all your friends how your life has miraculously become better.
And then your body realizes what you're doing and you're suddenly face deep into a bucket of fried chicken with chocolate syrup and a side of fries and a large soda.

Mmmmmmmmm....
Source: robynsonlineworld.com

 

So what happened? Why can't you just change the way you eat automatically? There are a lot of analogies I can use here, but one of my favorites is the one where I compare one's eating habits to a wagon being pulled down a steep hill.

I don't know if you did this as a kid, but imagine yourself being pulled really fast down a steep hill by someone as you're sitting in a wagon. As you get to the bottom, imagine that person trying to turn the wagon to the right or left. If the person suddenly pulled the wagon you're sitting in at a sharp right angle as you continue to roll down the hill, you will fly off of the wagon and crash into the ground. Conversely, if that person slowly started to turn, you would stay in the wagon and eventually have a smooth stop at the bottom of the hill.



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It's the same with nutrition. If your body is used to outrageously tasty high sodium, high sugar, and high fat foods, it's going to be calibrated to expect those foods all the time, especially if you do the same things every day that exposes you to those foods. The way to combate this in my opinion, is to KEEP eating those foods in the same quanitities, while decreasing, i.e. weaning, the amount you intake every so often and never increasing back up to the original amount you ate before decreasing to the amount you're currently eating.

The amount you decrease the food(s) you're trying to kick and the period you choose as the time you will again decrease the amount is arbitrary and completely up to you. Choose a time period you know you can stick to and an amount that you don't think will make you go insane and relapse back into gorging yourself with said food.

Before I started bodybuilding, I would eat Wendy's about 3 times a week.....because it's absolutely delicious. Once I started to get heavily invested into bodybuilding though, I realized that the food I was getting at Wendy's was obviously not going to help me attain the bodily aesthetic I was questing for. Had I abruptly stopped eating Wendy's all together however, I would go into withdrawls and, when I did go back, order more of the food to compensate for the amount I quit eating all of a sudden (such is the way of the human mind).

Realizing this, I decided to CONTINUE eating Wendy's 3 times a week for at least two weeks....even if I didn't want to. The fact that I forced myself to eat it when I didn't necessarily want it also helped me not really look forward to it or crave it anymore. My protocol went something like this:

2 Weeks - Wendy's 3 times a week

2 Weeks - Wendy's 2 times a week

2 Weeks - Wendy's once a week

After 2 weeks of Wendy's once a week - No more Wendy's


Your times and quanitities may vary

I was actually astounded by how well this process worked. I believe now that a lot of bodily functions (like food cravings and sleep cycles) and routine changes (like getting into bodybuilding and / or fitness) require a period of adjustment, or a weaning phase. Going from outrageously great tasting food to plain chicken breast and salad is like going from kissing a person you're attracted to to all of a sudden only hugging them. You need time to adjust to the process and reset your mentality. You may look tough and inspirational in the beginning, but bodybuilding and fitness is the marathon of marathons. It's how well you consistently put in the work and dedication that matters, and setting your mind up in the right way to optimize that takes time.

So instead of suddenly kicking a food you're trying to get out of your diet, trying slowly weaning yourself off of it. Don't just dive right into completely eliminating things from your diet. Is it better to eat as clean as possible? Absolutely. But learning to slowly accept and eventually stay super dedicated to a diet is better than diving hard into it and suddenly crashing equally as hard.

-Jtrain

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