First of all, its grammatically incorrect. I mean, as an English major I have to point that out. Healthy is an adjective, not an adverb, so it modifies a noun, not a verb. What I really mean is Eating Healthy Foods or Eating Healthily. But that just doesn’t have the ring.

I try to make this podcast about learning how to learn, learning how to become an expert in your own health. So I don’t really present an overall program. But it’s easy to get lost in the details. If I don’t have a big-picture idea of my goals, I may not have the focus I need to propel myself forward.

So when you’re describing yourself and how you live to someone you don’t know that well, do you say, ‘I try to eat healthy’? Because ‘I try to eat well’ doesn’t work, it implies eating high-cost foods. Like ‘living well’. As opposed to eating high-value foods.

Here’s an example. Episode 140 was about fat and explained how, although we need fat, some kinds of fat are pretty much always bad for you. For example, saturated fat. It doesn’t really occur in nature, you know Tom Brady says don’t eat anything that comes in a box or a bag. Saturated fat raises LDL cholesterol and increases the risk of heart disease. There’s no good reason to consume it, except that the foods that contain it often taste really good.

For cheat meals I occasionally have Captain Crunch. It’s almost all sugar and tastes amazing. It also offers 1/2 gram of saturated fat in a single serving. On the other hand, my homemade granola contains zero saturated fat and tastes almost as good. So I keep that around most of the time. The Captain Crunch gets consumed quickly and it’s something I only buy specifically for a cheat meal. This is just one example of how I form my environment such that I ‘eat healthy’ almost without thinking about it, because I have healthy foods around. I also keep the granola in a closed cabinet up high and out of plain sight, because even though it is healthier than eating Captain Crunch, it has about the same amount of calories. It’s possible to eat all healthy foods and still not have a completely healthy diet. So that’s a trick, a life-hack to eating healthy. I’ve learned that homemade granola is healthier than Cap’n Crunch, so I put the healthy choice in my environment, and I don’t have to think about that quite as much anymore.

Here’s another example. 2% fat milk, which I might have chosen to eat with my Cap’n Crunch, has 3 grams of saturated fat per serving. Almond milk has zero. Incidentally I personally it better than cow’s milk, it’s less acidic. So I always have almond milk around and as a result, I’ve reduced my risk of heart disease. I make these choices one at a time and they seem small, but now, a couple of years into this health journey, I am surrounded by good foods. I don’t have to think on a daily basis, “I need to eat healthy foods today, so what am I going to eat?” I’ve already answered that question, one little choice at a time. So I eat healthy foods.

So if you’ve taken my advice on many of these choices, you are already eating good foods and the big picture has formed itself almost without you knowing it happened.

Now that we are surrounded by good foods, how do we keep from eating too much of them? There are another set of small choices that come together to make this happen as well. Bring your lunch to work, preparing meals like my double-bean chili, or grilled chicken, or shrimp gumbo ahead of time and freezing them to make eating them more convenient. Keep track of your calories and stay above your basal metabolic rate and below the calories you burn in a day if you’re trying to lose or maintain body fat, above that level if you’re trying to gain.

Eating healthy for long life is a big topic. But it becomes clear when we make good little choices and continue to practice them. If you haven’t listened to every episode of this podcast I encourage you to do so. With each one, you should learn something, some little thing about how to improve your health. If you make those little choices one at a time and stick with them, you’ll have a long, healthy, happy, and active life right up to the end, and that’s the whole point.

Weight 7-day Avg. (change since Jan 2018): 220 (-54)
Workout time: 85 Minutes
Total Distance (total since Nov 2017): 3.47 Miles (541.01)
Steps: 7,678
Muscle Mass 7-day Avg. (change since Aug 2018): 162.31 (+21)
Body Fat 7-day Avg.: 26%
Daily Sleep Duration 7-day Avg: 5 hours
2019 Goal: 15% Body Fat