How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life (24 page)

Allow me to tell you what I eat, and what works for me, as a template that might be useful in planning your own eating strategies. And yes, I realize how egocentric that sounds:
“Eat like me!”
But I’m not recommending that you follow my diet example. Staying consistent with the rest of this book, all I’m doing is providing you with some extra data within which I hope you can find some useful patterns. For reference, my body-fat composition recently tested at about 16 percent,
which is good for an adult male. Here’s a fairly complete list of the foods that are the foundation of my weekly diet. I can eat as much as I want of the foods on this list, which I quite enjoy, and I won’t gain a pound as long as I stay active.

The first thing you might notice about my list is that most of the foods I keep at home are convenient. I can grab a handful of mixed nuts and an apple and call it lunch.

I also prepare pasta and keep it in the refrigerator, along with veggies steamed in the microwave. When I want something warm and filling, I just mix the veggies and pasta, add some butter, microwave the dish for two minutes, and add pepper and Parmesan cheese. I’ve learned to use my own laziness in a positive way. I’ll always eat what is most convenient during the day, and if the only easy options are healthy, laziness takes me in the best direction. Laziness can be a powerful tool.

As I write this, my fridge is full of prepped, healthy food. There are some cut and washed strawberries and blackberries in one plastic
container. Another has microwaved and cut brussels sprouts. Another has a concoction of quinoa and brown rice (that comes precooked) mixed with sautéed edamame, carrots, and broccoli. I literally open the lid, drag a small bowl through it and pop it in the microwave for two minutes. There is enough variety within the dish itself that I can eat it three days in a row for lunch and never feel bored with it. Add some pepper and Parmesan cheese and it is delicious.

We also keep containers of carrots and celery, precut and washed, covered with water, in the fridge. On days when the only thing I have in mind for food is “more,” the carrots and celery offer a perfectly healthy option. I think of carrots and celery as diversions more than food.

The trick to eating right is to keep willpower out of the equation for your diet. Laziness can make you choose healthy foods if you are clever enough to make those foods the most convenient in your house. You can further game your willpower by allowing yourself unlimited quantities of the good sort of food, at least until your cravings for the bad stuff subside.

For dinner, which tends to be a social meal, I’m not so stringent about avoiding simple carbs, especially near bedtime, when I prefer being sleepy. My usual takeout food options are …

Takeout

We eat for more than one reason. I find it useful to understand what is making me eat so I can adjust my food choices accordingly.

For example, scientists know that your brain triggers the hunger sensation and hunger hormones like leptin and ghrelin when you don’t get enough sleep.
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The next time you have one of those days when you can’t eat enough to satisfy your hunger, ask yourself how
much sleep you got the night before. You’ll be surprised at how often a bad night of sleep leads to nonstop eating.

When tiredness sparks your hunger but you’ve had all the calories you need for a while, try eating peanuts or mixed nuts to suppress your appetite. Cheese also works, at least for that specific purpose. The fat in those foods acts as an appetite satisfier. Nuts and cheese have lots of calories, but you’ll find that suppressing your appetite at the expense of some extra calories is still a net gain if the alternative is to eat until everything in your kitchen is gone.

I often find myself doing social eating just because someone else in the family happens to be snacking in the kitchen. I wander in and start a conversation, and the next thing I know something unnecessary is heading for my stomach. It’s almost automatic and mindless. I have just enough awareness to steer myself toward the lowest-calorie items. I don’t need nuts or cheese because I’m not actually hungry. I just need something to do while I hang out. So I go for the celery or carrots or cucumbers in my fridge that are prepped and waiting. When you eat for social reasons, aim for the lowest-calorie options. You don’t need to suppress your appetite if the reason you’re eating isn’t hunger.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to healthy eating is flavor. You might love the taste of everything that’s bad for you, while being less enthusiastic about so-called healthy foods. As your friend who eats a vegetarian diet plus an occasional fish, I’ll tell you how to get the flavor you need from otherwise boring food.

The first rule of eating right is avoiding foods that feel like punishment. No one gives out medals for choking down a big bowl of boredom. If eating a healthy diet feels unpleasant, you’re doing it wrong. And you’re wasting your limited stockpile of willpower. You might have your own list of awful-yet-healthy foods. Feel free to avoid them so long as that leaves you plenty of other options.

I find that most people who have poor diets believe healthy food has bland or unpleasant flavor. That impression is doubly true if the first thing you think of in a vegetarian diet is tofu, and I find that is often the case. As a public service, I’ve listed below the condiments,
seasonings, and ingredients that can add flavor to most foods that would be otherwise bland. These are the taste sensations I live on while never feeling the slightest twinge of flavor deprivation. Your tastes will differ, so this is just a template to make the point about how many flavors you can enjoy in a healthy diet.

Vegetarian Flavors

You’ll notice that salt and butter are on my list, and you probably associate both of those things with a bad diet. I’d like to make an argument in favor of including copious amounts of both salt and butter in your diet,
so long as you’re adding them to otherwise healthy food.

Here I’ll remind you again—because I can’t say it too often—to be wary of health ideas from cartoonists. Check with your doctor before you install a salt lick in your living room or start eating butter by the stick. Read my argument below and run it by your doctor before you go off and give yourself a heart attack.

Let’s start with salt. For years, science has produced conflicting reports about the health risks of salt for people who have no special
risk for heart disease. Given the number of studies undertaken to uncover the hidden risks of salt, I would expect a clear answer by now. Science has not provided it.

Everything in life is a calculated risk, and I’ve decided that using salt as much as I want allows me to thoroughly enjoy some healthy foods that I wouldn’t otherwise eat. For example, a salted carrot is delicious but an unsalted carrot is like chewing on a stick. Steamed and salted brussels sprouts are one of my favorite foods, but plain brussels sprouts hold no appeal.

The key to enjoying salt without worrying about a heart attack is that you need to have a healthy diet in general, exercise regularly, and have a healthy body-fat composition. It also helps if you don’t have high blood pressure. If you’re built like a barrel, eat pork for breakfast, and lost all of your uncles to heart disease, your doctor will probably take salt out of your diet just to be on the safe side. Keep in mind that your doctor probably isn’t a salt expert, and caution will always be a doctor’s first instinct. You can find plenty of information on salt studies on the Internet. Make up your own mind, but keep your eyes open because new salt studies come out on a regular basis.

My argument in favor of butter is similar to that for salt. Butter is a good appetite suppressant, and like salt, it helps me enjoy healthy foods. Steamed broccoli with some butter and pepper is delicious. Plain broccoli is boring. If butter helps you eat more vegetables, and your weight is under control, butter is probably an acceptable risk. Check with your doctor to be sure.

You can do your own test on the appetite-suppressing quality of cheese and butter. Try steamed vegetables with butter and Parmesan cheese one day and remember how you felt after. The next day, try steamed vegetables with just soy sauce. The soy sauce is a great flavor, but you’ll find yourself hungry before you swallow the last bite. Soy sauce works best when you’re doing social eating or you are eating healthy fat in some other form to keep you feeling satisfied.

Think of healthy eating as a system in which you continually experiment with different seasonings and sauces until you know exactly what works for you. You want to be able to look at a vegetable and instantly know five ways to make it delicious, at least two of which don’t require much effort. When you change what you know about adding flavor to food, it will change your behavior. You’ll no longer
need much willpower to resist bad food because you will be just as attracted to the healthy stuff.

As I mentioned earlier, studies show that having overweight friends can make you overweight yourself.
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I don’t automatically trust studies that uncover correlations without knowing the mechanism behind them, but I have noticed that my weight does fluctuate depending on the company I keep. At the moment, my business partner in a side venture is an Ironman athlete. And as I write this paragraph I am sitting next to a friend who looks like he stepped off the cover of a fitness magazine. For the past year or so I’ve spent more time with unusually fit people than at any other time in my life. That’s mostly a coincidence. But just as the studies suggest, I’ve somehow managed to drift into the best physical shape of my adult life. And I don’t feel that I used any extra willpower to get there. It feels as if the social influence made it easier. I don’t know if the reason is that I feel competitive or that people naturally imitate the people around them in the same way we adopt accents when we move to other parts of the country. Whatever the reason, science, common sense, and my personal experience are in agreement: Hanging out with fit people can cause you to become more like them. It passes my bullshit filter.

I’m not suggesting that you should stop accepting invitations from your overweight friends. But in the upcoming fitness chapter I’ll suggest joining some organized sports teams if you can. That will expand your social circle to include people who enjoy exercise. In time your sport friends will play a bigger role in your social life. That can only be good.

I was a vegetarian for most of my adult life. Recently I introduced some fish into my diet just for the health benefits. When the topic of my diet comes up, people often ask how I get enough protein, why I became a vegetarian, and how much work is involved in finding good vegetarian food. I’ll answer those questions because some of
you might be on the fence about giving up a traditional meat-based diet.

I don’t recommend a vegetarian diet, or any other diet, because I’m not a doctor. It’s also plainly obvious that hundreds of millions of people eat meat, enjoy every minute of it, and end up dying for all sorts of nonmeat reasons. I’m also a convert to the thought that dying at age eighty isn’t worse than dying at a hundred. If your meat diet is a bomb with a long enough fuse, it might kill you at just about the time you’d want it to.

I don’t trust the science behind the vegetarian movement because the believers have agendas beyond nutrition. Some vegetarians are in the lifestyle to protect animals, some want to address climate change, and all are partially blinded by the cognitive dissonance that comes automatically with any lifestyle choice.

Complicating matters, one expects the beef industry to make convincing arguments in favor of a meat diet, complete with charts and graphs, and to debunk vegetarian claims. We citizens can only watch the show and use our bullshit filters as best we can.

My bullshit filter tells me that the health benefits of a vegetarian diet are probably real and probably substantial. The studies seem to line up in that direction.
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Science provides one element of the truth filter. The second filter is that whenever I hear of a fifty-year-old guy having a heart attack, he’s almost always a barrel-shaped carnivore with a well-used barbecue. Granted, there aren’t enough vegetarians in the general public for me to fully trust my anecdotal observations, but my observations are consistent with the science, and sometimes that’s the best we can do.

Bottom line, I eat a vegetarian diet (give or take a few fish per month), because I don’t digest meat well and I think there’s a good chance my mostly vegetarian diet is good for my health. But I don’t think the person who eats moderate amounts of chicken and seafood, with an occasional steak just for entertainment, is necessarily making a foolish choice. If a person who eats meat in moderation is generally fit and eats plenty of fruits and veggies too, I respect that approach. Everyone has a different risk-reward preference.