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The Healthy Food Mindset - How To Know If You Are Really Eating Healthy

By Ben Longley

In my experience as a personal trainer in St Kilda when it comes to achieving your goals, whether it be weight loss, increased muscle and strength, improved health and fitness, or all of the above, you cannot overemphasize the importance of diet in determining whether you will be successful or not.

You can go to the gym everyday and do a workout, even with a pretty poor diet you may get some results, however you will never come even close to realising your full potential if you don’t put the effort in to what you are eating everyday. If you are training regularly and are not achieving your goals, then I would take a look at your diet and give it a thorough evaluation.

Now this isn’t an article on eating specifically for any one goal, it is not about fat loss or adding muscle or how many calories you need; it is more to help you get your head around the concept of eating healthy foods, and how to make good food choices. Not everyone has the luxury of a personal trainer to give them diet advice, so by actually understanding what constitutes ‘healthy food’ i.e. something that is good to put in your body and what is probably not so good, it will put you well on your way to being a much healthier you. Remember no matter what your goals, whether it is performance or aesthetics, a healthier body will always get better results.

As a general mindset on the issue of food, the best way to look at your diet is to try and not eat anything that you wouldn’t find naturally in the wild.

Any food that has been made by humans or changed by humans in some way to take on the form that it does now will generally be unhealthy. We should be trying to eat the food that is as close to what we are biologically designed to eat and what we have eaten throughout our hundreds of thousands of years in existence on this planet.

If your food is alive, or used to be alive, if it has been plucked off a tree, or picked from the ground, then it will generally be good for you and a healthy diet. If your food has been manufactured, or put through some level of processing to take on the form it does now, if it simply doesn’t exist in nature without the interference of human processing, then it is most likely unhealthy. Now there are shades of grey when we start to look at vitamins supplements and things like that, but don’t be a pain in the butt, you know what I am getting at!

The more steps in the processing of food the worse it will be for you, so we should ideally be aiming for as little processing as possible. The staple of our diets should be lean animal meat, fish, fruit, vegetables, nuts, seeds and water. This is the food that you would eat if you were stranded on a desert island or if you were alive 20,000 years ago, and didn’t have the luxury of going to the supermarket and buying all the junk that is around now. It was only about 10,000 years ago that humans even started farming grains for mass human consumption. Even grains, which are considered by most to be really healthy foods, are not really part of a natural human diet. Compare 10,000 years of eating grains to how long we have been on the planet which is about 200,000 years as the modernised human, with our human lineage going back millions of years before that.

The diet of humans has changed more in the last 50 years than it ever has in the history of our millions of years in existence, and we are now a society struggling with obesity and health problems and the weight loss and personal training industry is growing at a phenomenal rate. Just think about that for a moment, it is no coincidence…..and no we haven’t really changed all that much, we basically have the same bodies, the same physiological make up and same digestive system.

Whilst the human body is amazing and it can cope and adapt to a certain degree, we will eventually wear it down and it will succumb to ill health sooner or later if we continue making bad diet choices. Natural sources of food which the human body has been surviving on for a long, long time will supply you with all the natural nutrients, vitamins, minerals and fats our bodies need. All the energy dense, processed, unnatural, high in sugar, high in trans fat foods that are around today will do you no good at all, in fact, they will do you a lot of harm if you eat them consistently for long enough.

By eating food that we are not supposed to, we will get fatter, weaker, more prone to sickness and disease, more prone to injury, generally unhealthy, and we will greatly reduce our lifespan.

Just think of it like this, If you have a pet dog or a cat, imagine only feeding it pizza, chocolate, and soft drink every day, instead of its natural diet of predominately meat, do you think it would be healthy? Would it become fat? If you bought a pet monkey and fed him potato chips and Mars bars all day do you think its health would decline? Every animal has a natural diet, which when strayed from for long enough will have damaging effects on their physical health (and mental for that matter).

I think a lot of people forget this when thinking about food but at the end of the day, humans are just animals. Take a minute to think about how your ancestors found and prepared their food, and where they got their food from. It’s easy to forget in this world of ours where we can just go to the supermarket and purchase a totally man made piece of food in a shiny wrapper with ‘healthy whole grains’ written all over it and feel like we are eating healthy food, that for most of human existence we simply didn’t consume this sort of stuff.

I would like to think that if you are reading this then not only do you want to avoid ill health, you want to be in optimal health and physical condition.

We cannot afford to neglect our diets and we can’t forget the fact that to look and feel as best as we can, our diets will play a major role, in fact I would say the most important role. Obviously it is hard to be perfect, and everyone will have a meal here and there which will not be as healthy. If you try to make sure that around 90% of the time you follow a close to natural diet then you will no doubt improve on your health, fitness and performance goals. Below is a list of the foods which make up most of my ideal diet, yes I do eat selected grain and wheat based products because for me I feel fine when I eat them. Some people will find they don’t respond well to the consumption of too much grain and wheat based foods, this is very much an individual thing so see how you respond by taking it out of your diet for a while. If you feel better then you might want to limit your consumption of these foods. This list is not exhaustive, but I think you get the idea, besides my starchy carb list and protein shakes everything passes the simple test of

- Is it or has it been alive?
- Can it be plucked from the ground or picked off a tree?


I often tell my clients who are after fat loss to not eat too many starchy carbs, in place of vegetable and fruit. However these exceptions are made by me because I am 6’3, weigh a pretty lean 100kgs, and am not specifically eating for fat loss. I also think that the benefits for most people of conveniently adding in some extra protein to their diets through protein shakes outweighs any possible negative effects that I have so far heard of or come across, especially if you’re diet is made up of 90% natural healthy foods.

Now is not the time to get into hormones in meats and pesticides in fruits, just make the healthy diet mindset shift for now about how to make better food choices, and if you wan tot start looking into things like grass fed beef, and organic produce then even better. But for now, pick one thing from every column in the list to make up a meal, and your doing better than most.

These foods should make up approx. 90% of your healthy diet

Protein Source Vegetable Source Fruit Source Good Fat Source Secondary Carb Source

About the Author:

Ben Longley is a personal trainer in St Kilda, Melbourne, Australia. He specialieses in fat loss and general strength and conditioning for everyday people. His website is StKildaFitnessTrainer.com