Freshness

So far, in this guide, I’ve frequently mentioned discarding artifical products. It’s one of the subtle ways in which people ruin their diet, but there’s a simple explanation. Once you know it, and focus on it, you can easily improve your diet.

For example, maybe you love eating pasta. Then you don’t have to stop eating pasta. You merely have to select pasta types that don’t add anything artificially and that don’t refine their grains. You merely have to swap your usual choice for a more natural, less processed pasta type.

Our body evolved to eat food from the natural world. Anything that is not natural, therefore, is usually worse for your body.

Pasta is actually already quite a natural food. Something like candy, cake, energy drinks, etcetera are much more unnatural. Which means you can already guess the advice: ignore those if you can.

Whenever you are about to buy (or eat) food, ask yourself how fresh and natural it is. You will quickly realize how much of our food is completely separated from what we are supposed to eat. Through exposure, through addictive contents, we’ve learned to see these foods as normal. Not because they actually give our body something it needs.

And no, you don’t need to resort to chewing leaves and raw nuts. Our body can handle other foods, as has been shown for hundreds of years. A little modification to food, like cooking it, is what allowed us to evolve faster in the first place.

But there’s a line here, a boundary, where food stops resembling any natural type of food. Whatever crosses that line should be ignored.

I think this is a more logical and achievable way of keeping a diet. Because it leaves choice. If you’re used to eating 4000 calories a day, you won’t be able to scale back to 3000 calories at once. But you will be able to swap some of that food for something with more nutritional value and less added waste.

As such, remember these guidelines:

• If something can be stored for a long time, it usually means lots of sugar (or other chemicals) were added to make this happen. It usually means it’s not natural.
• So buy fresh produce with the intention of eating it within a few days.
• Most food can be cooked / warmed up for about two or three times, before it has lost too much nutritional value. (When cooking, some nutrients leave your food through the gas and the water.)

I wanted a separate chapter on this to make sure the message was clear. Because this isn’t just true for food—it’s true for life. Lifestyle determines everything: your mental and physical state at all times. And almost all advice on lifestyle? It merely states what is natural or what our body wants, and tells you to do that.

We are humans. We have bodies, we are just animals, we evolved to live in the real world. The more you separate yourself from nature, the more you will be penalized for it.

So make it a habit to stay close to nature. And no, I don’t mean you should move to a forest and go live there. Again, society and technology has many benefits, we can do things we were not evolved to do, it’s a balance.

But you will never be healthy, if all your food only vaguely resembles actual food, and you spend your days doing hundreds of things your body was not supposed to do. (Like, sitting still, sitting inside, staying inside your head, etcetera.)

Next chapter is about a great application of this idea: fasting.