The Purpose of Food

It’s funny to me how often people give diet advice without giving or considering the actual goal someone wants to achieve. They’re like: “want to lose weight? Eat more raw meat!” That’s only going to work, by accident, for one person and nobody else!

Instead, let’s talk about two things:

• The general purpose of food
• And your goal when you say you want to eat better

Purpose of food

Our body is constantly breaking down. That’s just how the universe works: everything wants to go back to a state of chaos and destruction.

As such, even if you don’t exercise, and aren’t sick or injured, you still need to eat well. Because your body is still repairing mistakes, using energy, trying to keep itself together.

In fact, most of your calorie intake is actually used when in rest. Exercising doesn’t spend that many extra calories while doing it. (There is some nuance here which I’ll talk about later.)

So, what is the purpose of food?

• To get energy, enough to do what you need to do
• To get the right building blocks to repair or grow

The consequence? Eating (many) calories isn’t bad. It’s only bad if you eat more than you need. Likewise, it’s bad if you don’t eat enough calories. Because then your body is screaming for energy which it cannot find. Which at best leads to exhaustion and lack of motivation, and at worst to your body breaking itself down.

Another consequence? Eating things that are only high in energy (calories, carbohydrates, however you look at it) is bad, because you’re missing the other 50% of what you need.

That’s why fast food is generally bad. You get too many calories, and nothing for repairing your body. A few fastfood burgers can easily exceed your calorie intake for the whole day. Even if everything else you eat is extremely healthy and full of growing nutrients, it will most likely also add some calories—and so you become more fat every day.

A hidden consequence

Alright, food is important. Without it, we break ourselves down, until we die. So, yeah, pretty essential stuff.

This plays a role in evolution, of course. Our body evolved to process all sorts of food. It evolved to respond in significant ways to certain types of food, or lack thereof.

This becomes most apparent in two ways:

• Our psychology is heavily influenced by food.
• Our stomach is sometimes called “the second brain”.

That second brain idea is so important that I’ll devote a whole chapter to it later in the guide.

The other idea simply means that your mental state—mood, thoughts, clarity of mind, etcetera—depends heavily on your food intake. This is somewhat individual. As such, I can’t say much more about it than: “be mindful of this” When you react annoyed at a simple request, consider if you did that because you were actually hungry. When you make stupid mistakes at work, consider if this is due to bad diet (that day).

What’s your goal?

You are reading this guide for a reason. What is that reason?

If you know your goal, you can find more easy and concrete steps towards it. If you remind yourself of that goal, every day, you are more likely to execute it.

The best goals are small. So “easy” it feels like cheating! Why? Because it means you’ll actually try to achieve it.

You can always create a new (bigger) goal. You can always move the goalposts a bit further. But picking a goal that’s too hard and too far away just means 99% of people … give up before they start.

Let’s take my example from the introduction. I’ve heard several doctors say to me (or my family): “eat more meat” We’ve been vegetarians our whole life 😅 My issue was that I ate too much sugar. When I was younger, and still didn’t eat meat, I had no problems at all. So no, eating meat was useless advice.

Similarly, you often hear advice like: “Don’t stress-eat! When you’re stressed or sad, talk about it, go exercise, but don’t eat it away!”

For me? I had the reverse issue. I ate a lot when I felt good. When I was productive, busy, and exercised well. So, again, useless advice for me and my goal.

This guide merely states facts, lessons I learned personally, and things to try. But remember: being healthy is a marathon, not a sprint. So pick only the advice necessary for your goal, and make your habits as small as possible, as that means you will actually maintain them.

About vegetarianism

As I said, I was brought up as a vegetarian. As times changed, and I got older, this even changed to an almost 100% vegan lifestyle.

What were the advantages? None of my family members have serious issues related to food intake. None are really fat, or have too much cholesterol, or any other issue linked to meat by research. We had plenty to eat and stayed at a good weight.

Surely there were disadvantages? Yes, the fact that many places weren’t serving vegan food yet. And that obviously people had to make fun of it. But purely based on diet? No, there are no disadvantages.

These days, the world is much more ready for vegetarian and vegan lifestyles.

I would recommend becoming vegan.

But that’s merely my recommendation. The rest of this course won’t talk about this again, don’t worry.

• Slaughtering animals to eat parts of them feels like something that should be in the past.
• Livestock (and the meat industry) is one of the major catalyzers for climate change. The process of giving food to animals and then eating the animals is an extremely inefficient and slow way of doing it. If you take the animals out of the equation, and grow food directly for humans, you can only gain ground and resources.
• Plant-based diets are proven to have no significant downsides and many advantages

When I grew up, the world wasn’t really ready for that. I vividly remember trying to explain, in broken Italian, during my high school trip to Rome, that I was vegetarian. They didn’t know what to do. In the end, they found a pizza margherita somewhere and gave it to me.

Now, the world is ready.