Time to Value Quality over Quantity

Have you ever looked for a snack you could eat the most of? Marketers might call this the 100-calorie strategy. Nutritionists call these vanishing calories: “Look how much you can eat without feeling full!” Inevitably, these foods are processed—full of air and delicious chemicals. These foods might keep you under your calorie goal IF you are able to stick to the suggested portion (who in the history of ever has eaten only 1 cup of cereal?!), but they aren’t really doing you any favors. Even the low calorie “diet” foods are made to make you overeat. They are designed for bottom lines, not, uh, actual bottoms.

Processed foods, especially snacks, trick our metabolism and hijack our weight goals in several ways (more on this later).

Instead of looking for the most bites of food you can eat for the littlest impact, we should be looking for the most impact in the fewest bites.

Read that again

I’m referring to a strategy called nutrient density. It’s one I build my whole personal diet on and one I bet my family’s health on.

I heard an analogy years ago that I love:

Your body is constantly working to build and rebuild itself. Nothing will stop it on its quest, it is designed to do this and solely focused on its purpose. Now, if you give your body quality building materials—brick, lumber, nails—it will build you a strong, beautiful body. If you give it packing peanuts and duct tape...well that’s a different story.

Consider 150 calories of Cheetos (as close to packing peanuts as I could get!) and compare it with 150 calories of broccoli (those little trees even look like lumber!)

Those light, airy poofs carry a lot of flavor, but not much substance. They are full of craveable chemicals that make a bag call your name when you have the munchies. But they are also designed to make you eat more and more while leaving your inner contractor very little to build with. Poofs.

Broccoli on the other hand is packed with nutrients and fiber your body will hungrily soak up to use as high-end, quality building materials. And you have very little chance of overeating it (even slathered with butter and/or cheese!) as it is satiating, filling.

Granite vs particle board.

Real Food vs Fake Food…what are you made of?

Now I realize the flaw in this comparison. No one is grabbing a bag of broccoli at snack time (well, almost no one.) Cheetos to Broccoli is farther than an apples to oranges comparison. So in future posts, we’ll be looking at nutrient dense snacks and foods you might want to nosh on. We’ll also look at ways to tell if your contractor is getting the materials needed to build a brick house, not a bounce house.

You are a brick house, not a bean bag full of Styrofoam poofs.

Nutrient Density is a foundational concept that applies to us all no matter what diet we subscribe to or what food habits we have. Consider each bite you take. Is it building you or is it simply filling you and even breaking you? You deserve the best.

Make Every Bite Count.

How do we get the good stuff in?

You get to choose with every bite you take, every item you put in your cart, every forkful you bring to your mouth.

First, a quick note on what to avoid or reduce. No one likes a list of no -no’s, but he good news is that if you choose the goods stuff, nutrient dense foods will naturally crowd out the cheap filler. They will also help rebalance the hormones that signal hunger and satiation. So any effort you put into eating nutrient densely will compound as you go and making those choices will only become easier and easier!

AvoiD and/or reduce:

processed, chemically altered, artificially flavored or colored foods. Artificial flavors, thickeners, preservatives, and anything you really can’t explain the content of.
Foods high in empty calories, namely starches and sugars with no real nutrition to offer.
Foods that are so nutritionally bankrupt the manufacturers artificially fortify them (I am looking at you, bread and cereal!)

Increase and/or focus on:

Unprocessed foods, whole ingredients, things your great grandma would recognize as food. (I actually remember my great grandma trying a twinkie; she was very unimpressed.)
Organic when possible (google the dirty dozen…a discussion for another day)
Quality sources (ethically raised, without exposure to chemicals, antibiotics and hormones)
Variety: (time to make friends with some new foods!)

A note on grains: in general, grains can have health benefits, but calorie for calorie, they are not a big bang for your buck. Sure, a bowl of oatmeal will stick to your ribs, but the fresh berries you might top it with offer more actual nutrition that the whole bowl itself does! Its worth evaluating how often in a day grains pop in your diet. Most people are surprised how often they do! This might not be the best approach to meeting your nutritional needs and deserves a little self-evaluation.

Some examples:

In general, here are some guidelines. Before you auto-no anything, keep an open mind (and mouth):

Liver: eegads, did I just say liver? It is the most nutrient food on the planet. A little bit packs a punch! This may sound out of your realm, but you just can’t talk nutrient density without mentioning the big guns. Liver takes gold every time. *scroll to the end for a bonus tip on how to get liver in.
Leafy greens: think beyond iceburg. Kale, spinach, collards, watercress, arugula, romaine, dandelion greens, butter lettuce…again go for variety!
Cruciferous veggies: broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, broccoli rabe. If you think you hate this whole family (first of all, rude!), then you don’t know how to cook them. Worth the effort to learn!
Berries: blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries. And think exotic like acai, goji, camu camu and snoz berries. (gotcha)
Brightly colored vegetables like red, yellow, and green bell peppers. Carrots of all colors. Eggplant. Tomatoes. The bright colors advertise their high vitamin content!
Herbs like garlic, parsley, cilantro, basil, oregano, and more. They not only boost flavor, they boost micronutrient content!
Asparagus
Root veggies like beets, parsnips, and sweet potatoes (think beyond your white potato rut!)
Wild caught salmon and sardines
Grass fed beef, lamb, bison, and other ruminants (wild game, mmm)
Bone broth
Pastured whole eggs…stop throwing away the yolks, they are a nutritional gold mine!
Seeds: sunflower, pumpkin, chia, flax, hemp, sesame, etc.
Quality raw/organic cheese
Fermented foods like sauerkraut, yogurt, kefir, kimchi, labneh, etc.
Grass fed butter
Avocado
Mushrooms, especially wild mushrooms
Pumpkin, butternut, and other squashes
Ocean vegetables (this means seaweed…the stuff I’ve seen you pick off your sushi roll! There are fun ways to add these into a diet and if you read about the treasure trove of minerals and bioavailable iodine these are, you’d be in!)

This list isn’t exhaustive, but there are some nutrient darlings on here worth making friends with. How many show up on your plate?

Some quick techniques:

Reach for whole foods. Bypass the apple juice and grab an apple.
Pair carbs with protein and healthy fat. For example have some almond butter with that apple you just grabbed! Put some browned butter on that side of roasted asparagus. Have cheese on your brocccoli (I’m convinced that’s what it was created for.)
Swap out low nutrient foods for high nutrient foods, or at least change up proportions. For example, instead of pasta, can you try cabbage, cucumber, zucchini or butternut noodles? Can you use lentil based pasta instead of simple flour? If you can’t give up pasta, can you put a smaller portion of noodles on your plate and focus on pumping that sauce full of extra veggies and protein?
Snack smart: snacks are often where we sabotage ourselves the most. You’ve heard of a “snaccident,” where you accidentally ate the whole bag, the whole carton, the whole bowl of something “bad?” Reach for trail mix, whole fruit, a slice of cheese and olives, a whole orange, celery and hummus, and avocado with salsa…reach for real food snacks. They are harder to overeat and they are serving more than just your taste buds.
Think about it: as you eat your food, think what you are taking in and what it has to offer your body. Be grateful for it. Welcome it into your body. This will reinforce good choices and help you learn as you go. (This practice is actually proven to help with digestion, so there’s a bonus!)

This was just a little food for thought to hopefully help you reexamine some basic thought patterns. When you change your mindset to search and celebrate nutrient density, your eating strategy changes.

If you want to learn more about nutrient dense foods, some great search terms are Paleo, Nutrivore, Whole 30 and Food Quality. You can really go down the rabbit hole.

You can also book a session with me and we can talk about how to make informed food decisions based on real, whole food. Your body will thank you in a million ways!

Book a free call with me!