Rule #2: Eat unprocessed foods & cook your meals

Health

Dec 30

Food that sustains human life is whole, unprocessed, and naturally irreducible.

One cannot break a leaf of spinach or a chicken thigh into its constituent parts without venturing into the realm of the molecular or the subatomic — chicken is simply chicken, spinach simply spinach. These foods are invariably nutrient dense, easily digested, and when combined with each other sensibly, produce sustainable, even energy levels.

By contrast, foods that are processed, usually identifiable by brightly colored packaging and extensive ingredient lists, can be created and synthesized from subparts — xantham gum, dextrose, Yellow 5 — and are always detrimental to health and wellness to some degree. They are comparatively nutrient void, often cause bodily upset (both physical and mental), and lead to spikes and crashes in energy.

Regularly taking in unprocessed foods will aid your efforts at building cardiovascular and load-bearing capacity, mental acuity, and healthspan, while regularly taking in processed foods will keep those qualities out of your reach.

Recognizing and honoring this fact can be done with a simple heuristic beyond smart grocery shopping: cook your own meals. You are likely to be able to make a veggie omelette or a chicken stir fry without much fuss, and less likely to create a fudge-covered Oreo cookie (at least in the absence of a day-long odyssey into mixers, ovens, measuring cups, and a severely off-putting confrontation with sugar).

Cooking your own meals allows you to know precisely what you are eating and how it was prepared, and keeps you close to health via the natural filter of complication — if your meal or treat tries your patience through multi-step transformation processes and long preparation times, you are likely venturing further and further into the realm of the non-nutritive, and will pay the toll accordingly.