On Eating

ON EATING


I’ll start by stating clearly: I’m not a biochemist or nutritionist. If you’re looking for a collection of references to journal articles, peer reviewed studies, or detailed biochemical explanations for why certain foods do what they do, you won’t find it here. But nutrition is one of the topics I get asked about most. And whether I publicly detail my eating or not, what I’ve already said about it can easily be misconstrued, taken out of context, or taken as a prescription for others. So I might as well address it. What I hope to do is tell you my story—to outline what I eat in detail, how I came to this approach over time, how it works for me, and what I think are some common mistakes generally speaking. I also hope to use my expertise in the fields of psychology and physical training to add perspective to our relationship with food.

What we eat is in part influenced by how we perceive ‘health.’ This health narrative evolves over time through a dynamic interplay between conceptual and experiential frameworks. In other words, as a narrative, ‘health’ is a powerful motive behind food choices. By recounting the evolution of my perception of ‘healthy eating’ over time, through my own folly I aim to paint a realistic picture of the typical naiveté in perception of health. Hopefully this will be relatable and help some of you avoid the same pitfalls and nearsightedness.

PUBLIC SCHOOL

My attitude toward athletics turned serious around my third year in high school, at about 16 or 17 years old. Before this point, like many, I really didn’t give any thought to what I ate. I ate to not feel hungry, basically. I grew up in my mother’s house. And as far back as I remember, she was averse to red meat. It was’t an ethical thing; the smell of it cooking made her nauseous. Looking back, I suppose all of her aversions were strong and unwavering like this. To this day she still refuses to eat raisins because “they look like little no-legged bugs.” I suspect she’s not alone in this, and that many secretly harbor these childish biases against certain foods.

The only time I had red meat or fish was on the rare occasion of a BBQ or family party on my father’s side. My sister and I visited him for a couple of days every other week. But by the time I was in school my mother had us convinced we didn’t like red meat, either. So I avoided it even when I wasn’t at home, under the vague notion that it was somehow gross. I think a good 70% of my meals at home were pasta with butter and that fake powdered parmesan cheese. Sometimes we ate chicken. 

At school my diet was even more problematic. In middle school I distinctly remember eating lunches of exclusively peanut butter and marshmallow fluff sandwiches on white bread (wheat and refined sugar), Little Debbie oatmeal cream pies (wheat and refined sugar), strawberry shortcake ice cream bars (wheat and refined sugar), and strawberry milk for basically three years straight. I even remember walking to the store to buy raw cookie dough (wheat and refined sugar) before soccer practice. Playing soccer on two teams, together with my hyper-analytic and anxious brain’s continuous demand for glucose, were probably the only things preventing me from degenerating into a listless, wobbling teenage soufflé.

But by the time I started to get serious about competing in track, I didn’t really have a gauge for what was “healthy.” I was basing my direction on cereal box wisdom and popular hearsay. That is to say, I had no internal sense for what made me feel well or unwell. It was all based on abstraction, concept and folk gossip.

Finally I was cooking for myself and had now moved in with my father. I started packing my own lunches. I brought a cooler to school full of what I reckoned to be healthy foods: deli meat sandwiches, cooked and raw vegetables, some nuts, fruit, chunky canned soups with meat, and leftovers from dinner. I developed a reputation for the large soft cooler box I carried around every day, and some of my teammates followed suit. For dinners I still ate a fair bit of wheat pasta, and still little to no red meat. I was training hard six days per week for track, and in the summer and fall still playing soccer. Despite my diet not being optimal, up to that point this was the best I’d felt and performed physically. At my heaviest I think I weighed 175lbs/79kg, and was quite lean.

UNIVERSITY

When I went to university and continued running track, nothing really changed about my nutrition perspective for the most part. In my first year I got a blood test, which showed I was severely iron deficient. So I started to take liquid ferrous sulfate and made a conscious effort to eat more dark greens, dabbling in red meat here and there. Based on research I’d done, I understood that heme iron found in animal foods is more bioavailable than the non-heme iron found in plants, but still had a hard time wrapping my head around red meat—no doubt the residual influence of my mother’s narrative.

Looking back this was the first time I had signs of gluten intolerance. Whenever I would eat cereal, pasta, bread, and especially beer, I would get terrible cramps, bloating, weakness, and indigestion that lasted for the rest of the day. Sometimes my face even went pale. Luckily I liked grits quite a bit (made from corn), so I often opted for that at breakfast instead of toast or cereal. But I didn’t suspect that it could be gluten. I even blamed it on milk for a while. I didn’t even know what gluten was. This was a time before the general public really knew about gluten and people with intolerance to it, aside from the very rare case of Celiac’s here and there.

In 2011, my 4th year at university, I quit the track team after the spring season and started a yoga practice. At this point I was still eating as I had been for the last 6-7 years. But my introduction to yoga as a cultural paradigm marked the beginning of a movement toward vegetarianism and eventually veganism. Fortunately the vegan dogma didn’t reach my actual eating habits until about a year later.

Early in 2012 I moved off campus and started cooking at home. This was around the time I remember making a conscious effort to start eating more raw foods. The only explicit reason I can recall was, “raw foods have more nutrients.” I believe I first heard this from a yoga teacher talking to a student after class, and might have googled it briefly. I didn’t do any real research on this premise, or even consider that it could be more nuanced. This was also the beginning of my transition to a vegetarian diet. I was already quite lean due to the past 7 years of competitive running, but in eating less animal foods, increasing my intake of raw foods and decreasing cooked foods, I lost even more weight. At one point I weighed myself at 148lbs/67kg. For the amount of physical movement I was doing (running, cycling, and yoga), I likely wasn’t eating enough, either—a theme I’ll revisit later.

A DESCENT INTO VEGANISM

By late 2012/early 2013 I was deep in the yoga paradigm and fully vegetarian, with an effort to keep a significant part of my food intake raw. I bought organic as often as possible, even though I really couldn’t afford it. I consulted two nutritionists about getting appropriate macro and micro nutrients while vegan. It was always about health for me, as puerile as my perception of health was. I cared about both performance and longevity. Looking back I now see I also valued the concept of being vegan, as an ethical virtue signal. But I wouldn’t have taken this direction if I knew it would compromise my health or performance. But it did. And badly.

Over roughly the next two years I forced myself into this extremely restrictive and abstract framework called “veganism” and saw my health rapidly deteriorate, despite my firm belief I was eating optimally for this purpose. I had chronic diarrhea daily. I don’t think I took a solid shit for about 15 months. I lost a lot of strength, muscle mass, and put on some fat. I was emotionally unstable and volatile most of the time, slept very poorly, my limbs fell asleep while sitting and sleeping, my skin was breaking out for the first time in my life, and I felt lethargic. During the last year of this horrifying mistake I was sick 8 or more times with flu-like symptoms, each incidence lasting for more than a week. Over my years of high level competitive sports, I had become quite resilient and tolerate of discomfort. Mentally I was very persistent. But at this point even I had to admit something was very wrong.

I went to see two doctors, one in the western medicine paradigm and one in traditional Chinese medicine. They both gave the same diagnosis: “your small intestine isn’t processing food properly and has mostly shut down; your liver is over-taxed due to the toxicity in your stomach and intestines.” I saw the western MD first, who of course prescribed some drugs and recommended I get more sleep (ironically my poor sleep was largely due to chronic emotional stress from being chemically wrecked for so long). I think one drug was a corticosteroid for inflammation and the other was an antibiotic. I was skeptical of taking this kind of medication, likely due to a healthy mistrust of medical doctors instilled by my father who hadn’t visited a doctor in decades. So I sought a second opinion. The Chinese medicine doctor suggested something very different: “eat bovine liver, red meat and fish, and cook all of your food.” This is in no way a testimony in favor of the Traditional Chinese Medicine perspective, but at this point I knew something had to change with my diet anyway. So I decided to give it a shot.

A RESURGENCE

Mid-2014, following my consultation with the TCM doctor, I started eating grass-fed ground beef daily, bovine liver, wild-caught ocean fish, and cooking my vegetables. To my surprise I found I really liked beef, even craved it. And within 3 weeks most of the symptoms which had plagued me for years were gone. Within a few months I was getting stronger again, sleeping better, regained some muscle mass, and two out of three bowel movements were solid again. It was at this point that I cut out gluten as well—as I started experimenting, paying attention to the effects of individual foods by introducing or removing one at a time. This was a complete reframing of my health narrative. And for the first time I saw untapped possibility in terms of how good I could feel and perform.

LESSONS IN CHINA

In December of 2014 I made the move to Shanghai, China. At this point I’d already established that red meat was working very well for me. The more I ate, the better I felt. And as long as I didn’t eat past the point of being full, there didn’t seem to be a point of diminishing returns, either. And I continued to stay away from gluten. But some unexpected factors took me by surprise during my first year in China: vegetable oils and poor food quality. In the first six months of my stay, I started to notice some inflammation and lethargy return. I couldn’t quite pinpoint what it was at the time, and it would take me another year or more to figure it out, but it was largely the cooking oils they use. 

Firstly, almost all food in China is cooked in low grade vegetable oils: peanut, canola, sunflower, safflower, soybean and generic mixes of these. Furthermore they’re cooked at high temperatures, which degrades the unstable molecular structure of these already inflammatory oils and produces multiple carcinogenic compounds. Further still, most places recycle these oils in cooking multiple times.

Secondly, the food quality is very poor in most places, even high-end restaurants. Wherever they can cut costs without too many people noticing, they will. Many meats and other foods are fake, or mixed with other ingredients like wheat flour and soy to increase volume. A typical beef burger in China, for example, typically contains a mix of low grade beef scraps, wheat, soy, vegetable oils and MSG. MSG is actually the default. If you don’t ask to leave it out, you can bet 99/100 restaurants will use it.

I eventually cut out vegetable oils entirely. But it wasn’t an epiphany or sudden decision. It was more a matter of gradual awareness of the effects over time. I noticed indigestion, specific joint and general inflammation, mental fog, and lethargy. Just the same with avoiding fake foods and chemicals: it was a gradual practice of asking for ingredient specificity and saying no in the face of social pressures, which are very real in China. 

Chinese eating culture is very different from what most of you are used to. If you’re from the US, South America, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, or most places in Europe, you order a meal for yourself, and the person next to you does the same. But China has a collective eating culture: food is for the whole table, and every dish is shared. It’s also a strong hospitality culture. People who see you as a visitor or guest often want to pay for your meals, and they want to order your food. If you like what they order for you, it’s a sign they know you well and know how to please you. This makes them a good host. It’s considered very unusual and even rude in most places to say you want to order your own meal for only you to eat, or to specify what ingredients you want or don’t want. It’s more unusual still to say you prefer to eat alone. So the pressure is tangible and inescapable, and this can make it quite challenging to make intentional food choices in China if you’re not cooking all of your own food (also uncommon due to the superabundance and affordability of restaurants). Social pressure is still present in different ways in other countries, but living in China for five years helped me to learn the hard way to set boundaries and ask for what I want—though gradually, with many lapses in judgement.

I can, however, remember one trip to Lanzhou in Gansu province, a northern region of China, which changed my food perspective dramatically and immediately. The region is famous for its sheep and goat meat. With very low population density in the countrysides, an abundance of sprawling grass plains stretching between arid copper mountains, misty green hills at high altitudes, the freshest air, and a nearly year-round grazing season, ruminant herding culture is prominent. And it’s apparent in the quality of the meat. Gansu and Qinghai provinces have without question the most astounding lamb and goat meat I’ve ever tasted. Raw yogurt is also commonplace—which is often made from sources less commonly found elsewhere, like goat and yak milk.

On one of my earliest trips to this region I fell so deeply in love with the lamb kebabs, slow barbecued over charcoal, that I ate basically nothing but these and raw yak’s milk yogurt for the entire two weeks. There are people who stand over long charcoal pits in front of restaurants and systematically turn skewers of lamb all day—seasoning them expertly with only lamb fat, salt, cumin seeds and chili pepper. They’re perfect. And so was the yogurt. Sweetened slightly with cane juice, a natural yellow layer of vitamin oil settled on the surface of each cup. I didn’t want to eat anything else. So I didn’t—except maybe a bit of white rice here and there. And something almost miraculous happened: for the first time in more than six years, I had absolutely no digestive issues. I felt energetic, clear-minded, and any bloating and gastro-intestinal discomfort vanished.

This was a turning point, and the first time it even occurred to me that I could eat only meat, yogurt, and rice if I wanted to. This was also a new level of intuitive listening, as I really wanted to eat only these things. I was craving them and they made my body feel good. Later I would also discover that these cravings changed seasonally. If I eat mostly fish for a while, for example, it’s only a matter of time before I start craving red meat again and don’t really feel very excited about fish. The reverse is also true.

After this trip, my digestive health would continue to fluctuate due to inconsistency in food quality and my lack of awareness of vegetable oils and other factors contributing to inflammation and gut permeability. But the general realization that I didn’t need to eat as much plant matter, and felt great eating only meat and yogurt, was a step forward.

INTO THE LABORATORY

Eventually there came a point when I wanted to travel less, settle in one place, and devote most of my time to studying my craft—instead of teaching weekly and being in perpetual transit. So in 2016 I settled in a mountainous region of rural Guangxi province. I rented a house for about USD$100 per month, set up a simple home gym on my rooftop, and went to work. It was like my own little science lab, where I could have peace, nature, and all the time I wanted to experiment on movement and nutrition. And there I stayed for about three years. I was still making a conscious effort to eat mostly meat and restrict carbohydrates intake to moderate or low.

At one point, early in this period, due to visa complications I stayed in Hong Kong for a couple of months. This was also an important period. I had no work there, and was spending every day alone more or less. So I was strength training 2-5 hours per day, eating like a desperate barbarian, and sleeping 10 hours a night. In a period of just over two months, I put on about 5 kilos of muscle. Despite overtraining (and eventually getting injured toward the end of this stay) my strength and performance leapt forward. This helped me realize that I had been under-eating for the majority of my athletic career. I think this is actually a problem for many athletes: they simply don’t eat and sleep enough.

In 2017, with visa issues sorted and back at the ‘lab’ in Guangxi, I started to do more research on nutrition. This is when I discovered intermittent fasting (IF) and time restricted feeding (TRF) methods. They worked very well for me. I experimented with fasting for 16-20 hours per day and keeping my eating window between 4-8 hours. My digestion improved dramatically, and it was the first time in more than a decade I could go months without any diarrhea. I was shocked. 

So I stayed strictly on this eating window for more than two years. It also worked well for me at the time as I was training fasted in the mornings on most days. So it was easy, and I wasn’t hungry in the mornings and afternoon before my first meal. It was only this year in 2020 that I started to stretch this window to 12 hours a few days per week. Most days I still eat within a 10 hour window, though. My reasoning for extending the window is pretty simple: I don’t really like to stuff myself once or twice per day, eat when I’m still full, or train on a full stomach. And I found it difficult to eat enough calories for optimal performance within a 4-8 hour eating window. So despite my Hong Kong epiphany, I was still chronically under-eating most months. Recently I’ve increased my intake of carbohydrates, mostly from rice, also for the sake of performance. I also started to have one meal a few hours before my training. With this current balance I feel more energetic during training, my recovery and sleep is markedly better, and my progress is faster than it’s ever been.

WHAT GOES IN, WHAT STAYS OUT

Okay, so here we are caught up to the present. And I did promise an outline of what I eat currently, and what I avoid. So here it is. I’ll start with a list of things I absolutely avoid. I don’t feel inclined, nor am I educated enough, to give a biochemical explanation for why I avoid these substances. So I’ll just list them, and you can do with this what you like. Just remember this is not a prescription for you.

  • Vegetable oils — canola, sunflower, safflower, soybean, generic veg oil, peanut, flax, etc. I avoid cooking with olive oil.

  • Gluten — wheat, barley, and any other grains that contains the gluten molecule

  • Medications

  • Alcohol / drugs

  • Packaged foods and condiments with mystery ingredients

  • Soy —tofu, tempe, edamame, dried soybeans, soy sauce, soy protein, etc.

  • Refined sugars

  • Caffeine (yes, even tea)

  • Nuts

  • Unfermented cow dairy —basically milk and cream

  • Peas

  • Beans

  • Raw meat

  • Mint and cilantro

  • Raw vegetables

Here’s a list of what I eat often:

  • Grass-fed, grass-finished beef

  • Pasture-raised sheep

  • Wild caught fish, crustaceans, mollusks

  • Free-range chicken/duck eggs

  • Organ meats

  • Yogurts (no sugar or naturally sweetened)

  • Rice and rice flour products

  • Potatoes

  • Corn and corn flour (organic)

  • Ginger in cooking (organic)

  • Herbs and spices in moderation in cooking

  • Chicken in moderation

  • Coconut aminos in moderation for taste

  • Cooked vegetables in moderation, and mostly for taste

  • Fruits in moderation (I squeeze a lot of lemon on my foods though)

  • Preserved meats (salted or smoked)and cheeses rarely and in moderation

Supplements:

  • Grass-fed goat or cow whey protein isolate, unflavored, unsweetened

  • Chelated Magnesium (evening)

  • Chelated Zinc (evening)

  • Electrolytes higher in potassium than sodium (morning)

  • Grass-Fed Collagen mixed in warm water with creatine and sea salt (morning)

ON THE MIND ON FOOD

You’ll notice that in recounting this journey toward my current eating protocols, nowhere do I mention aesthetics. That’s because I don’t allow the compulsion to look a certain way to drive my food choices. I eat for feeling and performance. Aesthetics matter; how I see my own body has an impact on the way I feel and perform. But that doesn’t perforce make aesthetics a worthwhile goal, especially when the appearance most are looking for can be earned as a byproduct of listening closely to health and performance markers. It can be a result without being an end-in-itself.

It’s not that I haven’t been misguided at times. I’m human, and as such I feel the pull of more shortsighted and superficial motives. The difference is, I know where these roads come from and where they lead. I attribute my long term progress in both nutrition and movement to my ability to avoid these pitfalls through integrated introspective awareness. As I outlined in more detail in a previous article, “On Building Ships,” the fixation on aesthetics represents part of our more base inclinations to seek the appearance of an attribute over the attribute itself. And these impulses are often co-motivated by fear-based narratives formed in reaction to trauma. What’s worse: there are clear systems of reward in place which encourage those who would aim at more superficial ends to keep doing what they’re doing. Because they seem to be getting what they want—or what they think they want. I think training and eating for aesthetics is a deeply misguided practice. I know this might ‘offend’ some people, but I’m not in the business of telling people what they want to hear.

I take the same stance on counting calories and macros. I’m absolutely against it. Yes, in every case. 

Does external food measurement work? It depends on what you mean by ‘work.’ Does it help people to lose weight? It can for some. But in 99% of cases the impulse to measure food intake is symptomatic of a belief that there is a ‘problem.’ Measurement is seen as the solution. The paradigm itself orbits around insecurity and perceived insufficiency. So to me it doesn’t matter if it ‘works’ to this end; the cost is too great. 

What about those who have an utterly distorted relationship to food quantity and internal chemical regulators? Can’t calorie counting and macro measurement help them find a way back to a sense of appropriate intake? Yes, for some it can. But there are issues here, too. We might use the analogy here of reading a map to illuminate a few. If I follow a GPS map blindly, absent-mindedly following the turn by turn instructions, I won’t be able to find my way back to that place without a GPS. I’ll be reliant on it forever. And in fact I put myself in a worse position than before because now I don’t know where I am. And if the GPS somehow fails, I’m screwed. But there is a way to follow GPS guidance, paying attention to navigational landmarks on the way, that can enable one to find their way back without guidance. Then, the GPS is used as a tool for orientation and future competence, right?

There are three major problems with this argument.

  1. The mere presence of the GPS map and turn by turn voice guidance makes it less likely I will need or want to pay attention, even if I intend to. If you gave someone a paper map, the likelihood would be much, much higher that they would remember the way again without the map. This is undeniable. Anyone who drove a car before GPS was a thing can attest to this fact: we simply don’t pay as much attention to the routes anymore. And our memory for directions is getting worse and worse in this regard. Whenever possible the brain wants to automate tasks which cost us time, focus, and energy—so it can focus on other more complex goals. With the GPS we automated a task which would otherwise have a very high time, attention, and energy cost.

  2. The motive is not equivalent. The desire to get to a destination is not likely based in narratives of insufficiency and fear. Wanting to ‘lose weight,’ in the overwhelming majority of cases, is. To draw an equivalent with the GPS analogy: imagine that, wherever you’re going, you’re going there only because you’re afraid if you don’t this will mean you’re somehow defective, in danger, or existentially alone. You think whatever is at the destination will solve your problem. It doesn’t matter how you get there—GPS or paper map—the trip is defined and colored by this fear-based motive.

  3. There are other, better alternatives. That a thing can do a job doesn’t stand as evidence that it’s the best tool for the job, and it certainly doesn’t attest to the quality or sustainability of result. I can hammer in a nail with a spoon to hang up a sign. But this isn’t a testament to the spoon, or what’s written on the sign. Ashtanga yoga can be used to make you flexible. But what about the knee and hip injuries, wasted time on poor quality movement without developing capacity, and ascetic religious dogma? I could effectively motivate people to increase labor output through fear for their own safety, propaganda, manipulation of resources, misinformation, and emotional polarization. But I think we can all appreciate the ethical issues with this.

SO, WHAT THEN?

It’s fair to say the challenges have shifted for us contemporary eaters. The same strategies for managing calorie intake that worked thousands of years ago won’t necessarily work today. So I can’t just point vaguely in the direction of some golden era long gone for a solution to problems like obesity and diabetes. But perhaps we’re misjudging the ‘problem’ in the first place. The problem is not obesity or diabetes. The problem is that most humans for most of their lives, myself included, have an utterly stupid, superficial, abstract perspective on health. On a deeper level, we’re also disconnected from our highest values. We are for the majority of the time motivated to action by fear based narratives. It doesn’t have to be this way. Instead of thinking, “If I don’t lose weight I will become diseased, nobody will respect me or find me attractive, and I’ll fail at reaching my movement goals,” one could ask, “What do I really want to experience and do with my body before I die, and how can I start making choices in support of this.” The shift is subtle but profound, and it does take strategic work. This isn’t an external measurement or a quick fix. It’s a fundamental reframing of the task itself—from a reactive deficiency-oriented fixation, to a creative value-oriented disposition.

The two questions I ask myself are simple:

  1. When I’m free from attachment to any form of belief that I’m bad, not safe, or alone, what do I really want to experience and do while I’m alive?

  2. How can my daily choices contribute to actualizing these values?

The first question obviously presupposes an awareness of these narratives in their particular forms that manifest in my life. The second requires some strategy. But it really isn’t complicated. With sufficient practice in bringing awareness to these narratives and regularly re-orienting toward my highest values, it’s very possible to see enormous changes in nearly all feelings and behaviors. It isn’t a macros sheet, and I’m not going to hold your hand through every rep and set. But this is the first and only shift toward more intentional eating and living.

-Devin

PS. If you’d like to listen to the commentary where I speak about my process for writing this article and add some additional thoughts, but don’t want to listen to the full audio recording, you can skip straight to 32:00 in the audio and that will take you straight to to the commentary.

Thanks for reading. Until next time.