The Death of Protein, Carbohydrate, Fat, and Cursive
Do you remember when you spent an entire year in third grade learning how to write in cursive? Cursive was the shit. All of the letters went together, it was barley legible, the upper case “Q” oddly looked like a “2,” and for some reason your Grandma had penmanship like she was a ghost writer for the U.S. Constitution.
In the 80’s and 90’s people needed to learn how to write and the more beautiful your penmanship, the more educated you looked, so you wrote in this long, flowing cursive. Oh, hindsight, you win again.
Cursive is basically hieroglyphics at this point and I assume in a million years, the new humans will look back and try to decipher what all of those squiggly lines actually meant. In 2015, cursive is equivalent to drawing stick figures on a cave wall to understand why the sun revolves around the earth.
Everything evolves, computers exist, and cursive is extinct.
There also use to be this thing called an encyclopedia. It was 26 volumes, in alphabetical order, and contained all of the information, literally. If you needed to learn about vegetables, you went to the library, found the “V” for vegetable, opened the encyclopedia, and learned.
Now, type in “What is a vegetable,” and you will get a crowd sourced Wikipedia page and 174,000,000 other results of people that have written something on their blog about a vegetable. It is pure chaos. Who is right, who do you listen to, and is there really a need for 174,000,000 pieces of information to tell you about plants that grow in the ground?
I really love owning a gym. Unfortunately, at times, I feel like Bryan and I are fighting 174,000,000 people at once. The internet has so many quick fixes, perfect diets, and noise on noise on noise. Every time I hear, “Well I am paleo plus cheese and on Saturday morning I like pancakes and it is my cheat day so at night I eat paleo cookies mixed with gluten free, non-GMO funnel cakes. Oh, and on Tuesday’s, I am a Vegan and I use my Vitamix to juice tofu and black beans because I want to give my body a break from red meat.” I wish I had a product with a fancy name, a massive Google AdWords budget, and a T-shirt to sell but I just cannot find it in my soul to be a part of that world.
The real truth lies in simplicity and every single one of us already knows the answer. You do not need blogs or the internet or a fancy juice machine to be healthy. All you need is some common sense, commitment, and a true understanding of longevity.
Bryan, in a coaches meeting, stated “we should be teaching people to create habits that they will be able to replicate every day, six months from now.”
This resonated with me because six month’s seems so far away. You want results now, immediately, and for some reason, seeing 2016 seems like an eternity. But it is true. You WILL NOT be Paleo in 6 months, it is impossible, I have tried. You will not juice your meals every day in six months, it does not taste that good and it sucks not eating. Be honest with yourself, create habits that will last, not just the new hot website you found with the hot model that lost 20 pounds in a month doing cocaine.
Seeing through all of the noise is tough, but you already know the answer, it is so simple. Eliminate Protein, Fat, and Carbohydrate. They are too complicated. Replace them with Meat, Vegetable, and Starch. Meat will be defined as meat, vegetables will be defined as vegetables, and starch will be defined as anything else you put in your mouth. We are eliminating all nutrition labels because if you are eating food, you do not need to worry about percentages and calories.
You are going to eat 4-6 meals a day, all of which will be the exact same size and your plate will be split into thirds: 1/3 meat, 1/3 vegetable and 1/3 starch. A serving size is the size of your palm. You get one serving size of meat, vegetable, and starch at each meal. You will never have to ask, “Is red meat good, or can I eat a piece of bread?” Well, red meat sounds like it fits in the “meat” food group and bread is not a vegetable so it must be in the starch food group.
If you do this, consistently, forever, starting today, you will have mastered 99% of the 174,000,000 things that Google uses to tell you how to live.
You see, as a society, we have made things so easy that it has forced us to complicate humanity. There was never a tribe in the woods that came across a blueberry and thought about juicing it. It is stupid. Give someone a grocery store, the internet, and some options and we have the fattest nation in the world. It makes no sense. Just keep it simple, eat some meat, eat some vegetables, and eat some rice and potatoes and do it multiple times a day in small amounts.
Anything above meat, vegetable, and starch was created so you can pat yourself on the back when you go to sleep at night. Your juice blender, your botched paleo diet, and your over the top tofu burger are a security blanket hand woven by a blogger that writes in cursive. All you need is the basics. Keep it simple.
