Emergent Fitness: The Easiest Way to Make Healthy Food Choices!

I have a confession to make: I know very little about all the myriad effects that factory processed foods and their ingredients have on the human body. People with far more impressive pedigrees than what I possess have plunged deep and wide into the murky ocean of scientific research to discover exactly what compounds and food products we need to consume and what compounds and food products we need to avoid. While I respect the efforts of these individuals, I think their work often leads would-be fitness enthusiasts down rabbit holes that they just aren't ready to go down (yet). While it might make for a flashy add or news article, most people don't need to worry about the latest research on the effects of raspberry ketones, the orac value of a strawberry vs that of a banana, or whether white potatoes are better for you than sweet potatoes.

We spend so much time fretting and stressing over the details that we often fail to count it as a blessing that we have the spare time and the disposable resources to care about the details.

In any event, I'm here to tell you that making healthy food choices is really, really, really simple.

Are you ready?

Prepare to have your mind blown!

You can meet virtually all of your nutritional and performance needs with whole cuts of protein and fat rich meat, poultry, fish, and eggs (the whole egg!), fibrous and nutrient dense fruits and vegetables, starchy tubers such as white and sweet potatoes, white rice (if your eating plenty of animal sources of food, along with fruits and veggies, you don't need a lick of the nutrients found in brown rice, or in any whole grain for that matter--plus you'll skip on the "anti-nutrients" found in the bran of whole grain foods), and you can use whole food sources of fat such as cold pressed virgin coconut and olive oil, butter from grass fed cows, avocado, and whole nuts.

Eat whole foods 80-90% of the time!

In short: Eat foods composed of only one ingredient.

That's it. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Now don't get me wrong here. I'm not trying to say that you should never eat anything that contains more than one ingredient. I am saying, however, that you can simply the process by which you live a healthy lifestyle by making whole foods the foundation of your diet (at least 80-90% of your food choices).

Who has the time to assess the healthfulness of every single ingredient of a Snickers bar, or of a slice of Domino's pizza, or of a fresh batch of homemade cookies? I certainly don't, and it's for just such a reason that I'd rather focus on that which I know to be healthy rather than on that which could potentially be healthy, unhealthy, or neutral.

Even if it's made of whole food ingredients, a cookie is still a cookie.
It's healthfulness is an emergent quality, and the emergent quality of a cookie (paleo or otherwise) is to cause me to overeat. :(

Think about how people are taught to tell a counterfeit dollar bill from a real one. People aren't taught all the various ways a bill can be counterfeited; rather, they're taught what a real dollar bill is supposed to look like.

In the same way, there are a lot of purportedly healthy and unhealthy foods that make up the interior of a grocer. You could spend a good chunk of your time worrying about these foods and their various ingredients, or you could simply follow the periphery of the grocer and pick out foods that are, generally speaking, unambiguously healthy.

But keep in mind too that no one food is healthy or unhealthy. Diets are either healthy or unhealthy. Lifestyles are either healthy or unhealthy. Our individual food choices are mere components of the whole emergent system that is "healthfulness."

Just worry about making 80-90% of your food choices "healthy" (i.e., one ingredient foods) and don't waste your time worrying about the other 10-20%.

No diet is perfect. No diet can prevent death. So stop worrying about every last detail of what constitutes "healthy" food. Just be thankful that you're alive and that you have the ability to pick and choose your food (some people aren't so lucky!).