Dietary Principles

Within my own practice, and others I know, there is a striking dichotomy between people that find rules more helpful and those that find flexibility preferable.

Imagine, if you can, that you like chocolate candy bars and you also have a body composition goal to reduce your bodyfat. What is the best approach?

❌No chocolate candy, ever? 🍫

The rule offers simplicity and certainty. It spares you from the tyranny of decision-making. It eliminates doubt and enables consistency.

It also binds you. It stifles spontaneity. It might deny you some shared experiences with friends & family. It might trigger anxiety and unhealthy behaviours and thoughts.

✅Chocolate candy, sometimes? 🍫

This approach gives you flexibility. It does not oppress you. It respects your capacity to balance consistency with freedom.

It also means on any given day, any given hour, you *could* have chocolate candy.

What does a balanced approach actually look like? How do you choose? If you have decision fatigue at the end of a day or a terrible time at work or something similar, will this likely result in you making a choice that pleases you in the moment but does not support your goals? If yes, what next? Does the departure from your intentions undermine your confidence and commitment?

Rules vs Flexibility in practice

I am yet to discover a way to *know* what will work best for a person up front. Asking works well of course and some people do have the insight and self-awareness to know.

For others, I find a helpful approach is to:

1. Create a shared awareness of this dichotomy
2. Start out with flexibility
3. Plan a review
4. Assess whether the flexible approach is a good fit for your personality, goals, support and environment
5. Continue with flexibility if it is a good fit OR switch over to try out a rule

Do you know what works best for *you* already?

Link goes to a full size image, on Instagram, where you are welcome to ask or tell me anything.

Protein Principles for Optimal Health

There is debate over whether a high protein or low protein intake is most supportive of health. Advocacy for a low protein intake is typically based on concern that a higher protein intake will upregulate metabolic processes that accelerate aging and age related disease risk. There is some evidence for this albeit mainly in mice.

Set against this, advocacy for a higher protein intake is usually based on the certainty that higher protein intakes support increased muscle, and muscle is a highly current and long term health supporting organ, providing functionality (being able to *do* stuff), reducing the risk of injury, and acting as an endocrine organ, secreting myokines with multiple health supporting effects.

If you choose to prefer the higher protein approach, the key principles to apply are:

1. Total Protein Intake

There is a fair consensus that for actively exercise individuals, protein intakes of 1.4 to 2.0 grams per kilo bodyweight (0.63 to 0.9 grams per lb) is safe and supports improved recovery and adaptation to exercise

2. Protein Dosing Per Meal

There is a demonstrated increase in muscle protein synthesis from meals that contain a minimum of 25 grams of protein and 3-4 grams of the leucine amino acid, making this an ideal target to apply per meal.

You may read that there is a "maximum" amount of protein one can benefit form within a single meal, but initial research that led to this understanding was using extremely rapidly digesting whey protein. Slower digesting proteins and mixed meals will change that picture completely.

3. Protein Intake Timing

Since there is no effective longer term 'pool' of amino acids for the body to use, unlike stores of fat and glucose, and since there will be an upper limit to how much protein can be effectively utilised from a single meal, it is ideal to take in protein rich meals 3 or more times daily.

For example, if aiming for 100 total grams of protein daily, 3 meals each containing 30+ grams.

4. Protein Quality

The key quality features are how well the amino acid profile of a protein sources matches what is typically needed, and how much of the protein in a food will be digested and absorbed.

Great wholefood sources include eggs, muscle meat, organ meat, fish, bivalves (such as mussels), cottage cheese and some dairy.

It is possible to obtain sufficient protein for all the above from plant-based sources, with some caveats. One is that the amino acid composition is often less ideal in plant based sources compared to the better animal based sources such as whey, egg, fish and lean meats. One can address this by combining different sources and eating more total protein.

Secondly, wholefood plant based protein is usually bound up in a complex fibrous matrix that may render some of the protein undigested as it passes through the small intestine.

Last, plant based protein sources often contain more carbohydrate than protein. Plant-based protein powders can work around this issue.

Top plant based options include fermented soy products (tempeh, some tofu, natto) and lupin or lupini beans, which have a far higher protein content than all others. Mycoprotein, from fungi, is also a great option, for example, from the Quorn brand (available in the UK)

5. Protein Powders

Protein powders are not essential for most, but do provide simple and quickly available protein which can be consumed alone or mixed into a meal, shake or soup.

Protein powders will often not provide the added nutritional qualities - micronutrients and phytonutrients - that wholefood sources do, so they are ideally used as part of, but not the only and not the main protein source.

In addition to the popular whey and vegan blends suitable for shakes and smoothies, one can use savoury proteins such as beef, pea and pumpkin seed for adding to soups and dips and as the "flour" base for high protein bread.

> Link goes to the International Society of Sports nutrition Position on Protein and Exercise