How thinking foods are "bad" impacts us
Hello everyone, welcome back to the podcast. Today's topic is something I will back until the end And you'll notice I mention it, I talk about it in maybe different ways as well. For you to have a life that you're not catastrophising, you're not stressed about food and stuff, you have to see food as neutral. There's no good and bad food, it's just more nutrient dense and less nutrient dense. And some of you might be thinking, so what?
Speaker 1:I can say food is bad if I want, and I can listen to these people online like this Eddy Abou guy who says everything is bad and maybe things are bad. But that's not what the science says once you've got your calories and protein in check. You can have a diet that's so called bad. But if you're trying to lose weight and you're your calories and protein, it's in a deficit, you're going to lose fat, you're going to maintain as much muscle as you can, your health markers will improve, you don't have to have a perfect diet, and actually trying to be perfect with your diet goes against you and you end up having a worse diet because doing three or four days or two or three days a week where you're like what we call on it and then the rest of it you feel guilty and bingy, there's not other way to live. So there's a lot of psychological stuff going on there as well about the stress response, and I've covered stress response in podcast before, but in short the stress response can be turned on through pure cognition only, so you can just think about something and it can be as stressful as a physical stress, like maybe you get scared physically or you get attacked physically or you think type of stuff versus thinking about it, you can elicit the same stress response.
Speaker 1:And we know a consistent stress response on all the time is very damaging for our health. It increases our stress hormones and glucocorticoids, increases the risk of heart disease, increases the risk of us wanting to eat more calories and food because the stress response is so expensive. If you think about its mechanism, it is designed for you to get out of there and survive so your digestion stops, for example. That's why you feel like you need to go toilet, whatever, you need to get rid of it, get out. There's no waste of energy, it's going to the muscles, adrenaline's pumping, you need to get out of there, you need to go.
Speaker 1:And we can turn this on multiple times a day based on absolutely stupid stressors out of our own doing. Some of these stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid stressors are stressing about if you've had a chocolate bar or not, if you've had an ice cream or if you've had some chips, if you've a biscuit. You are not meant to turn that response on for that thing. This is the worst catastrophisation you can do and there's no wonder you're battling a huge appetite and always feeling potentially bloated and down and tired because the stress response is so expensive that when it turns off, the baldy needs to recoup the energy that is put into that response. And that's why your appetite flies up, and that's why we want high calorie foods, high sugar, high fat, high salt, high calorie foods, because that's going to give us the energy quicker.
Speaker 1:You really need to stop catastrophizing. You really need to stop catastrophizing over foods. I've got a study to prove it's your perception of the food being bad that causes more damage than the food itself. Are you ready for this? Because if this doesn't help you see, guys I don't know what else to say.
Speaker 1:So good and bad, and the mindset is looking at the placebo versus the nocebo effects. So scientists have known for a while that if you believe a treatment will get them better, even if it's a sham, it might help you, it's known as placebo effect. Painkillers, for example, painkillers work better if they're more expensive, painkillers work better if they are more specific, even also the same drug. Painkillers work better if the design is slightly more expensive as well. So, you know, like Nurofen might work better for you than the 29p Tesco version, which is the same drug.
Speaker 1:So the placebo can work in terms of pain and stuff like that. The nocebo effect is the opposite. It means just believing something is harmful can sometimes bring about adverse outcomes. A recent study from the Queen's University in Kingston, Canada believed that a so called bad food is unhealthy may worsen its impact. So just believing food is unhealthy will worsen the impact of the food.
Speaker 1:So how did this study work? They measured blood levels of several health markers in 25 women aged 18 to 30. They were doing assessment forms, measured feelings of stress and shame, as well as performed ultrasounds of the women's brachial arteries to assess their, And this is a word you probably use, endothelial function or endothelial function. And what endothelial is a layer of the cells that line your blood vessels. So the researchers say a healthy endothelium helps blood vessels remain relaxed and flexible, allowing blood to flow easily.
Speaker 1:When it becomes damaged, doesn't function properly. Blood vessels can become overly stiff and narrow, raising your risk for heart disease. Okay? So what did the study do? On two occasions, study participants were asked to report to a lab while fasting.
Speaker 1:During each visit, they were given a milkshake to drink. Then researchers measured the women's health markers again. The milkshake was the exact same milkshake for both visits. However, the women were told each beverage varied in nutritional content. So same milkshake, but this is what they said.
Speaker 1:One milkshake was very unhealthy vanilla milkshake. It had 540 calories, 14 grams of fat, 80 grams of sugar, 20 grams of protein. The healthy milkshake, okay, or the healthy nutrishi shake they called it, was a hundred calories, four grams of fat, three grams of sugar, and 10 grams of protein. But it was the same milkshake, it was the same unhealthy milkshake, five forty calories. So the only difference was they were told one of them was healthy and one of them wasn't.
Speaker 1:Here's what the study found: When women consumed the unhealthy milkshake, the endothelial function worsened. This didn't happen when study participants consumed what they thought was a healthy nutritional shake even though both drinks contain the same calories, fat, sugar and protein. Think how crazy that is, and that's only the thing they looked at. I can't imagine all the other parts of your body that are negatively impacted because you think you've damaged yourself by eating foods you think are damaging. Foods are not damaging by themselves, you can have a milkshake, you can have an ice cream sandwich, you can have ice cream, you can have crisps, it's your overall nutrition that matters.
Speaker 1:And if your calories are controlled and your protein is hit, okay, like you can add fiber in there if you want, which is a nice one to have, but you know start with calories and body first, you've got no problems. You can eat these foods. But if you believe that by eating them you're going to get damaged by them and they're bad, you are in fact doing the damage from that perception itself, not from the nutrition of it. And you could say well obviously there must be some bad foods. Anything is bad in excess.
Speaker 1:Obviously I have three milkshakes in a row, I can have three chocolate bars, I can have loads of unhealthy foods as we call them, because we call them unhealthy because they're higher in calories, sugar, fat, whatever, but they're easier to consume. That's the problem with them, is like can I stop at one serving? For me personally, I have these foods every day. I have a lot of fruit, have a lot of protein, but I also have my chocolate bars, I also have my Oreo ice cream sandwiches, I also have a lot of that stuff and I don't catastrophize it. So therefore I'm not having this negative health impact from these singular foods, but you will if you think they're bad.
Speaker 1:Fearmongering doesn't help people with their eating choices. This is backed by science, backed by top coaches and everything around the world. It just doesn't help. It makes things worse, It makes things way worse. So when you start be seeing or hearing people say, you can't be eating this, you can't be eating that, you need to tell them straight, just shut up.
Speaker 1:Okay? Just shut up about it. You don't even realize you're actually causing yourself damage by thinking that those foods are bad. Because let's be honest, there is not a single human being on his planet, at the profit of maybe one person or 10, that doesn't eat foods, doesn't have alcohol, doesn't drink these other people think it's bad. And even today people are saying the foods that are bad, it's like absolutely laughable what people are saying.
Speaker 1:They're saying foods are bad, like oh it's processed, it's bad. No it's not. No it's not. Just because something's processed doesn't mean it's bad. Loads of foods are processed that are high in nutrient quality.
Speaker 1:Yogurt is highly processed, very, very good nutrition. Whey protein, very good nutritional profile, ultra processed. There's other things that are ultra processed that have got good nutritional profiles. Not only do we not get it right by the fact that that food is less nutrient dense, we actually mistaken high nutrient dense foods for bad foods because we think bad is processed. There's no scientists coming out and trying to rectify this because the system of defining it is off.
Speaker 1:What people really mean is foods high in fat, high in sugar and high in salt are potentially foods we need to limit and obviously we all agree on that because we find it hard to control eating them. But it doesn't mean you should eliminate them and it doesn't mean you should demonize them and it doesn't mean you should say they're bad and it doesn't mean you should beat yourself up when you consume them because you're just making everything worse. So you just feel bad and you're gonna eat chocolate, you're gonna have a milkshake, you're gonna have fish and chips, you're gonna eat a takeaway, you're gonna have a Chinese, you're gonna have Chinese chicken balls, you're gonna have tikka masala, you're gonna have these foods again in your life. There's no doubt. And if you're not, you are lying to yourself and you are living in a delusion essentially.
Speaker 1:Know, there's no way. Like, let's be real here as well. Who wants to live a life where they think that having some of the food, the nice foods in our lives that we really like is gonna be bad and we want to sit around the table and be one of those people that says to people you can't have that's bad for you, you can't that's bad for you, can't eat carbs, it's bad for you, can't do that's bad for you. Do you understand how damaging that is? And especially if you've kids around, and I've talked about this in other studies, when you talk to your kids about food at a young age, girls as young as eight, right, I want them to lose weight because their mothers are talking in such a negative way about weight and weight loss stuff.
Speaker 1:It actually seeps through to their brain. They're already thinking about weight loss at eight years old. Highly damaging. So imagine when you're talking about stuff you can't have this, can't have that why. Instead of telling kids you can't have chocolate bars bad, you need to rephrase it.
Speaker 1:You need to say you need to have lots of variety of foods and you need to be moderate in them. Why? Because your body will be stronger and powerful when you have more nutrients and you get nutrients from a range of foods. And these foods, you can eat lots of them which means you can't eat as much of the other varieties. So if you want a chocolate bar, can have the chocolate bar but you need to make sure whether we have the others, the other colours as well.
Speaker 1:And you go through the veggies, go through the meats and stuff like It's a better way to go about it. This way of thinking, perception is reality. Perception causes negative outcomes in your health. It causes potentially increases your levels of inflammation from the stress. And that's what's going on.
Speaker 1:So how do we remove this judgmental approach when it's so hardwired into you? This is real. This is the next thing. And I'm in the WhatsApp groups and I see the language you use sometimes to speak about yourselves, guys. You need to be careful.
Speaker 1:Okay? There's no foods have got nothing to do with your morality. They are neutral, they are unrelated to self worth, they are just it's just a bunch of nutrients. That's it. It is so black and white like that.
Speaker 1:It doesn't need anything else. It doesn't need labels on top. Like the Stoics would see many things like this, material possessions, they would strip back. They would say wine is just old fermented grapes. You could see a luxury leather bag as a dead cow.
Speaker 1:You can strip it all back and it's just like cool, neutral about it all. It's our own perception that adds all this extra stuff to it. And I think it's important that when we're looking at what's the priority, our energy intake is a priority and our protein is a really important nutrient. It doesn't mean fats and carbs aren't important, it's just that if we typically get our energy intake and our protein nutrient in check, other things just fall into place regardless of if you're having chocolate bars or not. I think I rambled a bit there on that one.
Speaker 1:I think it's something that I've seen so many people, I've spoke to so many people, helped so many people, and it is mainly women, it is mainly people who have been in Slimming World and Weight Watchers and diet clubs and have tried every single diet known to humankind and used to super fast weight loss, used to all sorts of things. The people I see that finally break free, it is the same breakthroughs in everyone. You know, it's it's it's kind of like there's a code to break free. You know? And the first code is and this is why one of the early tasks is to eat that food that you deem a bad food and to not have any catastrophizing thoughts about it and to break that chain on that, to break that habit of that.
Speaker 1:Really getting into psychology here a lot, we're really getting into why we binge eat, why we self sabotage and stuff like that, like what the hell is it all, what is going on? And a big part of it is that you've got core beliefs that have been injected into your brain by other people magazines over the years. Sometimes when you're younger it is really pushed in. We've never fact checked them, we've never really looked into them much, we don't really want to see what they're about, and we run our lives off these core beliefs and it sometimes takes time to unravel them, but the only time we can unravel them is when we run an experiment without bias, without guilt, we want to do something that's objective as well, we want to remove our preconceptions. This is so difficult, like when you think about even we've got the election coming up in The UK, to be able to remove your beliefs and things before trying to have an open discussion with someone about politics is very difficult.
Speaker 1:We already have got our core that we work from and that sometimes blinds us to maybe some objective truth. It's the same here with our nutrition. A lot of you are going to I notice a lot of people sign up to the app, they get given their calories and they straight away change the calories to what they've had previously. It kind of defeats the purpose of trying a new method because it's going back to your old ways that clearly haven't worked because you are here. So it's not about panic and reducing calories, it's about let's see what this is about, let me experiment, let me see what the data says.
Speaker 1:There's no point trying to roll back to what you think you know, because what we think we know about nutrition, for most of you listening, is completely wrong. And I say that because when we go back in the fitness industry to the 90s to the early 2000s to the 2010s and you've got these researchers, you've got these key people who've done all research and done these books and I've had the debates with these charlatans about like is the insulin causing you to gain weight and carbs are bad, fats are bad, sugar is bad, All these people, they've all been debunked over the years and if you follow the trends and you see what's going on, it's the same trend coming around but there's a different enemy. So for example the main guy that was pushing the can of O Keto diet, Paul Saladino, he is now completely rebranded, he's no longer the Carnivor keto guy. Do know why? Because his doctors actually told him, he looked at his blood, he's not actually healthy, that eliminating 95% of foods and just focusing on meat and stuff isn't actually the best way to live meat.
Speaker 1:Now all of a sudden he's changed everything, he's no longer a carnivore keto and he's adding fruits and veggies and stuff into his diet when he was demonising them for years because he was making so much money from it. But the money wasn't worth it anymore, maybe he's made enough money now that his health is more important so therefore and he can't live that lie anymore. And this is the same with all of them. And what you might be saying to me is well Scott, surely what you're saying is potentially a method or potentially a way to live. It's not a diet, nothing I'm saying is telling you what to eat.
Speaker 1:What I'm saying is the important parts are the things we can't move away from are just scientific facts. If you want weight loss you need to be eating less energy than your body needs, that's the only way that you're going to lose weight. If you want to retain muscle, one of the only ways to do it is if you actually need the protein intake and you need some stimulus, it's just facts. There's nothing more mad into it. I'm not saying you need to eat only beef protein, which other people will say it's not, or chicken protein or plant protein, I'm not saying any of that, I don't go further than the fact.
Speaker 1:I don't do it. It's the same with the calories and stuff like that, I don't go further than the fact that it is calories. I'm not saying you should have calories only from things your grandmother's grown and all this stuff, it's just calories. If some of you have got a diet higher in ultra processed foods and stuff like that, that's fine, at least you're actually doing the main things, at least you're actually doing the calories and protein which is what you've been missing out on all your life. And now you do that and you realise oh my god I'm getting results and I'm still eating biscuits and stuff, I'm still eating chocolate, this can't be right.
Speaker 1:Yes it is right. It is right. Yes over time you will want to improve your nutritional quality but that's going to have to come from you inside, That's going have to come from your own intrinsic motivation to do it. Like actually, I've got control now, I've lost weight, I'm feeling good, and now I actually want to eat better because why wouldn't I want to put more nutrients in my body? Let's go, let's do it.
Speaker 1:You don't need me to tell you that. If you need me to tell you to do that and you're forced to do it, you're not going to do it. But if you've got this complete flexibility and freedom to have days of 80% you're eating foods that are considered out of process and then some days it's like 20% of your food. It varies because you've got social plans and stuff. Do you know what I mean?
Speaker 1:When I look at my diet, I'm like, there's most of my days are good and there's some days absolute junk and yeah even my calories are way beyond. But when I look at my averages I try and make that in check over time and I look at the averages as the main thing. I'm like yeah okay I've got a huge day yesterday calories wise, it just means I've to have a bit less now the rest of the week and I've to focus on my protein and stuff like that. I'm not beating myself up about it. Yeah if you've been thinking about these things I hope that's helping you, hope it eases you and I hope you don't think this is not true because the research backs it for decades.
Speaker 1:We've got enough information now that shows negative view. Like for example, the body positivity movement has come from the fact that negatively shaming yourself has got devastating consequences but you're negatively shaming yourself physically, you're negatively shaming yourself food wise, they're not too far from each other. The psychological damage is going to come from both. So we must not do this to ourselves. I hope you don't do it yourself.
Speaker 1:Hope you feel like you should be more careful. You should be guarding your mind a bit more. The Stoics and Epictetus, one of the famous Stoics, would have a really good about this. He goes, If someone comes up to you in the street and tries a steel temple note of you, you're guarding that temple note, you're trying to say, No, I'm not giving it to you, you're on defence or your handbag or whatever, you're on defence, you're physically guarding it or you're watching it or when you're walking on the street and it's very uneven, you're making sure that each step is carefully done so you don't twist your ankle. But then he says but when it comes to your mind, you let anyone invade your mind.
Speaker 1:You let anyone come in and fucking poke shit in your mind and twist it and turn it and switch her up. And you think twice about it. You don't think how crazy it is that in the physical world you're defensive, but in the psychological world, which is probably more important or equally as important, you'll ever run hard work. So where is your guardian of the psychological part of you as opposed to just the physical part of you. I think it's a really important thing to think about, like what are you learning through your barrier in the brain?
Speaker 1:What shit do you learn in your brain? It could be shit on the news, shit on social media, the stuff you talk with your friends. You've got to be careful, you've got to really be careful. So food for thought as they say. I'd love to know what you think in the group and I'd love to know if anyone's had any breakthroughs on this good bad stuff and how it's helped you in your life.
Speaker 1:I'd love some personal stories about this to feature on the podcast but other than that guys I hope you have a good day and I'll speak to you soon.
