Ok, so this will be a crash course to eating for muscle growth and fat loss, also known as eating clean. Obviously there is a spectrum here, and I am at the far right- I don't expect anyone to be as crazy with nutrition as I am. That being said, the farther and harder you're willing to go with it, the faster and longer lasting your results will be.
First things first- food is fuel for your body. That’s it. The purpose of eating isn’t to experience pleasure, in fact it’s the other way around. The pleasure you get from eating delicious food is an evolutionary adaptation that rewards your brain for consuming vital nutrients. Sugar and fat, which are excellent sources of energy, were hard to come by in the caveman days, so our tastebuds evolved to crave those tastes to make sure that we sought them out. Modern junk food (extremely processed foods not found in nature) is nothing more than the exploitation of this inherent propensity to seek out foods high in energy and nutrients. Junk food is a super-concentrated, super-addictive drug that acts adversely on the body in a number of ways. It messes with your hormones, your brain chemistry, your cardiovascular system, your bones, your muscles...pretty much everything in your body is negatively affected when you eat junk food. Sugar activates the same regions of your brain as cocaine. That should give you an idea of how powerful it is. Sugar is one of the most powerfully addicting drugs on Earth.
The number one thing you have to get accustomed to when eating clean is the separation of food intake and extreme pleasure. I’m not saying you shouldn’t enjoy eating, I’m saying that you shouldn’t expect all the food you’re eating to be an orgasm of flavor in your mouth. That is a strictly modern phenomenon that the food industry tries to make you think is natural, but it's not. Nature provides us with all the nutrients that we need. Cake, candy, chips, etc. do not exist in nature and are devoid of nutritional value.
If you want to know what the limit for sweetness is, look into nature. Fruits like berries, melons, apples, oranges, and bananas are the sweetest things you’ll find out there. These are the simple carbs - carbs that are broken down quickly in your body to give you short term energy (technically the fiber contained in fruit makes them complex carbs as well, but you get the idea). If you’re trying to lose fat, keep these as a smaller part of your eating routine to minimize your sugar intake. HOWEVER, the natural sugar in fruit is nowhere near as bad as the processed, refined, bleached white sugar that go into so many of our foods today, so it’s perfectly fine to eat a few servings of fruit everyday if you want. I eat like 4 bananas a day, but if I want to lean out a little bit I cut back and can see the difference within a week or so. The other kind of carbs are complex carbs, which take longer for your body to break down and utilize and in turn give you more energy - sweet potatoes/yams, squash, brown rice, couscous, oatmeal, beans, and whole-wheat breads/pastas are complex carbs. If you’re trying to burn fat, keep your carb intake low, under 100 grams a day (a slice of bread is about 20 grams of carbs).
PROTEIN is your number one belly filler, muscle maker, and fat blaster. When you tear up your muscles at the gym and get sore, your body needs to repair them with protein to make them bigger and stronger so they don’t get so torn up next time you lift the same amount of weight (which is why if you never intensify your lifting, either with more weight or higher reps, you’ll stop progressing). I try to minimize meat in my diet because I don’t like the idea of a murdering sentient beings for food, however I can’t deny the muscle I built eating meat products like eggs (yolk and all), lean chicken, turkey, wild caught fish and seafood like salmon, tuna, crab, lobster, haddock, swordfish, and trout (NO TILAPIA!! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON’T EAT TILAPIA!!). Unfortunately, our oceans are not as clean as they once were, so don’t be surprised if within the next 10 years the FDA recommends eating less seafood. Knowing what I know now, I would say stay away from red meat as much as you can, for the environmental impact alone. The farming of cows is destroying our planet in a lot of ways. Arnold Schwarzenegger recently said that everyone should go part-time vegetarian in order to save the world. I don’t disagree with him. Other non-breathing protein sources are nuts like almonds, cashews, pecans, pistachios, macadamia nuts, brazil nuts, and walnuts, seeds like hemp, chia, pumpkin, flax, sunflower, and sesame, and legumes (peanuts are actually legumes, not nuts). For nuts, try to go for a mixture of (unsalted) roasted and (unsalted) raw because some raw nuts contain compounds that mess with your thyroid if you eat too much. A WORD OF WARNING for nuts and seeds, watch out for added oils, added salt, and added sugar. You want to stay away from nuts roasted in canola/safflower oil and ESPECIALLY SOYBEAN OIL. If you see soybean oil, run. fast. Hydrogenated soybean oil is the main source of trans fat in food, and trans fat is one of the worst things you could ever eat.
Fats are the other big category, and they are often misunderstood. Fat in natural food is almost always good. Avocado, various seeds, nuts, legumes, and extra virgin olive oil are all very high in delicious healthy fats called monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats. Eating fat doesn’t make you fat. Eating high amounts of carbs does. Carbs are broken down into sugar in your body, even complex carbs like pasta, so that’s what you have to really watch.
VEGETABLES are the go-to food for ultimate nutrition, the greener (called cruciferous veggies) the better. Spinach (#1 super food!), broccoli, peas, carrots, peppers, tomato, mushrooms, brussel sprouts, celery, kale, cucumber, and onions (among many others) are all full of vitamins and minerals (and fiber that make you feel fuller) that make your body run better and flush out cellular waste (each person has around 37.2 TRILLION cells in their body, and each one of those cells poops out waste constantly!).
A note on dairy- I used to rely heavily on dairy for protein, but I gave that up and have seen nothing but improvements in my health. There is a ton of credible evidence coming out that the protein in dairy, called casein protein, actually promotes cancer growth in the body. It also contributes to mucus production which gunks up your whole system. I like to have the most up-to-date information on stuff like this so I spend a lot of my time researching, and as time goes by I find more and more studies that condemn dairy for a number of reasons, so I try to avoid it.
So alllllllllll that being said, the next step is actually putting it into practice. Food companies make this really difficult by writing things like “LOW FAT! SUGAR FREE! NATURAL! UNDER 100 CALORIES!” on their food packages. It’s all bullshit. Don’t get suckered in by it. The only thing that matters is the ingredient list on the back of the box. It goes in order by how much of each ingredient is present. If you look at the nutritional facts box and see it says 20 grams of sugar, you can look at the ingredient list and you’ll probably see a form of sugar in the first couple ingredients. Food companies use A LOT of different words for sugar.
For example:
Cane juice, Dehydrated cane juice, Cane juice solids, Cane juice crystals, Dextrin, Maltodextrin, Dextran, Barley malt, Beet sugar, Corn syrup, Corn syrup solids, Caramel, Buttered syrup, Carob syrup, Brown sugar, Date sugar, Malt syrup, Diatase, Diatastic malt, Fruit juice, Fruit juice concentrate, Dehydrated fruit juice, Fruit juice crystals, Golden syrup, Turbinado, Sorghum syrup, Refiner's syrup, Ethyl maltol, Maple syrup, Yellow sugar
So don’t let those bastards fool you. Anyway, nature doesn’t box foods, so if you’re trying to really eat a natural clean diet you’re going to have to do a lot more cooking and preparing, which sucks, but that’s the way it was always meant to be.
I hope this wasn’t really confusing, and if it was or if I missed anything or went too fast through any category please let me know and feel free to ask any questions!!