How to eat like a Normal Human

When people ask me about nutrition, I like to focus on two very simple and very objective boxes that we want to check every day.

They are:

Eating enough protein

Eating enough fruits and vegetables

These end up being very powerful and straightforward goals to focus on. They empower us in the sense that we focus on what we WANT to be doing, not what we want to avoid doing. A big topic here is that eating is zero sum. Meaning that if I’m really full from eating healthy food, I just have less room for cookies.

Additionally, these two goals are extremely impactful and give us a lot of the benefits we can derive from nutrition with not a ton of effort on our part. We just make good decisions, and then get chompin.’

What is “enough” protein?

This one is actually pretty straightforward. Enough protein for most moderately active adults is .7g of protein per pound of bodyweight. Meaning a 100 pound healthy adult should have 70g of protein per day. 200 pounders that fit this description should have 140g.

This amount of protein gives the body enough of the raw materials that it needs to build and rebuild all of its physical structures. At the end of the day, that’s why we should care about our protein intake. Our hair and nails, muscles, bones, organs, skin, and so on are composed of proteins and water. 

We need to make sure we have enough raw materials on hand to build and rebuild all these aspects of our body to the degree we need to. 

Imagine your body is like a house under construction.

If we don’t have enough nails, 2×4’s, cinder blocks, et cetera, then construction has to come to a halt. We do not want that.

Now does hitting this goal require you to bust out a food scale? Yes and no. If you want more precision, then absolutely yes, bust that thing out and get to logging. It’s not entirely necessary if you’re willing to pay attention to the nutrition facts on the food you’re eating. If you’re cracking eggs into a pan or making a protein shake, it will be really easy for you to know more or less exactly how much protein you’re consuming.

Most other scenarios involve some guesswork, which is fine if we remember that the number in question is a good minimum level of protein to be eating in a day. All else equal, more is better. So as long as we’re getting enough, then we’re good to go and more precision doesn’t necessarily mean more results.

Keep in mind there are several factors that might make you want to eat more protein per day than this .7g number. People who are more than moderately active, people who are sick or recovering from surgery, and people who are growing a baby or breastfeeding. Another prime consideration is that as we age, our bodies less effectively utilize the protein that we consume. So our protein intake should go up as our age does. Having a range up to 1g of protein per pound of body weight is very reasonable for anyone who falls into these categories.

Now I don’t care too much where the protein comes from but I do have some slight preferences:

Whole food sources are generally better than supplements because they come with more micronutrients (vitamins, minerals, etc.) and generally keep us feeling full longer than a powder. The counterpoint though is that a lot of us struggle to hit good daily protein quantity without a supplement. I certainly fall into this category. If you do too and the difference between you reaching that number or not reaching it is a supplement, then powder up.

The other preference I have is for protein from animal sources of protein rather than plant sources. 

Protein from another animal is going to be complete, meaning it has all the essential amino acids present, whereas a plant source of protein is incomplete, meaning it does not have all these amino acids present. 

Going back to our example on building a house, a complete source of protein basically means that we get every bit of raw materials on hand that we could need to build that house. This is achievable through plant proteins by mixing and matching our sources, but just requires maybe a little more planning. 

Say for example we had somebody only get their protein from peas or a pea protein supplement (an insane proposition, but I wouldn’t put it past someone on the internet). That person would only be eating some of the essential amino acids but not all of them. This would be the construction equivalent of having twice as many screws as you need, but no 2×4’s. 

You can build a house with screws AND 2×4’s, but not one or the other.

Also most animal sources of protein tend to be mostly protein (and some fat, which is okay), whereas a lot of plant sources of protein tend to be higher in carbs, which can be a little more problematic. 

All of that being said, these problems are far from insurmountable and just require a little more care and planning. I would never try to convince someone to not be vegan, vegetarian, or whatever. But again, those paths just require a little more care and planning in order to be done well from a health perspective. However at the end of the day, there are many paths that lead to the top of the mountain.

How much is “enough” fruits and vegetables?

There are a lot of ideas and recommendations out there on what a good amount of produce to eat on any given day is. I’m a fan of 800 grams per day. Now that initially strikes people as a weird number so let me explain. “The 800g challenge” is an idea initially started by E.C. Synkowski of OptimizeMe Nutrition with the basic idea of getting people to focus on upping their intake of fruits and vegetables.

After working with that 800 gram number myself for a while and recommending it to a lot of my clients, I can say that there are a lot of merits to it, not the least of which being that it can make weighing and measuring food a much less daunting task for someone who has never done it before. This is because we’re just taking the physical weight of the food in question, as opposed to weighing it and then translating that weight into how many calories or how many of each macronutrient we’re working with. The number on the food scale is all we keep track of, and at the end of the day we want to have more than 800 total grams of produce consumed.

Let’s talk about why.

The micronutrient density of these foods is probably the most significant reason why. Put simply, this means that the amount of vitamins and minerals in these foods is really high per serving of the food. This means you don’t need to eat a lot in order to get a lot of nutrients. This is great because these vitamins and minerals are what the body needs for healthy growth, development, and disease prevention, among many other functions.

Another great aspect of making a game out of hitting 800g of produce a day is that you will naturally start to prioritize heavier foods. You would need to eat mountains of spinach in order to get even to 100 grams, but replace that with black beans or potatoes and all the sudden 100 grams becomes a piece of cake (figuratively speaking of course).

Now the benefit here comes from the fact that while physically heavier, the foods in this example still aren’t very calorically dense compared to any ultra-processed food. Research shows that the heavier a food is, the more satiating it will be when you eat it. Meaning that it will make you feel fuller for longer.

Traditional diet protocols might emphasize leafy greens like spinach and while certainly they’re great, maybe counterintuitively to some, a plain white potato might be a better option. This heavier option that the whole 800 gram game tends to emphasize will leaving you feeling fuller while still controlling for calories.

It also encourages a very inclusive way of eating. There are really no bad fruits and vegetables when you get down to it. Oftentimes people ask what counts for grams with this particular concept. If you can get it in the produce section at the supermarket and it’s not ultra-processed, it counts. This means that potatoes absolutely count but potato chips do not. Even the organic, colorful, well-marketed chips that are twice the price. Those aren’t potatoes, they’re chips.

But by sticking to real fruits and vegetables you will naturally start to explore different foods, encouraging variety in your fruits and vegetables because our brains crave novelty. This means that you’ll naturally rotate through different options, maybe based on what’s on sale at the moment, maybe based on a recipe, or maybe based on what just looks cool.

This will expand your eating horizons and simultaneously make sure you’re getting a lot of different nutrients, while keeping your eating fun and fresh in every sense of the word.

Conclusion

And there are your two guiding principles.

Eat enough protein
Eat enough fruits and vegetables

That’s all you need to get the majority of what good nutrition can unlock for you. Track it however you want to: with an app, with a notebook, with the notes on your phone, whatever. Make a concerted effort and be consistent with it. Let me know how it goes.