The Wildly Asymmetric Impact of Diet and Nutrition
My alarm used to go off at 4:30 a.m. — a carefully calculated start time to ensure I could complete my extensive morning workout routine before going into the office at 8 a.m. For at least an hour and a half, often two, I would journey out on a bike from my home in Marin County, California, ride roughly 25 miles south to Muir Beach, then head back across the Golden Gate Bridge and through San Francisco before finally arriving at work. (And that was just “Part One” of my routine; I’d log another 15 miles on the way home.) At the office, I would down a Diet Coke and some Shredded Wheat while catching up on emails, and feel good — for a few hours, until my energy started to fade. Anticipating the crashes, I always kept a few more bottles of Diet Coke in my backpack to get me through. But each one I consumed delivered diminishing returns, and I spent most afternoons tired, moody, and stressed. I was really lovely to be around — just ask my colleagues!
I subjected myself to this routine because I liked the endorphins exercise produced, and because, to be honest, I was really hoping to see the results manifest in my appearance. But my reflection in the mirror never seemed to match the work I was putting in. I told myself, “I guess I’ll have to get up earlier and work out harder tomorrow.” It seemed that no matter how many hours I exercised each day, though, my body never really changed. I grew increasingly frustrated, and eventually resigned myself to the idea that I must just have bad genetics. I thought I would never see outward evidence of the fitness I was working so hard to achieve.
Unhealthy Habits
Throughout my younger life, without much guidance or education to the contrary, I had instinctively approached diet and exercise as blunt instruments. As a 6-foot tall, 150-pound high school sophomore, I wanted to make the varsity wrestling team, and the only open slot was in the 125-pound weight class. So I went on a severely restrictive — and in hindsight, disordered — diet, consuming just 900 to 1,000 calories per day. To put that in perspective, I was living on roughly a bowl of bran cereal for breakfast, an apple and a bagel for lunch, and a salad and chicken for dinner. I made the weight, but not surprisingly had very little strength for, or actual success in wrestling.
Sadly, this routine nonetheless became a habit, embedded deep in my now-anorexic mindset. I kept up a similar diet for nearly three years, even after I no longer needed to maintain the weight class for wrestling. It was not a fun-filled time in my life, to say the least, and I really struggled on the inside, both emotionally and mentally.
Then in college, I overcorrected dramatically, eating a tremendous amount of food — mostly complex carbohydrates — and amping up my exercise to compensate. I trained about two hours every day rowing on the crew team, and five days per week added an additional 60 to 90 minutes of cardio. Yet when we had our body fat measured as a team, mine had doubled, and was by far the highest despite working out longer and harder than any of my teammates! My workouts and diet consumed much of my time and energy each day, and I was still not in a healthy place.
After college, I rotated between long runs and bike rides, monotonous sessions on the stationary bike, and intermittent weightlifting. I qualified for my first marathon, in Boston, and was a top-level competitive tennis player. I also tried a series of diets, from Atkins to Paleo. But nothing seemed to change my body in the ways I hoped, and I was constantly exhausted to boot.
My low point came in 2015. I had very little energy, physically struggled to get myself up to exercise most mornings, and emotionally and psychologically felt down all the time. Even working out didn’t seem to pull me out of how I was feeling, so I started doing some research. I Googled terms like “low energy,” “afternoon crashes,” and “slowing workouts.” One online quiz asked me several questions about myself, including how I would rate my health on a scale of 1 to 10. I gave myself an 8. Knowing what I know now, I should have given myself a 3.
Lessons In Asymmetry
As I continued my research, I learned a tremendous amount about the unhealthy habits I’d adopted throughout my life.
Along with the newfound knowledge about my harmful habits and their impact on my relationship with my own appearance and overall enjoyment of life, I also learned something practical: there is a wild asymmetry between diet and exercise. Simply put, I had been spending hours and hours exercising when I could have made a vastly larger impact on my body and my energy by spending just minutes being more thoughtful about what I put in my mouth.
“I also learned something practical: there is a wild asymmetry between diet and exercise.”
I do not say this to downplay the benefits of exercise, which are extraordinary. Exercise is linked with improved cardiovascular health, reduced risk of obesity and other chronic diseases, stronger muscles and bones, improved mood, better sleep, and reduced stress, among many other benefits. I still exercise every day and highly recommend everyone do so, to the extent that they can and that it is healthy for them.
However, if you are looking for the smallest and quickest changes you can make to your lifestyle that will yield the largest impact on how you look — and more important, how you feel — you may be well served to focus first on your diet.
The Five Most Asymmetric Changes I’ve Made
Over the past 10 years, I have deepened my quest to learn everything I could about a healthier approach to my own diet and used my body as my personal laboratory in an effort to figure out which dietary changes have the greatest asymmetric effects for me.
Note: While each of these changes is backed by research, and each has improved my life personally, this is not intended to be a comprehensive blog on nutrition, and I am obviously not a doctor or nutritionist. Each person’s health is quite different. While I hope these learnings could have similarly positive impacts on your life, please be sure to consult your own doctor or nutritionist before making significant lifestyle changes or decisions.
“Being the best in the world requires you to set your standards higher, and to demand more of yourself than anyone else ever would.”
Some Not-So-Obvious Dietary Changes
Testing for food allergies. In my Google searches about feeling down, bloated, and low-energy, a term that surfaced frequently — and was, to me, surprising — was “food allergies.” I learned that when your body is intolerant to a food, you can experience everything I had been feeling intermittently for decades — inflammation, bloating, gas, indigestion, fatigue, brain fog, and joint and muscle pain. My tests revealed I was severely intolerant to gluten and several other foods. In today’s world, many people are aware they are gluten intolerant, but at the time, it was a revelation for me. At least 60% of my daily caloric intake comprised foods that contained gluten! Cutting out gluten was not easy — it is the star of the show in many of my previous go-to foods, including cereal, pasta, bread, flour tortillas, and crackers, to name a few, and is in many other foods, as well. But, as you may have gathered from my prior blog posts, I take my health very seriously, for better or for worse. So I went cold turkey.
The benefits of dietary changes can often be difficult to pinpoint, but for me, this was mercifully not the case. It only took a few weeks of eliminating gluten and the other foods to which I was intolerant to notice a huge change in my energy — and, for the first time in my life, I had a six-pack. It turns out my abdominal muscles had been there for years; they were just hidden by bloat and inflammation!
If you’re worried that investigating potential food allergies will mean never again eating your favorite meals, fear not. Eliminating these foods from your diet for three to six months is often enough to allow your body to reset, and many people can then add them back in, in moderation, without dramatically reversing their results.
Prioritizing the magical macronutrient: protein. There are three primary macronutrients: protein, fat, and carbohydrates [1]. Most people consume the majority of their calories from carbohydrates [2], and while carbohydrates are an important source of energy, eating them can spike your blood sugar. This triggers your body to produce insulin, which can create a feeling of fatigue followed by intense hunger. When eating simple carbohydrates — such as fruits, rice, white bread, processed foods, or anything with simple sugars — this blood-sugar volatility is particularly pronounced; such foods typically leave people feeling hungry again within one to two hours. In fact, eating foods high in simple processed sugars is one of the single worst things you can do for your health.
Eating protein or fat, on the other hand, can help you feel satiated for as long as three to five hours after a meal. Both protein and fat also mitigate the body’s blood sugar spike-and-crash response.
Protein is far less calorically dense than fat, containing only four calories per gram versus nine for fat, meaning you could eat more than twice the volume of protein than fat for the same number of calories. And as you may recall from Intro to Biology, protein is also the building block of muscle. So if your exercise routine includes resistance training — which experts say it should — then eating protein can help you build lean muscle mass. Each pound of lean muscle you gain, in turn, can help increase your resting metabolism — i.e., the more muscle mass you have, the more calories you will burn even when you’re doing nothing. Sounds like a pretty nice deal, right?
These days, I do not adhere to a severely low-carb or low-fat diet. Instead, I follow a simple rule of making protein the primary macronutrient of each meal, or at least eating some protein with every meal. Doing so stabilizes my blood sugar, keeps me feeling full, and helps me build lean muscle mass.
“I follow a simple rule of making protein the primary macronutrient of each meal, or at least eating some protein with every meal.”
Eating foods with low caloric density. Of all the studies on diet and weight loss I’ve seen, one by Dr. Barbara Rolls might be the one that has stuck with me most [3]. It found that most of us typically eat the same weight of food each day — between three and five pounds, depending on the person. Said differently, people feel satiated not by the number of calories they eat, but by the volume, or weight, of the food they consume. Therefore, if you’re looking to lose weight, you want to reach for mostly low caloric density foods. For example, four pounds of macadamia nuts has 13,000 calories, but four pounds of graham crackers has only 8,400 — and four pounds of apples has just 950. Eating foods with low caloric density is great because it doesn’t feel restrictive — just the opposite. You are actually eating more food, not less, yet you are significantly decreasing your caloric intake.
“People feel satiated not by the number of calories they eat, but by the volume, or weight, of the food they consume.”
Not surprisingly, high water content foods like fruits, vegetables, soups, yogurt, chicken, and fish have low caloric density, while low water content foods like chips, nuts, crackers, and bread have high caloric density. So if you want to drop weight without feeling deprived, reach for an apple before lunch, have some soup before dinner, or eat a banana for a snack instead of chips. This website has a good guide for the caloric density of common foods.
Obvious Changes That Are Not Commonly Followed
While the three changes above were somewhat novel to me, the next two were more obvious. Yet, like most people, I wasn’t following them.
Accepting you are intolerant to alcohol. I am sorry to break this to you, and I didn’t want to believe it before I gave it up myself, but alcohol is one substance that requires no food allergy test to determine its effect on your body and health. There is a tremendous amount of research on how alcohol negatively impacts our well-being. Much like a food to which we are severely intolerant, it creates fatigue, bloating, inflammation, and similar symptoms. But alcohol wreaks havoc in several other ways, as well. It disrupts your sleep, for example, and poor-quality sleep is associated with a slew of problems, including trouble focusing, irritability, and yes, weight gain.
Because alcohol is a diuretic, it leaves you dehydrated, and then severely bloated the day after you drink. It is also highly caloric — one shot of vodka contains roughly 100 calories, or roughly six times the calories in the equivalent volume of Coca-Cola. Finally, alcohol is a depressant, and can impact not just your physical health, but your mental health as well. Want a hack that will have a massively asymmetric impact on your life? Cut back on — or better yet, cut out — alcohol.
Drinking enough water. This one is the simplest nutrition hack of all. Often, when you feel tired, hungry, fatigued, or low energy, you are simply dehydrated. Before trying anything else shared here, try drinking more water. The benefits of adding more H2O? Better physical performance, improved digestion, reduced hunger, clearer skin, improved joint health, and the flushing out of harmful toxins, to name just a few. Water is abundant, free, and will improve your health as much as nearly anything else you can do, so drink up!
What I Wish I Had Known
If I could go back and give my younger self some simple advice it would be this: Be kind to yourself. Typically, the things that are kind to our bodies are the healthiest options, as well.
On those long bike rides to and from work, when I had plenty of time to ponder why I wasn’t getting the results I wanted in my body, health, or energy, things seemed so difficult. It was easy to write off my lack of results to genetics — or worse, the need to work out even more! But when I discovered the wild asymmetry between diet and exercise, I learned a healthier approach to my overall wellness, both mentally and physically. Today, by focusing on what works for me with my diet, I’ve reduced my exercise routine from that excessive two hours per day to about 45 minutes on average — and I am in better shape than I’ve ever been. My clothes fit better, I have more energy, and I am stronger than I was in my 20s. Most important, I no longer obsess over fitness the way I used to, because I’ve learned to take a more balanced approach that prioritizes how I feel. These diet changes are asymmetric because they require very little time, yet they have made a massive difference in my body, health, and energy.
I know this can be a sensitive topic — especially for those who have been through struggles with weight loss or body image. I hope the experiences I’ve had and the information I’ve gathered along the way are helpful to you! I would love to hear about your journey to a healthier place with your diet and appearance, and about any strategies or tactics you’ve found that make a difference in your life.
Best,
Graham
If you struggle with an eating disorder, help is available through the National Eating Disorders Association.
[1] Some dietitians also consider water and alcohol macronutrients. For simplicity, I am listing the most common sources of calories here.
[2] National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES)
[3] Rolls BJ, Bell EA, Thorwart ML. "Food intake patterns of self-reported restrained eaters.” Appetite, 1999 Dec; 33(3):333-40