A Friendly Nudge - Context & Nuance Matter
...because we all could use a little encouragement!
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Context and nuance matter but they’re not catchy.
Clickbait promises simplicity and the inside scoop:
“Eat these 4 things to blast away belly fat”
“How my body changed when I did 100 pushups a day for 30 days”
“Doctors don’t want you to know about this super food”
Like I mentioned last week, “there’s no such thing as a free lunch” and that means there are no magic potions or super foods, no overnight body transformations. An exercise approach that might be perfect for a reasonably fit 30-year-old could be a disaster for a 70-year-old who is more than a little overweight and just starting their exercise journey.
Your body is doing what it was optimized for over millions of years of evolution and it’s not a big fan of change.
It’s doing its best to keep you alive and part of that is making sure you don’t starve to death during the next ice age or even just a tough winter.
From an evolutionary standpoint, fat was like having an extra fuel tank on a stretch of road with no gas stations for miles.
When food was scarce our distant ancestors didn’t spend much time in a caloric surplus, it took luck and effort and it was almost always short lived. Now we have to be deliberate to avoid being in a perpetually over fed state.
This is where context and nuance matter.
This is why I don’t obsess around weight loss. I pay attention to what I weigh but I don’t get maniacal about it.
I’m not worried about having 6% body fat. Which is fortunate for me because that’s not happening. But what I am interested in is staying metabolically healthy and hanging on to as much muscle as I can as I age.
For me, that means prioritizing real food like meat, fish, eggs, veggies, unsweetened dairy and fruit and taking it easy on nachos, ice cream and german chocolate cake. Nutrient dense foods make it a little easier to manage my weight than calorically dense foods. 200 calories of steak hits different than 200 calories of german chocolate cake. Same caloric impact but completely different from a satiety stand point.
In the spirit of full disclosure I did have left over nachos from the Super Bowl party for lunch today.
But I also had the delicious and nutritionally dense Italian Sausage, Cannellini bean & Kale Soup for dinner– that’s this week’s food video.
I made a version of this soup years ago and I’ve been playing around with it to get it dialed in. Jude and I love this version, I’m betting you will too.
Ingredients:
3-4 Mild Italian Sausage
4-5 stalks of celery chopped
1 onion diced
3 cloves of garlic minced
Small handful of spaghetti broken into pieces
2-3 handfuls of chopped kale
1 qt chicken stock
1 can diced tomatoes
1 can cannellini beans drained
1 fat pinch of italian herbs or herbs de Provence
1 fat pinch of salt
1 fat pinch of cracked red pepper flakes
1 handful of Italian parsley
In a large heavy bottomed pot, heat a couple of tablespoons of olive oil and then brown the sausage. I only had 3 links, but next time I’ll use 4 or 5.
Just sear the sausage and then remove and slice into bite sized pieces. You’ll add it back in later.
Break up the spaghetti and add to the hot olive oil, add the onions, garlic, and celery and stir to keep any of it from burning.
Add the sausage back in and add salt, herbs de Provence or Italian seasoning and red pepper flakes.
Add the beans, tomatoes and chicken stock and bring to a boil.
Add the kale and let simmer for 5 minutes. Check the temp of a piece of sausage and make sure it’s over 165℉. Stir in the Italian parsley.
Serve topped with a generous amount of Pecorino Romano or Parmigiano Reggiano.
Enjoy!
Now that we’ve got a few of your meals figured out, let’s put together a week’s worth of exercise snacks.
You can do them sequentially for a circuit or do them individually as snacks. Please skip any that you don’t feel ready for.