Here are a few of our favorite Big Ideas + Other Cool Stuff from Week 1 of John Allen Mollenhauer's 4-week course Switch to Rich.
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The Context
John Allen Mollenhauer is a nutrition education trainer and lifestyle coach, and the founder of NutrientRich.com.
His mission: To promote his flexible, but optimal “Nutrient Rich” approach to healthy eating and revolutionize what it means to “eat healthy” as part of a resilient lifestyle.
He began promoting “Nutrient Rich®,” the new two-word buzz term for healthy eating, back in 2005, when the USDA Dietary Guidelines recognized nutrient density as the fundamental principle of nutrition and the nutrient-poor, low-cal low-fat, low-carb diet fads began to quiet down in the media.
To begin, he created The 3 Classes of Foods™ at NutrientRich.com
Here are a few of our favorite Big Ideas from Week 1 - Why You Really Want to Switch to Rich:
Big Idea #1: Are You Really Eating Healthy?
Ever thought to yourself, "I really should eat healthier?"
While that is true, it's likely that you subscribe to one of the many myths of eating a healthy diet. So even if your intention was to eat healthier, you could still easily deprive yourself of the necessary Nutrient Rich foods that it takes to perform optimally.
- Do you think vegetables and fruits are a side dish?
- Do you pride yourself on eating a "healthy" diet of grass-fed beef and chicken?
- Do you make sure to take your supplements every day?
Most of the common knowledge (especially in the diet industry) is wrong. Not only is it wrong, it's predicated on a false assumption. This false assumption is usually known as the Standard American Diet (or SAD), commonly known as meat, potatoes, and a veggie side dish.
Some people avoid the SAD and they try to eat healthy without knowing what that really means. They focus on eliminating calories or optimizing protein intake and they still deprive themselves of nutrients.
In fact, you could easily be using one of many "healthy diet tactics" and actually be promoting the opposite outcome: weight gain, energy drain, and faster aging.
Big Idea #2: A Better Way to Define Healthy
With so much information on eating healthy out there, it's easy to get lost.
To make eating a Nutrient Rich diet easy to follow, here are three classes of food:
- Nutrient Rich: A food that is rich in all the nutrients. These are water, fiber, phytochemicals, health promoting proteins, real carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals, and essential fat.
- Nutrient Poor: These are rich in some nutrients, but missing whole categories of other nutrients. These are the most deceptive, since they seem healthy. However, because they don't have all the categories of nutrients, it's likely that you will deprive yourself of some of the nutrients your body needs.
- Nutrient Barren: These have all of the nutrients stripped out of them. Only some of these are processed foods. For example, hummus is a great Nutrient Rich food that is also processed. Refined food, on the other hand, is almost always completely nutrient barren.
Changing your thinking and eating to this may seem like a huge step, but it's necessary. The diet industry, on the other hand, encourages baby steps which ultimately never solve the problem.
Big Idea #3: 3 Golden Rules
Here are 3 rules to keep in mind moving forward, in order to promote the best eating style for your health and longevity.
Nutrient Rich foods:
- Provide a vast array of micronutrients including the vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals that your body needs to function and perform well, without overwhelming the body with calories from protein, carbohydrates and fat, and in a health-promoting state.
- Do not provide what your body does not need from or added to your food in significant quantities. Examples of these are animal protein, cholesterol, saturated fat, refined oil, salt or sugar and unnatural chemicals like additives, preservatives and dyes.
- Are plant-based and eaten in a way that is as close to their whole natural state as possible in order to protect their nutrient integrity (i.e., can be eaten raw or be prepared with conservative cooking).
If this all still seems scary, remember that the main reason that you eat nutrient poor foods is that the lack nutrients.
This makes your body crave more food. On the other hand, if you give your body the necessary nutrients, then the cravings for a nutrient poor diet will go away.
Having said that, you can get overweight eating nutrient rich if you are eating “healthy foods” for the wrong reasons or when you are not hungry.
Other Cool Stuff:
Click here to join our community site, where we've setup a group to connect with other students in Switch to Rich!
Are you worried that you won't have motivation to keep your Nutrient Rich diet? John Allen has the answer for you:
John Allen Mollenhauer - Switch To Rich from Sandro Marino on Vimeo.
Find out about the latest news at the Switch to Rich Digest Blog
Want more from John Allen? Don't just change your diet, change to a Performance Lifestyle
Homework:
- Read and fill out the assessment in Wow, I Thought I Was Eating Healthy PDF and send it to chris@entheos.com.
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Follow along in the Switch to Rich textbook - everything can be found in your en*theos Library!
We hope you enjoyed and see you in Week 2 - What Makes a Food Nutrient Rich?
-The en*theos Team
