anyone who knows me knows that i’m a huge whole food advocate, but i confess, this hasn’t always been the case. i grew up in the 70s and 80s, a time when processed food was a part of just about everybody’s diet. cereal with milk in the morning, sandwich with deli meat for lunch and meat and potatoes (or a variation of) for dinner. my parents were health conscious but the information wasn’t as readily available as it is now, so it was canada’s food guide. so as i started to educate myself in my teens via bodybuilding books from the 70s and really the only source we had back then for current training, nutrition and supplements, bodybuilding magazines. flex, muscle and fitness, muscular development were our mainlines to the bodies of our dreams.
like a lot of people who were products of that culture at the time, i came to over emphasize the importance of supplements. in hind-sight those magazines were all perfectly crafted to warp the young teenage mind, and good for them, mission accomplished. this led me to not really making the progress i could have in the gym and the most of my triathlon career. i was more focused on powders and pills from the local supplement store than the actual food i was eating. this was a time of my life when i started to move around a lot, i got a job during the off seasons of a couple of my earlier years as a triathlete, working on the pipeline.
working on the line was pretty cool, money was good, which as an athlete came in super handy, and i saw almost all of canada, which makes me appreciate how awesome this country really is. i still trained 6 days a week, as no matter how small the town might be, theres a weight room somewhere, but heres where it gets interesting, my diet consisted of 3 or 4 meal replacement powders a day, everyday. id stock up on met-rx. myoplex or labrada lean body when we were in a town with a supplement store, and id be set for a month. while my coworkers were consuming the standard pipeline diet of coffee and copenhagen for breakfast, subway for lunch and then steak and crown royal for dinner, id be shaking and drinking.
so my standard day would be 3 or 4 meal replacement shakes for 38 yummy grams of protein, 21 grams of carbs and i cant recall how many pounds of aspartame and then a steak or chicken caesar for dinner id pick up after the gym. ok so not so bad short term while living in hotel rooms (and not the kind with kitchens) but the problem was this system fed on my laziness and after getting back home i was still on MRPs. this carried on for years, 8 or 9 to be honest. so what got me out of this lactose riddled haze?
i was done with triathlons and i hadnt found crossfit yet, so i was really just training for looks, having thoughts of trying to get into fitness modeling and i was lean but not as lean as i thought i needed to be to be taken seriously. i was still eating the same basic plan as above but with pres and posts and fat burners on top, training my ass off and couldn’t get that last little bit of fat off. so i had a conversation with my friend Ben Pakulski (whos now an IFBB pro), he asked to see my food log. when he did he literally laughed out loud, “dude you cant get lean on shakes, you need whole food” ok sounds good, next day i switched to whole food and never looked back. eggs, tuna, chicken, beef, bison and tons of stirfrys and salads, had never felt or looked better.
this was back when i was working for james fitzgerald at the first OPT (now OPEX) facility in calgary. James had been programming for me for 6 or 7 months before and continued to help me with my programming while i worked there. cool part of being around OPT back then is you could get your body fat tested pretty much whenever. i cant even imagine how many people James has tested body fat on, and hes was pretty good with the calipers so i was getting great data which was a huge motivator back then . i was stuck in the low 8s for awhile then in comes the whole food, under 6 in 3 weeks. James says “what the fuck dude? what did you change?” i said “i switched everything over to whole food”, he smiles “thank God!” james had been hounding me since we met to get off them (and i had for awhile but…), in fact his wife Leighanne used to clown me and my pre shake ritual of flicking the MRP so all the powder would be in the right spot when id tear into the bag. so needless to say my MRP habit was “a thing” .
that was in 2005, its been whole food all day every day since. big change for sure and ive never been so grateful for my ridiculous ability to make a decision and its like a new chip gets inserted in my brain and thats the way it is from that point forward. i still use whey protein post workout and sometimes through the day for a quick protein spike, and yes my vitamin and mineral, fat and fibre daily ritual is pretty extensive (idea for the next blog) but 5 or 6 whole food meals a day, everyday. i throw in a wendys double cheese with extra mayo on wednesday night, then on the weekends i have a lot of latitude to add in extra calories wherever i want as my body doesn’t respond well to the one big cheat meal.
i dont have the extensive science background a lot of my peers do, so while taking the precision nutrition level one course (strongly recommend it) i learned a ton about cellular activity and metabolism. i came to understand the science of why what i was applying was working so well and why my metabolism is faster than its ever been, at 48 years old. if your body spends less time and energy detoxifying, it can move forward at a faster rate. you are what you eat, literally. you’re built from the food you put in your body, give your body the best raw ingredients to start from.
oh one more thing, eat the highest quality food you can afford, when me and coach a first got together things were pretty tight money wise, but we still ate the best we could on our budget. weve been blessed to make connections with local farmers and the local meat processors and we can eat some pretty great food thats about the same as getting it in the grocery store. get tied into your local ecosystem, the benefits of eating from your own area are legit.