the best nutrition advice, if only it were actionable

It really is about diet, exercise and rest, but knowing only that isn't very helpful

This week we’re welcoming my father, Tom, to {unprocessed} as a recurring contributor. The kernels of knowledge I started picking up about how the food we eat impacts our mind and bodies started when I was in middle school (circa mid aughts) and can be attributed to my parent’s health journeys. Watching them toss out the conventional knowledge at the time (this was peak fat-free everything) and learn through trial and error is a huge reason why I’m so passionate about these topics. I can think of no better contributor to this Substack than one of the people who supported me to get to where I am today - Emily

When the old formulas no longer work

It was roughly 20 years ago and I was being rolled on a gurney into the testing area for cardiac patients. I remember it being sunny outside, a truly nice day, as part of the gurney stroll was outside. Sun beaming down on my face, blinding really.

I woke up that morning to a resting heart rate that would not drop below 120 bpm. I couldn't sleep, and no amount of relaxing or even willing it to go down did anything. Married, and having a long history of pushing myself to exhaustion, I suggested to my wife that, yet again, I may have a problem that requires a trip to the hospital. I’d ruined another sunny day.

I was approximately 42 years old. 50 to 60 pounds overweight. A new partner at a boutique consulting firm and I wasn't really very good at it. Dieting (again); exhausted. Between the weight of my financial and business obligations, and, well, my weight, my body had said enough. You get a lot of time to think on a a gurney if you are conscious for it. I wasn’t dying or in cardiac arrest, so not exactly the first priority of a cardiac unit. But there I lay, heart thumping along at 120 bpm, wondering: what am I doing here?

Diet and exercise, right? I was doing all the right stuff. Watching what I eat, sleeping 4-5 hours a night, exercising at 6am or 11pm every other day, minding what I ate from each hotel’s breakfast and in-room service menu - what could possibly go wrong?

And laying on that gurney, it dawned on me, the reason I sucked at my job and the reason I wasn’t healthy were the same. I didn’t have a deterministic model for getting the results I was looking for. As in, if I do a, b and c, I get result d, every time. I would have even settled for a probabilistic model: I do some proportion of a, b, and c and 80% of the time I get d. That would have worked. But I was doing a (dieting), b (exercising), and c (resting) and it got me to d, the hospital. And thus, I went on a search for a formula. In the area of nutrition, it has taken me the better part of 15 years, and that is the journey I will post about occasionally on this Substack. Think of it as a practitioner’s view that you may, or may not, get something from. As that latter is a real possibility, I’ll do my best to keep it interesting.

A bit about me, for context, and only this once: I am now approaching 62, and, for the moment, objectively healthy based on the numbers. I recently left management consulting after 30 years, 25 of those traveling in the range of 120-150 days per year, a meaningful amount of that time outside the US wherever US companies were trying to deploy operations or make acquisitions. I like math. Done right, it provides objective goals and actionable feedback. Nutrition is about math. There is quite literally no mystery to it, and many programs try to shield us from it. But laying on a gurney in the sun with your heart literally revolting at what you are doing has a way of stripping away how you feel about what you have to do, and looking for a formula that works.

Drop a comment to let us know if you’ve experienced moments that were pivotal for your health and food journey. What other aspects would you like to learn more about?