You Are What You Eat - Literally!
Thoughts as of 5/30/2024
These thoughts have been percolating for a few months now since I first heard the concept mentioned on a podcast.
It seems so incredibly simple and obvious, and yet, after 25 years of living, I was and am blown away.
We have all heard the saying, “You are what you eat.” It sounds trite and meaningless, and until I heard it expressed in this specific way, I dismissed it as nothingness. In fact, I imagine most people do the same, and I am not sure the originator of the quote intended the meaning in the way I now interpret it.
As an athlete, I would always hear analogies along the lines of treating your body like a racecar. You need to take care of the racecar to make sure it is operating at peak efficiency. When it came to food, this was more so fuel for the racecar, or gasoline. You would not just put any old thing into a racecar and expect it to perform at its best.
Similarly, as an athlete who wants to perform at a high level, you should not eat junk food and expect to perform at your highest level. This makes a lot of sense to me because I can literally feel the difference in my energy levels and performance/recovery when I eat junk food and ice cream relative to minimally processed whole foods.
But this is where the profundity kicked in.
Food is not just what goes into the racecar as fuel, but food literally is the raw material from which the car is made.
You literally are made up of all of the things that you put into your body.
On some level, its like “yeah duh, what else would you be made of?” but at the same time, I had never thought about what I eat in that way, so I found it very profound.
Your body is made up of cells. Cells are constantly producing waste, decaying, dying, rebuilding, and growing. The only materials available for cells to be created and to develop and grow are things we put into our bodies, i.e. food, beverages, and air we breathe.
Another funny quote of this ilk is when I heard someone describe pregnancy as a woman 3-D printing a baby out of food.
There is much ado about processed foods, seed oils, chemicals, GMOs, and basically how the standard American diet is poisoning us all. This is pretty justified when looking at data over the years of obesity and disease rates and the impact of certain components of our diets.
However, what was lost on me was that not only is eating garbage food going to make you fat, the literal fat itself will be made of that garbage. Not to mention your brain cells, eye cells, muscle cells, hair, fingernails, skin, and everything in your entire body!
If there was ever to be an ad about being cognizant of what you put in your body, I think that would have the largest impact on my dietary choices.
You have a massive array of options when it comes to food/drink and what goes into your body. If you were going to build a house, car, any object that is of importance to you, and you could choose from all of the materials in the world, why would you not choose the highest quality materials you can find?
Now level that up and realize that we are talking about your literal body!
I don’t know, that was and is really profound to me and I had never considered it before.
For the most part, I try to stick to minimally processed whole foods that contain the ratios of macro and micronutrients that are close to what is found in nature and our millions of years of evolution have prepared our bodies to handle.
It makes me rethink drinking alcohol, or eating junk food and sweet treats. Even in choosing desserts these days, I would rather spend a bit more for something that is more freshly made with real sugar, real flour, and real eggs instead of ultra-processed shelf-stable equivalents found in the center of the grocery store.
Of course, I am not perfect and there are a million and one factors working against my desire to eat cleanly; however, this mindset shift of literally being what I eat and drink has added one additional point on the board for the good guys.