What I Eat Daily To Feel Great And Why You Shouldn’t

Today I’m going to tell you what I eat in a day.

I also want to make a point, but more on that later.

My average day consists of 3 meals and some pre meal snacks. 

These meals vary quite a bit in the actual ingredients which go in to them but the general template remains the same. Easy.

If you want the full recipes just send me a message here and I’ll send them over to you.

Do I eat anything else?

Not really, 

I sometimes play around with the style (ie. I might make dinner into a soup) and I’ll certainly swap out some ingredients for variety but the general template remains the same. I’ll add in some lean high quality meat, organ meat, fish or eggs from time to time.

Should you eat like this?

ABSOLUTELY NOT.

Not because I’m some superhuman who can do things others can’t.

But because I’ve spent literally decades training my friends, building the skills, the habits, the tastebuds, the tricks and the lifestyle which allow me to eat like this fairly effortlessly. 

For me this isn’t extreme at all and requires no great sacrifices or hardship…in fact I really enjoy both the taste of the food, the simplicity of cooking it and the freedom it allows me.

But it took me a long time and a LOT of failure to reach the point where eating like this is easy for me.

Doing that I learned…

Good nutrition is a skill which is much more complex than simply changing your diet. 

Let me show you why…

You need to:

• Find the right shops, 
• Make time to go to the right shops, 
• Manage your social life,
• Train your friends to accept your new habit,
• Organise your kitchen,
• Learn to cook, 
• Organise your life and job to enable you to stick to it, 
• Change you identity to one which will stick to it.

Knowing what to eat is actually the easy part

I can give you a list right now, which if you followed it, I guarantee would see weight drop off, have more energy, sleep better and feel amazing. 

But most people would fail, feel awful and then blame it on a lack of willpower or just being weak. 

So where should you start?

Well obviously I’m biased, but the best place would be my Re-Ignite Your Nutrition Course here >> which although primarlily a weight loss course is really just a great nutrition course (the 2 things are the same).

But for those of you who aren’t interested, here’s what I’d do.

Before you even think about an actual nutritional program there are other steps you need to prioritise. 

You don’t need to master them yet…that will come along the way, just start thinking about them for now.

STEP 1 – Identify Your Why?

First understand why you want to lose weight, why you want to feel great, why you want more energy.

You have to make this real. 

I’m lucky, I absolutely destroyed my health when I was 37 and the misery of those next 6 years left a scar so big it’s really easy for me to turn down junk food, because I will NEVER feel like that again. 

The bigger you can make your why the better. Most people here choose something to run towards, thoughts of what they will be able to do when they are slim and full of energy. 

The human brain works in negatives.

It’s much more powerful if you can create a compelling image of what you really don’t want, 

• Where you will end up in 5, 10, 20 years if you don’t change things, 
• What about your current situation disgusts you and you just are not willing to put up with again…ever.

And then start running away from that.

When you can combine a compelling positive and a highly vivid negative vision it becomes highly motivating, but…

Spend most of your time focussing on the negative.

• Some people put a picture of them at their fattest up on the fridge.
• Some create a dream board of all the things they’ll be able to do when they feel and look the way they want to.

You have to find something BIG to move you. 

This is why, at Re-Ignite, we use adventure to motivate people, the inspiration it provides often gives them their big why.

Even then, this will only get you so far. There will be days when even the thought of this isn’t enough, when you’ve had a bad day and you just think “fuck it” and reach for the ice cream…

So you need more…

Now these next few steps are the ones which everyone misses so listen closely. 

STEP 2 – Rebuild Your Lifestyle 

You have to rebuild your lifestyle to allow you to eat like this…

…before you start eating like this.

This might mean some pretty big changes.

For me it meant going bankrupt and moving back in with my parents when I was 43.

Now I’m not suggesting you have to do anything that radical but for some of you it may mean evaluating certain life choices:

1. Do you want that promotion or do you want to feel great?
2. Can you afford to live on a little less money if it means losing the weight? 
3. Is there a way you can reorganise your life and work to allow you the extra time and the mental bandwidth you’re going to need to learn this new skill?
4. Are there aspects of your life you’re prepared to sacrifice?
5. Are there friends you’re prepared to lose? (This happens sadly, it’s amazing how many friendships are based on a shared love of self destruction)

If the answer to these questions is no and has no possibility of becoming a yes, you’re probably not going to manage to stick to it. You need to get real about what it’s going to cost you to get to where you want to be and be prepared to pay that price.

Of all the questions above no. 3 is the one many struggle with. 

Because the answer to this may well be no and there maybe simply nothing you can do about it at the moment. 

You have to figure this out before you move any further. 

This may take time. 

Why Is This So Important?

Hold your breath until you pass out.

Can’t do it right. Why not?

Because breathing is vital for your ongoing survival, your brain has an automatic reflex which makes it impossible to stop yourself from doing it.

Guess what?

Eating is vital to your survival too.

This means if you’ve built a lifestyle around yourself which is so stressful or allows you too little time to adequately prepare and organise your eating, when time goes to zero and someone puts a cookie in front of you, you’ll eat it.

At this point willpower is irrelevant, this is simple survival.

For me, creating this lifestyle shift, meant giving up everything I love to move back in with my parents…now mine was an extreme case where I was in real trouble, but I want you to see how big a change this may need to be.

And yes living with my parents at 43 wasn’t ideal, but…

Whenever we want a better future, we HAVE to risk our lives in the present to achieve it.

Now I don’t mean put yourself in danger of death, what I mean is you have to sacrifice some of the pleasure of the present day for the success of tomorrow. 

As a general rule the more you sacrifice the greater the success.

• Want more money? Work harder today and watch less Netflix, 
• Want a 6 pack for the summer? Start working out in winter rather than going to the pub with your mates, 
• Want be 10 kgs lighter in 2 months? Start eating well now and stop going to the pub.

It’s a universal law,

Do not take this lightly. 

You are literally risking EVERYTHING. 

You’ll never back get the time or the life-force you invest into trying to achieve it. Ever.

Understand this and determine what you are prepared to sacrifice, what you are prepared to go without. 

Then once you’ve decided, if you’ve put enough on the line…

You’d better make sure you win.

STEP 3 – You Are Wrong About Nutrition (And Everything Else!)

The model you have constructed of the world is not even close to being correct. Don’t worry…neither is mine or your partners (no matter how much they may insist it is!).

Our brain is bombarded by 4 billion bits of information a second, it actually takes in about 2000 of those. The rest are filtered out.

It then uses those 2000 bits of information to create a representation of what’s out there and feeds this recreation to you in the form of what you see, hear, taste and so on.

What you actually experience is only the brains interpretation of a very limited amount of data of what is actually out there.

Our entire perception of the world is missing the majority of information needed to actually know what the true world looks like. 

• You see only a tiny part of the full spectrum of colours
• You only hear a tiny percentage of sound waves.
• You can totally miss things right in front of your nose if you are not focused on them.

Yet this is the only way you have of experiencing the world.

The brain itself sits locked up in the dark box of your head. 

The world you are experiencing is its incompletely recreated hallucination of the pre-filtered information it is being passed by your senses. 

It is a far cry from reality.

For example, sounds don’t actually exist. The real world is silent. 

A sound is simply changing air pressure. Your brain interprets that change in pressure and makes a noise in your head to represent the change. 

Again I stress…your perceived reality is based on your brains interpretation of the limited information it is receiving. 

What you think of as the real world IS NOT reality. It’s not even close.

And your reality is going to be very different from the reality of the person next to you.

Russians see 8 colours in the rainbow as they see blue as 2 colours.

What this means is: 

You can NEVER know the real truth about any given situation. 

You are simply lacking too much information. 

Remember how we said the brain is being hit by 4 billion bits of information a second but filters that down to 2000.

What decides which information gets filtered?

Your brain prioritises the information it uses to form its representation based on what is important to you.

How does it decide what’s important to you? 

It uses 2 filters:

Filter 1 – It prioritises information which reinforces your current model of the world (It Reinforces your beliefs).

This is why beliefs are so powerful.

It’s a bit like the Facebook algorithm. Once you ‘like’ something the algorithm will go and find other bits of content like that and discard the rest, reinforcing your original belief even further.

In the algorithm of your brain if a bit of information comes along which contradicts your beliefs the brain will create a story to tell you why this isn’t true, either that or it just won’t give you access to that information at all.

This means we’re literally blind to which of our beliefs are correct (if any) and which are wildly wrong.

Why? 

Because the reality our brain presents to us is formed based our existing beliefs. We literally cannot see what we don’t believe in because our brain will have filtered it out as irrelevant.

However, we all “know” that our own reality is the correct one and simply cannot understand when other people do not see it so. This is why we often think we are the shining beacon of light in an insane universe and if only everyone thought as we did the world would be much better place!

Filter 2 – It prioritises information which will help you achieve your goals.

Which is why having clear, conscious goals is so important and why Step 1 is the first step we took.

Once your brain knows what you’re trying to achieve it turns into a heat seeking missile, prioritising anything which can help you and flagging it up in neon lights in the hallucination of reality you are experiencing.

Interestingly this is a more powerful filter than the first filter I talked about. 

Which is why chasing goals can lead you to places where you are pretty uncomfortable. The brain will start presenting you with information which, while it helps you achieve your goals, may well contradict your deeply held beliefs.

When enough information is presented in this way your old view of the world simply cannot stand up under the weight of evidence. Your model of reality collapses and your world view (your beliefs) need to be reworked.

This is generally a very uncomfortable process and can lead to a time of self reflection and feeling utterly lost as you try to integrate this new model.

So why am I going down this rabbit hole?

Because you most likely have a seriously fucked up model of reality when it comes to nutrition. 

Now a lot of this model will have been formed by the marketing and the outdated science you were fed growing up.

Some will have been formed by your past experience.

Maybe you’ve tried eating plans which didn’t work, or where you felt extreme discomfort as you were literally starving to death or having to eat food that tasted really bad. Maybe you’ve done a diet plan, lost all the weight at great cost to yourself only to see it all pile back on again with interest. 

Meaning you have now built a reality where eating right is really hard.

If your model has been built to incorporate these as truths, even when you experience evidence to the contrary, your brain will explain it away by telling you some story around it.

Your brain has built a mental model (a belief) based on this interpretation and so for you it literally becomes an unshakeable truth.

You probably have a whole load of other untruths and unhelpful beliefs around this topic.

So you need to spend some time analysing your beliefs around nutrition and really question if given all evidence these beliefs are unshakable truths or just stories your brain is telling you.

A way to spot these is to look for the beliefs which have highly implausible stories as the only evidence behind them. 

Often this evidence will be presented in a way which ONLY supports your belief. If there is no counter evidence, this belief becomes a prime suspect. 

Life is rarely black and white.

Just by noticing them you’ll take the first step to destroying them as your brain will now be on the look out from evidence to counter the belief.

Let me give you an example.

I used to believe that making money was hard. 

All my life I’d had to work my ass off to earn a living. 

The evidence that this belief was BS was all around me. I had friends who earned a lot of money and didn’t work very hard to get it. 

It didn’t matter. 

My model forced me to look for the rich parents, the breaks they’d had in life, the petty reasons it had worked for them whilst blissfully ignoring the fact that many of them had made some very smart choices at some point in their life.

According to my incorrect model of the world the reasons it created for me made perfect sense and so reinforced my belief and meant I didn’t have to look any further.

They were lucky and privileged, I wasn’t. My brain was content it had sorted this problem out and done it a way where I didn’t need to feel bad about myself. 

Job done.

On the other hand, I was still skint.

It wasn’t until I forced myself to examine this belief in detail that I spotted the glitches in my carefully constructed Matrix. 

I started to educate myself as to how money really worked (I provided evidence to my brain which was closer to the truth of how money works). 

This was a painful experience, as it forced me to accept the reason I was skint was entirely my fault. Which is why my brain had provided me with this incorrect model in the first place, to keep me happy.

So now I had a choice. I could grow and integrate the pain caused by the new model and maybe improve my situation. Or I could stay where I was, not struggle, definitely remain content but also remain skint.

I chose to update my model.  

Was this new model perfect? Did I become an overnight millionaire?

No, but as long as it kept moving closer to the actual truth of how money works in the real reality, I’ll keep getting closer. 

Did it make me more miserable? 

In a sense. 

I now know that the responsibility for this lies with me. 

That hurt as I had to contend with feelings of failure, a loss of self esteem and all that comes with it. 

When the dust settled, I also realised that it wasn’t the world which had put me in this situation it was me, so I could get myself out of it.

This was deeply empowering.

Do you see how this works? How your brain is only trying to help. 

How it’s constructed a reality and stories around your weight to keep you happy.

You can definitely remain content in your current situation or you can gamble and build a new model, but there is no guarantee if you do that it will work, as it’s unknown. 

It may make you miserable and keep you fat. 

In fact the first few times you go through this process it will almost certainly make you more miserable and have no long term effect on your waistline or how you feel.

Your model, whilst getting better, will still be too far away from the truth to actually have an impact (remember nutrition is a skill and skills take time).

You often have to go through this process several times before you start actually seeing a difference in your life and the metal process of constantly updating your model can be pretty tough…it can also be pretty amazing once you understand what’s going on.

So Step 3 is to accept that your model of reality simply cannot be true, you are missing too much information. It’s just the reality your brain is presenting you with, from there start identifying your limiting beliefs around nutrirtion and commit to updating them.

Step 4 – Recognise You Hate Yourself And Make Peace With It

Now that you understand Step 3 it’s time to face what is real. This will be hard to hear.

You disgust yourself.

This is totally irrational and undeserved but it’s true all the same.

We humans are born with a gift called consciousness. It allows us to do all sorts of incredible things, like dream of a better future, create beliefs and form values about how we should live our life.

It also allows us to see when we break those values.

Time, after time, after time.

Each time we break one it shakes us, deep in our core.

Now for many of us we’ve seen ourselves break these values so many times that a kind of self loathing has developed where we simply don’t think we deserve anything good.

This is a special kind of disgust reserved only for ourself. 

• If your dog poos on the floor you’ll roll your eyeballs and within 5 mins you’re giving it a treat and everything is forgotten about. 
• When you say a misplaced comment to a friend…you haul yourself over the coals for hours. Inevitably ending at the conclusion you’re just a bad person.

I’ve written extensively about this here, so I’m not going to go over it again, go read that, or don’t and just take my word for it. 

The point is, because of this deep seated self disgust, you feel you don’t deserve to be thin, to feel and look great, to have unlimited energy and so will continue to self sabotage your attempts to become so until you can change your version of reality to one where you deserve to be thin.

YOU MATTER DEEPLY.

You just need to let your brain know that.

Step 5 – Build Resilience

Without the mental resilience to: 

• Accept the fact that some of your friends aren’t going to call you to go for a McDonald’s or to the pub anymore (and your slow realisation that this formed the bedrock of your friendship). 
• Accept that the friends that do stick with you are going to try to tempt you off the track as they are scared what your success would mean for them…”go on just one won’t hurt, you deserve it after the day you’ve had”
• Ignore the pack of biscuits endlessly calling your name from the cupboard.
• Get back on the wagon after you have fallen off…again, or to cling on to the wagon when it’s careering out of control.

Without that mental toughness you simply will not succeed.

And I’m sorry to say most people in this day and age (maybe this has always been a thing but I have a suspicion it’s getting worse as life gets easier) are weak.

You need to sort your shit out and start being what you’re truly capable of. It starts one baby step at a time.

Ignore that voice in your head telling you that you deserve it, that one won’t hurt.

It will…

Maybe not on your waistline or how you feel immediately. But it’ll add more fuel to the fire of that disgust you feel for yourself, make you feel less deserving of acheiving all the things you want for yourself as you fail yet again.

I don’t care how you do it but you need to start pushing your comfort zone, building strength in the face of adversity…just start. 

Take up a sport which scares you, face un unknown situation, do something new…anything to push your comfort zone a little. Again this is why we base our experiences around adventure sports…to expand comfort zones.

This is one area of life the benefits of which will spill over to every other.

This may seem like an impossible task. Remember this is a skill. Skills take time to learn.

Celebrate the wins, analyse and learn from the failures.

Slowly over time as you resilience improves, your self loathing will start cutting you some slack. 

One day you might even realise that you really do matter deeply and so damn well better start looking after yourself for the good of everyone on the planet.

Brief Interlude

A lot of you will be looking at the previous steps and thinking, “that’s a tonne of work.”

Yes it is, but here’s the thing. 

You only need to get the ball rolling now. 

Just by understanding these steps you have made movement towards achieving them. 

Take 10 mins now and just sit with the ideas presented above. Feel out which ones seem most real to you and explore them a bit further, re read the passage if needed and really ask yourself how it applies to you. 

If you come up against resistance from your brain that’s a sign you’re on the right track and should push a bit harder.

Then every now and again re-read these steps to keep the ideas at the forefront of your brain. Thereby priming your brains filters to start looking for a better model of reality.

As you start to implement the Steps below, movement will create momentum. 

As you start stacking up little wins the steps themselves will become easier and easier and your goals can become more and more ambitious. 

Build each step a little stronger as you move through the program.

Step 6 – Your Nutrition Plan

Now, and only now, is it time to decide which nutrition plan you’re going to follow  (again I’m biased but the plan I’ve built is here >>).

Signup to the program of your choice and get a copy of all the literature which goes with it. 

Use that to work out what ingredients you’ll need, what meals you can also cook for your family, where you’ll buy all the foods you need, can you get them online as that will save time and mean you don’t have to trawl round multiple shops. 

• Are there any you can prepare and then freeze? 
• How easy is it to eat on the go and so do you need backup plans for when you’re caught out.
• Does the plan include backup plans for when you’re caught short? 
• Does it look like you could eat like this for a long time, do the meals look appetising?

Now get real with yourself.

Will this work for you?

If it won’t then either work with the creator of the plan to make it work for you or if that’s not possible ask for your money back and pick another nutritional plan.

Step 7 – Iterate And Learn

Continuously reinforce step 1-6 as you work through your program.

…

Will this be easy. Hell no. Nothing worth doing in life is.

Will it change your life in thousands of positive ways, most of which you can’t even see yet…absolutely.

My aim with this article isn’t to put you off, it’s to try to make you realise why most nutrition plans fail. Not because the pain doesn’t work but because you don’t give yourself a chance to succeed from day 1.

I hope this has been a message of hope, made some of you realise you’re not doomed to failure you’ve just been approaching the problem wrong.

Trust me once you get the first steps in place, acting on and seeing results from Step 7 is child’s play.