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- 8 Tips for Good Energy
Hey. I hope you had a fantastic weekend.
On Sunday, I got together with my family & had a thought-provoking conversation with my uncle.
We discussed the food system & observed that despite our efforts to educate ourselves, it can still be difficult to identify, locate, & afford healthy groceries.
Over time, navigating these choices becomes easier, but in today’s culture, maintaining a healthy lifestyle can feel like a part-time job.
(that’s a big reason why I’m passionate about simplifying wellness wisdom in this newsletter… but I digress)
Toxins like glyphosate fill our food supply, endocrine-disrupting chemicals penetrate most household products, & food ingredients seem to be more & more wild each year.
Take something as simple as bread, for example.
Historically, bread had just four ingredients: flour, water, salt, and yeast.
Now, grocery-store bread is a complex blend of enriched flours, seed oils, soy lecithin, and other who knows what else.
This example isn’t intended to be alarming, but rather to shine a light on the pervasive & systemic issue at hand:
Lobbying dollars & biased research studies are enabling food companies to push highly processed foods onto an increasingly sick population.
Take the NIH-funded “Food Pyramid” study, for example.
It ranked Lucky Charms higher than steak & Honey Nut Cheerios as healthier than quinoa.
How could this be possible? My speculation - just consider which is publicly traded 🫠
The next day, I listened to the most enlightening health podcast I’ve heard in some time.
On “The Model Health Show,” host Shawn Stevenson, interviews Dr. Casey Means, a Stanford-trained physician, & her brother, Calley, a health advocate.
Both are extraordinary entrepreneurs, as well.
Casey co-founded Levels, an at-home continuous glucose monitoring system, and Calley is the co-founder TrueMed - a payment platform that enables users to use HSA funds on preventative health investments.
Together, they are on a mission to help people understand the root of all health & disease: mitochondrial health - how efficiently our cells create & utilize energy.
Their new book, Good Energy, drops May 14 and explores the “Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health” (according to their subtitle.)
Based on this conversation & my growing belief that food is at the heart of either health or dysfunction, I cannot wait to read this book.
In the meantime, this interview covers a lot of ground, including:
How transforming the healthcare system is two-fold: personal empowerment & systemic change
How the healthcare industry makes money from chronic disease management
How to your body can create its own GLP-1: the hormone that new drugs like Ozempic work with
The serious problem with the mantra “trust the science”
And 8 tips to eat for good energy, explained below
In the interview, Casey explains a 5 & 3 framework for healthy eating that I found super helpful.
By eating more of these 5 things & avoiding another 3, you can be confident that you’re making good food choices for you, your family, and your mitochondrial health.
5 Things to Eat for Good Energy
Lean Proteins
Omega 3 Fats
Probiotics
Antioxidants
Fiber
3 Things to Avoid for Good Energy
Processed Grains
Processed Sugars
Processed Seed Oils
Here’s where things can get confusing.
There is an abundance of food labeled healthy that are loaded with the items Calley & Casey recommend avoiding - grains, sugars & seed oils.
Take this FitCrunch Bar for example.
I recently bought a box because I saw Robert Irvine’s charming face on a box and Dinner Impossible on Food Network was my jam growing up.
What might appear to be a smart choice because it’s “gluten-free”" & “high-protein”, is actually a bar of 20+ less than ideal ingredients - many of which are hard to pronounce, much less understand.
Depending on your health & goals, there can be a time & place for packaged products like this, but awareness is what’s key.
What’s worked best for me - is sticking to single ingredient, whole foods, for a majority of my diet. This naturally draws me towards the five food groups mentioned above (& away from the three to avoid).
For some context, here’s a quick view of what I ate Tuesday.
breakfast: eggs scrambled with cottage cheese, green onion, & basil
lunch: chicken meatballs with quinoa/rice pasta & goat cheese
pre-workout: Medjool dates & LMNT
post-workout: smoothie with coffee, raw milk, banana, protein powder, collagen, creatine
dinner: ground turkey stir-fried with zucchini & various lettuce fresh from the Gardyn: Butterhead, Red Sails, and Rouge D’hiver
writing snack: blueberries & piece of dark chocolate
No day is perfect, but this spread helped me feel good & focused through a productive workday, strong workout, & late night writing session.
My Gardyn popping off, making healthy choices 100x easier
At this point, you’ve probably heard that looking at your phone right before bed is not a good idea.
So let’s reinforce that (well-established) idea:
blue light = bad news bears for your sleep cycle.
But what if there was a way to remove the blue light from your phone?
Thanks to an Instagram video that my partner Nadine sent me, we’ve discovered a way to take almost all of the blue light out of your phone - which makes late-night phone use WAY less hazardous.
I’d encourage you to check the video below, but here’s the summary (for those with an iPhone).
Settings
Accessibility
Display and Text Size
(Scroll Down to) Color Filters - Turn ON
Intensity - almost all the way to the right
Hue - almost all the way to the right
Go back to Accessibility
Accessibility Shortcuts (at the bottom)
Click on Color Filters
Now, with a triple click of the right side of your phone, your phone can turn blue light off & red light on, making it less impactful on your circadian rhythm.
Thanks for reading!
If you get a chance to listen to the episodes, let me know if a specific moment or idea stuck out to you.
Wishing you a great week ahead.
Aidan