Imagine an Exercise Scientist, a Billionaire, and a Buddhist Talk Shop About Nutrition
Keeping the Wheel of Nutrition Spinning--As You Like It
Jeff Bezos is often asked about work/life balance. As he describes it, to view it as balance is not quite the right approach. Instead, he sees it as harmony or a circle. Work should be energizing for non-work life, and non-work life should be equally energizing for work. They propel each other. Balance, in his view, is to say that there are two opposing forces tugging at one another.
As I’ve discussed, there can be a bit of a disconnect between fitness and nutrition. In fitness, especially with regards to manipulating body composition, there’s plenty of focus on calories and protein—as there should be—but often it’s like fiber, saturated fat, and micronutrients don’t even exist. By contrast, in nutrition—and when I say “nutrition”, I’m largely referring to the commercial nutrition space—there’s little acknowledgement of how important different modes of physical activity are for healthy living, as well as how nutrient and calorie needs change with different activities.
Just focusing on one half of this circle is akin to getting behind a large, upright tractor tire and giving it a good shove and then sprinting to get in front of it so that you can slow it down. You’d effectively be speeding things up in one moment just so you can slow it down in the next. It’s gonna be a hell of a lot of effort for minimal progress.
However you want to look at it—the entire picture of nutrition and fitness as a balance or a circle—it’s not a tangible goal that can be achieved once and forgotten about. Rather, it’s an eternal work in progress.
If we do random things and hope for the best, then we’re likely not to see any meaningful changes. Sometimes, we just don’t know where or what to do or what to focus on, so we first must learn some basic principles. With those principles in hand, we can develop a sense of self-awareness and reflect when and where needed to improve a specific area.
If Mr. Bezos is right about how different areas of life reinforce each other, we can also think of nutrition and physical fitness as a circle and not as separate, dichotomous entities, which is how I like to think of it all—a circle, a wheel, a yin and yang.
In order to achieve this health-fitness-nutrition circle, then, we can apply some principles of sound nutrition to physical fitness, and apply some principles of fitness, exercise, and movement to nutrition and healthy eating as a way to bridge the gap between them.
In weightlifting, one important principle is the idea of autoregulation.
Eric Helms, PhD., is kind of a rock star in evidence-based fitness. He’s another one of those practice-what-he-preaches kinds of guys. He’s an exercise scientist and professor, a science communicator, as well as a pro natural bodybuilder, a powerlifter, and a coach for both. Dr. Helms wrote his dissertation on autoregulation, and as the opening lines of the abstract define it: “Autoregulation is a training approach where adjustments are made based on the recovery, performance and readiness of the individual. By providing greater individualization, autoregulation may optimize muscular adaptations.”1
His dissertation and doctoral research focused on autoregulation as it applies to powerlifters and their training, but it certainly is just as applicable to other modes of training, be it other forms of resistance training, such as with standard muscle-building work—that is, hypertrophy—as well as power work, which is explosive, as seen with the standard Olympic lifts. Autoregulation can also be applied to cardio training, be it sprinting or endurance.
To oversimplify it, imagine you’re going to the gym, and you’ve planned to do a squat workout with a higher load and lower rep scheme, using a weight where you can do no more than five reps. However, you’ve been feeling a bit run down and beat up lately, and pushing that amount of weight isn’t appealing at that moment. Autoregulation makes you aware of this fatigue and allows you to modify the plan, and one way you can do it, in this example, is to decrease the load to something that is less demanding and just add more work sets to make up the difference in the work volume. Another idea is that, instead of doing squats, you jump on a leg press machine. You can do both. You could even move the workout session to another day and/or swap this session with, for example, an upper body session.
One driving idea with autoregulation is having the self-awareness, a sort of mindfulness, to know when you can crank it up and when you might need to dial it down, when to speed up and when to slow down, when to push ahead and when to pull it back, from day to day, week to week, and even month to month. You make adjustments in such a way that you are optimizing training and performance with where you are and how you feel at any given point. After all, you know your body better than anyone else.
Autoregulation is an example in weightlifting of larger umbrella principles of calibration and titration—zeroing in on what works, and it’s a principle we can just as easily apply to nutrition and eating.
To be fair, nutrition literature has similar approaches, but they don’t quite apply the same as autoregulation. For example, there’s mindful eating2 and intuitive eating3.
Mindful eating—borrowed from Buddhism’s mindfulness—is deliberately paying attention to our food and developing that sense of self-awareness about our eating habits: which foods we tend to eat, where, with whom, in which settings, how much, and other drivers like eating cues and triggers, and really, why those are the cases. Mindfulness attunes us to our eating patterns.
Intuitive eating is an approach that gets us more in touch with our hunger signaling, appetite, and satiety cues. Each of these is important, but with autoregulation, we’re also talking about intentionally making adjustments and to individualize things for the better.
We’ve all had meals that just didn’t hit the spot. We’re not quite satisfied. On the other hand, maybe we ate something that was palatable and delicious, and it hit the spot that way, but it’s just not sitting well with us.
Sometimes, the culprit is obvious: I should not have eaten dessert.
Sometimes, not so much.
You may have figured out a meal plan that keeps you in energy balance, but it’s not quite keeping you satisfied. In this situation, you’ll have to make an adjustment or resign to the possibility that if you stick with this menu and meal plan, you may not be happy with it from an appetite perspective, which we know isn’t any formula for long-term adherence and consistency.
On the other hand, maybe there’s no structure to how you eat. Everything’s on-the-fly, willy nilly, whatever’s nearby or easy. If that’s you, how often do you feel good after eating? How long is it before you get hungry again?
You might ask yourself what is it that isn’t quite satisfying? Is there a certain level of fullness that you like to experience that this meal isn’t providing?
Example: I love rice, but I know I can’t use it on its own for satiation and satiety. Rice is a bit calorie-dense for the volume it offers. I would need to eat a few cups of it to hit a stomach volume that I’d be happy with, and as each cup of cooked white rice has about 260 calories—which is, by the way, cooked without butter or oil—it’s easy to see how a couple of cups or more can easily add up the calories. And a couple of cups is not a lot of food. The same goes for sushi, which I also love, but I would need three or four rolls to feel satisfied in terms of volume, but a single roll is all the calories I need.
If you’re like me, and there’s a certain amount of food volume you’re after, you’d need something larger and more calorie sparse, not as a replacement but as a complement. Foods like starchy and refined carbs are great for palatability, but those are not the foods we eat to maximize stomach volume, especially if we’re keeping an eye on energy intake. It’s simply too many calories compacted in a small space. Sure, you can fill up on mashed potatoes until you reach the “I’ve-had-enough” point, but by then, you’re likely in the surplus energy territory.
This is a simple example with autoregulating in regard to food volume, but it can be applied to anything we eat and drink. The larger signals are hard to ignore, like gluten sensitivity for some people, as another example, but a little bit of too much bloat from a bit too many carbs and a bit too much sodium—as in some restaurant pasta—might not be so obvious.
Also, these examples are focusing on filtering out some of the negative effects, but we should also respond to the positive ones. If you eat something, and you feel good afterwards, think about why that’s the case. Was it the perfect volume? A good mix of nutrients and macronutrients? Variety in textures? Was there a power-punch of spice? What is it that you enjoyed about it? If you can pinpoint one or two of those features, you can repeat them in your next meals.
Ultimately, what we’re trying to do here with our nutritional autoregulation is maximize satiety and satisfaction, through foods we enjoy, while simultaneously getting a wide variety of nutrients. We want to maximize satiety and health. Don’t eat what someone else tells you because it’s part of some fad diet.
In nutrition literature, “satiation” is defined as the meal coming to an end on its own volition.4 All the anti-eating or inhibitory signals kick in. Ever notice how food flavor seems to diminish as a meal progresses? The first bite is always the best, right? With each passing bite, the food’s efficacy gets pared down. This is part of the satiation process. Some people try to repeat the power of that first bite by introducing new foods, flavors, and intensity and concentration of energy and flavors as the meal continues. (Here comes dessert!)
Satiation has several working parts, physical ones like the stretch receptors in the stomach, physiological ones like insulin, which is recognized as a satiety hormone, sensory and cognitive recognition. When everything’s running, you stop eating because you’ve essentially lost interest in the food, which may not necessarily mean you’re “full”. It will mean you’re well and good.
“Satiety”, by contrast, is the amount of time between meals—how long your meal satiation endures and persists. Satisfaction is a certain level of psychological gratification with the meal.
We want to check each of these three boxes after a meal, and we want to be aware of how we did it so that we can repeat it. We especially want to be aware of when we eat foods that leave a combo, or worse, all these boxes unchecked, which is often the case with ultra-processed foods. And if you can nail these three most of the time, when the dessert menu comes up, it’ll offer little interest.
Remember, no extremes. If you want to eat eggs or not because that’s a personal preference, then that should settle it. (Just be mindful of your total saturated fat intake.) The same goes for berries to dairy, from wheat to meat.
If you’re not sure where to begin, the USDA’s MyPlate is a good start, where a typical meal can be roughly into four quadrants: fruits, veggies, whole grains, and protein. Again, though, this is not a prescription. It’s a springboard into seeing what works for you. The great thing about MyPlate is that it includes a wide variety of foods, plenty of fiber and nutrients, and it hits all the macronutrients.
If an exercise scientist, a billionaire, and a Buddhist got together to talk shop about health and nutrition, their brainchild might be Nutritional Autoregulation, an easy-to-use yet powerful tool to develop our awareness of how different foods hit us and how we can modify and adapt our food selections accordingly—to individualize, maximize, optimize, to get everything we should out of the foods we eat.
It takes a little bit of practice, but nutritional autoregulation is a skill, and like all skills, it can be developed, and before you know it, you’ll be on your way to mastering your maintenance.
With the ultra-processed food environment that we all live in, it’s absurdly easy to overconsume energy without realizing it and without feeling satiety, satiation, or satisfaction, leaving us out of balance, putting the brakes on that health wheel we’re so trying to keep spinning, but nutritional autoregulation keeps the controls and the power in our hands.
