FOOD FILLYOSOPHY

Persist Nutrition

A Nourishment Plan You Don’t Need to Escape From

When I was 14 years old I looked up my very first diet on the Internet to follow. It was from a website called testosterone.net and was called the CHANKO diet. It consisted of several protein shakes a day along with 3 meals of rice, tuna, canned corn, and teriyaki sauce. For a sophomore in high school, eating bowls of rice and canned tuna with corn around my friends was definitely not the norm. To say I got pushback, jokes made about me, and in general strange looks is an understatement. But I wanted to make a change in my body. I wanted to gain muscle and put on some size and I was convinced that this diet was my ticket to the imposing physique that I dreamed of having.

 

That story is meant to serve a few purposes. First, to establish a starting point in my life for when I started to look at food as a means to making change in my body. Second, to highlight the theme of getting pushback and questions about my behavior and nutritional choices for the next 2 decades of my life. Thirdly, and lastly, this story to me is the definition of how I have approached learning about nourishment for the majority of my life. I’ve always been one to seek out a plan, and then stick to it for long enough to either know it works, or know that it doesn’t work for me. More often than not there are aspects of every approach that work for me and aspects of every approach that don’t. There is no singular method that I’ve ever read about, researched, or followed, that encompasses all that I need from a nourishment plan. Therefore, my aim is to present what I’ve found that has worked for me and many clients over the years, highlight some elements that have proven problematic, and ultimately help guide you to finding what works best for you.

 

Food has power. Enough power to change your physiology within minutes. Enough power to change how you feel in life within days. And enough power to alter the course of the next several decades of your life. I would argue that food is more important than your movement every day and should be the starting point for every good fitness program. Unfortunately, it often isn’t the first place fitness programs begin. Instead, you get moving with a workout plan, and then nourishment changes follow. If we flip this and set your food as the foundation of what you base your health and fitness approach on, you will likely have a much more successful journey.

“Build a life that you don’t need to escape from” – Ryan Holiday

Recently this quote jumped out at me from the pages of Stillness Is the Key. I read it and immediately thought of training and nutrition. I often speak about consistency as the key to success in health and fitness. I’m not alone in this thinking, and in fact this post by Dr John Berardi speaks to the same concept. He was doing a bit of explaining about his process of maintaining a great physique at age 46 without the use of exogenous hormones. The message about what has made him successful was captured in this quote:

“If anything is ‘superior’ genetically it’s my strange ability to keep doing basic, boring things over… and over… and over again long after others have gotten distracted, switched to something else, or stopped.⁣⁣⁣⁣⁠”

Building a life that you don’t need to escape from is a path towards living a life that feels fulfilling in every single moment. A life that is CONSISTENTLY rewarding and one that you wake up to each day feeling excited and grateful for. The same should be set as the goal of your nutrition. What plan do you wake up to each that you enjoy, find fulfilling, and consistently keeps you on the path towards – or in maintenance of – your body goals. This is what Dr Berardi has been superior at for decades. If you look at his day to day habits around nourishment, training, and lifestyle, they are rooted in fundamental principles that have yielded a ripped 46 year old body. He enjoys ice cream several times a week, he eats a wide variety of meat and plants, he isn’t afraid to indulge in something like a Tim Horton’s donut. He never speaks about how deprived he feels, how bored of his diet he gets, or how much he wants a CHEAT day.

 

What are we trying to build? We are trying to build a nutrition plan that you don’t need to escape from. That doesn’t mean that your approach won’t change and won’t be flexible. It doesn’t mean that you will never alter your numbers, choose different foods, rotate your meal timing, or adopt a slightly new strategy. It simply means that the barometer for your nutrition plan should be one of sustainability on some level. I will expand on this concept in the next section as I break down the balance between food for pleasure and function.

Balancing Function and Pleasure

I often get the question of how I would approach a “cheat meal.” As I prefer to think of it, there is a balance between two approaches to food: eating for function, and eating for pleasure. I’ll outline both and provide a delicious example of how to combine them, which is how I eat sustainably all year long without chucking my bland chicken breast in the trash and calling up Uber Eats. First, let’s hit on what a function vs. pleasure approach might look like.
 

Function: Food is fuel and has the functional power to drastically alter our physiology for the better or worse.

  • 6 oz chicken thigh
  • 200grams steam broccoli
  • 1oz sliced almonds
  • 12oz water

Pleasure: Food is pleasurable and can be linked to some of our fondest memories and most sensual experiences in our lives.

  • 12 oz ribeye
  • Twice baked potato with all the fixings (bacon, sour cream, butter)
  • Creamed spinach
  • 2 glasses of red wine
  • Fudge brownie with vanilla ice cream

The balance between these two often plays a considerable role in how you look, perform, and the status of your health metrics. A good way of looking at this is that the more we bias towards the functionality of food, the more we will be able to shape our bodies and control variables we wish to change. If you are looking to lose body fat, get lean, alter your blood lipid profile, or improve your energy levels measurably, then you are going to need to look at food as a functional tool to help in that endeavor. There might be less room for looking at food through the lens of pleasure, but that isn’t to say you can’t enjoy functional foods.


I’m not here to say that you can have your cake and eat it too when it comes to nutrition and achieving the health and body you want. While some people out there have the genetic predisposition, as well as the functional habits engrained deep enough in their lives, to eat lower quality foods and still manage great physiques and health, they are often the exception to the rule. Why is that? Our taste buds, digestive systems, nervous system, and endocrine system are all coordinated in a very intricate way. Foods that are laden with sugar, fat, and salt appeal to our taste buds which in turn send power signals via our guts, brains, and hormones to perpetuate this type of eating behavior. These survival instincts of “get the highly dense foods and eat as much as you can so we can survive” have stayed with us into our modern western worlds we live in. Where food is no longer a scarcity, and food scientists are working hard to get you addicted to their processed foods, we are at a biological disadvantage and are being tempted to view and consume food within the FOOD IS PLEASURABLE context all the time. 

 

Below is a list of different tiers of body fat percentages that men and women fall into. 

Men/Women

  • Tier 1 – > 20%/30%
  • Tier 2 – 15-20%/25-30%
  • Tier 3 – 13-15%/23-25%
  • Tier 4 – 10-12%/20-22%
  • Tier 5 – 6-9%/16-19%
  • Tier 6 – <6%/<16%

The purpose of creating these tiered distinctions is to illustrate the principle that moving from tier to tier requires more than a linear increase in your efforts. If you wish to move from tier 1 to tier 2 you may have to put in 2x effort from your current nutritional and movement approach. You could say that you will have to choose Food is Function 2x for every 1x you choose Food is Pleasure to see progress. However, if you wish to go from Tier 2 to Tier 3, you cannot just keep the same 2x to 1x process. Moreover, it will not just be a linear increase to 3x to 1x process. There is likely going to require a 4-6x to 1x Function to Pleasure increase in order to see those results. This over simplification of the process of moving from tier to tier is not meant to be a perfect guide to success, but rather a conceptual approach to making progress.

  • Tier 1 to Tier 2 – 2 Meals of Function for every 1 Meal of Pleasure (1 Pleasure meal a day)
  • Tier 2 to Tier 3 – 6 Meals of Function for every 1 Meal of Pleasure (1 Pleasure meal every 2 days)
  • Tier 3 to Tier 4 – 15 Meals of Function for every 1 Meal of Pleasure (1 Pleasure meal every 5 days)
  • Tier 4 to Tier 5 – 30 Meals of Function for every 1 Meal of Pleasure (1 pleasure meal every 10 days)
  • Tier 5 to Tier 6 – 66 Meals of Function for every 1 Meal of Pleasure (1 pleasure meal every 22 days)

The beauty of committing to a life of eating for Function is that you can very quickly learn how inject small bits of pleasure that will make your Functional eating much more enjoyable. When you begin, functional eating can feel boring when compared to eating for full pleasure. Our taste buds and brain chemistry take a little time but will adapt. You will begin to find your simple food to be pleasurable in it’s own way. Will a bowl of steamed broccoli ever live up to the dopamine hit you get when you consume a bowl of cereal or ice cream? Never. But you can start to connect the dots between palette satisfaction and a feeling in your body that matches how you want to look, feel, and perform. Plus, the tips and tricks that follow, will allow you to get maximum taste out of your food and literally spice the simple.

 

Eating the requisite number of calories and follow the requisite number of macronutrients you need to see results takes practice. For perhaps the full duration of this challenge you may need to focus solely on the Food is Function mindset and learn your numbers. After that you can begin the lifelong work of finding the ideal balance of Pleasure and Function in your food. For me, some weeks look very boring and simple. The function of food takes priority over all else. I eat the same basic things most days of the week and don’t stray. On special days, weeks, or occasions, I will purposefully slide over to the Food is Pleasure side of life and indulge. I always know where that food fits into the greater context of my approach and it helps guide me back to Function.

 

On a final note, I do find great satisfaction in the food I eat daily. Even the FUNCTIONAL food I consume tastes delicious to me and is rewarding every time I sit down to eat. I tell you this to ensure you remain hopeful that eating for Aesthetics, Performance, and Health doesn’t mean you are sentenced to a life of boring and dull. However, I caution you against making pleasure seeking in food your first goal. Instead, see how far down the food is function path you can walk, how simple you can make things, and how consistent you can be. You will know when you really have earned a Pleasure departure and the progress you make towards your goal as a result of keeping it simple and focused will be more of a reward than any Pleasurable Food Indulgence you can find, that I promise!