Written by Sarah Yee
Is choosing what to eat as simple as choosing quality over quantity, or is there something more? Let’s find out.
Cocktail Shrimp: A Surprisingly Relevant Backstory
My mother often tells the story about how, as a toddler, I ate 40 cocktail shrimp in one sitting.
My parents sat there, staring at me in amazement as I happily packed in approximately half my body weight in crustaceans. (The waiter was stunned too.) It didn’t occur to them until afterward that perhaps they shouldn’t have allowed me to eat so many, but I was a growing kid, and it didn’t seem to do any damage. I still love cocktail shrimp. Nonetheless, the idea of eating 40 of them at once as an adult makes me feel a bit queasy. I've learned my limits, and they must include a pause for a vegetable or some oxygen.
Don’t Evaluate Your Food the Same Way You Evaluate Socks!
“Quality over quantity!” is one of those obnoxious sayings that everyone has heard a thousand times, usually while they’re contemplating a Costco-sized package of tube socks. That might be a valid point when it comes to footwear, but it can’t apply to everything, and it certainly doesn’t apply to food.
Not OR, but AND: Quality AND Quantity
Our choices in food have to take both quantity and quality into account. Most of us already do some of this naturally - it’s a rare person who has to be told to stop eating broccoli - but for nutritional success, we should be more conscious about it and be willing to balance it. But how do we know what is a “quality” food and how much of it we need to maximize our performance in the box?
How to Determine a Quality Food
Quality foods are whole, unprocessed foods that usually sit around the edge of a grocery store - vegetables and fruit, meat, fish, and (sometimes) dairy. They usually have a shelf life of about 2 weeks and only 1 ingredient. (Frozen fruits and veggies are nutritionally equal to fresh ones, as long as they don’t have extra ingredients like sauces or sugars.)
If a farmer harvested it in a form that is substantially similar to the one that ends up on your plate, it’s likely a quality food.
Extra Processing = Extra Ingredients
When extra steps get introduced - for instance, turning those fresh apples into applesauce or that corn into tortilla chips or chicken into fried nuggets - extra ingredients like excess sugar or a variety of oils tend to get introduced with them.
Even if we can read the ingredients list, those processed foods have a tendency to hide what we’re really putting onto our plate. (If you have any doubt, check the back of your ketchup bottle - the third or fourth ingredient will almost always be high fructose corn syrup, i.e. added sugar. Sneaky!)
And despite measurements, a lot of people don’t have a good grasp of how much 50g of extra sugar truly is. Processing also tends to break down a whole food like those apples into a form like applesauce that gives you less satiety, or feeling of fullness, which leads you to eat more than your body may need. And that leads us into the second half of the equation - quantity.
Rethinking Quantity
If it outpaces our training, we’re still going to get weighed down by the quantity, even if the quality is there.
Quantity can be the trickiest part for most people. America hasn’t just Super-Sized its fast food - our advertisements laugh about not being able to stop at just one chip, chocolate, or taco, and our restaurants serve single slices of cheesecake of 3000 calories. We live in a society that, by default, over-consumes food (while simultaneously shaming us for it, so that’s super unhelpful).
But while an entire package of Oreos may not be the wisest move for the next day’s WOD, it’s also possible to eat too much fruit or steak (or cocktail shrimp) - if it outpaces our training, we’re still going to get weighed down by the quantity, even if the quality is there. The opposite is true, too - if we eat so little that we don’t fuel our workout, our energy and performance will suffer.
Determining the Right Quantity for You
Here’s the bad news - everyone requires a different amount of food to achieve results in the gym. The good news is that we can all start from the same building blocks and tweak it from there, according to our own needs.
Picking whole, unprocessed foods (and chucking the processed ones) is a huge step that will allow for a little experimentation with the quantity of food needed for attaining your goals in the box - while it’s not impossible to overeat quality foods, that satiety aspect makes it harder to do. And the great news is that this isn’t an all-or-nothing venture. No one expects you to eat green beans and skinless, boneless chicken breasts for every meal from now until eternity. (Personally, you can pry my occasional Cane Rosso pizza from my cold, dead fingers.) Perfection isn’t the goal here, remember. It’s performance. The food we eat should let us feel sated after a meal - not still starving or stuffed - while it also supports the strength and energy we need for our day and for our workouts.
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