Dietary enlightenment

Please take this post only as my own experience, my objective here is to emphasise the importance of good nutrition, not to explain what good nutrition might be for your specific needs. For that you may want to consult with an expert, like my sister for example. A real nutritionist, who is hopefully not rolling her eyes too much as she reads this.

Periodically I have been struggling over here in Thailand. I found it hard to get a solid night's sleep. I often felt tired. I had little energy in the gym and despite training hard I wasn’t making progress. Then to top it off my mind was always racing and I felt anxious.

I kept looking for answers in psychology and then spirituality. With the former my goal was to correct my thinking and with the latter to not think at all! It wasn’t working though.

Admittedly after a year of this I was getting pretty worn out. I often thought of throwing in the towel and going home. I noticed that whenever I did go home, somehow my sleep was pretty near perfect. That made me think that maybe there was something about Bangkok itself, the traffic, the noise.. perhaps I was just overloaded and couldn’t rest. So I was at a bit of a loss. My main hope was to keep going with my meditation and then at some point I’d reach some kind of enlightenment and have peace of mind. It’s funny, but there was also a kind of desperation in it, because of how miserable I was feeling.

I already knew the basics of nutrition from studying exercise science at university, where I took 2-3 units on general and sports nutrition. But as it turns out, I didn’t quite know enough. Not to be healthy anyway.

I would do silly things like eat a whole block of chocolate after a big workout, or just eat plain white rice and chicken for dinner, night after night. This is all a bit embarrassing to admit, given my education, I really should have known better. I’m sharing it though so that you don’t have to go through the same struggles.

(Before I go on, this is not a ‘carbs are bad’ post. I come full circle in the end as you’ll see.)

Anyway a few weeks ago I hit a tipping point. That day I had really loaded up on carbs (carbohydrates). I had a bunch of fruit, a sweet potato and regular potato for lunch and the same again for dinner. I was loaded to the gills with carbs. I probably ate over 300g of carbs that day (not that many for some people, but it turns out a lot for me).

That night I woke up at 3am, my heart was racing and I felt like I was having a panic attack. I tried to steady myself and went through a bit of a checklist. Was anything in particular bothering me? Sure I had some worries like we all do, but nothing major. I thought to myself, what exactly is wrong here? I’m in a beautiful apartment, overlooking trees where birds come and serenade me in the morning, my bed is comfortable, I’m safe. So what the hell is wrong? At that point I literally said a prayer to God, ‘help me out, I’m struggling’.

A few moments after that I thought back to what I had eaten during the day and it hit me like lightning! MY BODY ISN’T TOLERATING ALL THESE CARBS! What I realised is I had been overloading my system with carbs, and that to some degree the cells in my body had become less receptive to insulin. As a result after eating a large amount of carbs my insulin was spiking higher than normal to store all that glucose in non-receptive cells. Then at some point in the night, my blood sugar levels would drop rapidly and my body would go into panic mode.

While still feeling panicked as I lay there, I realised that all along I’d had a metabolic issue, not a psychological or existential spiritual one.

Over the days that followed I stripped out carbohydrates almost completely, giving my body a chance to re-sensitise to insulin. I still wasn’t sleeping well though. Now my cortisol had shot through the roof because I had taken away the primary fuel my body was used to running on. But at least my insulin wasn’t spiking up and down and my mood started to straighten out.

I was essentially at this point doing a ketogenic diet. I could feel my body struggling to adapt. The more I researched the more I could see it would be quite challenging to get well-rounded nutrition on a ketogenic diet. That became especially apparent once I started looking at micro-nutrient requirements. I noticed that a lot of people on ketogenic diets therefore need to take additional supplements. That put some cracks in the idea for me. If a diet requires artificial supplements is it really that great?

Still, I can see the sense in a ketogenic, or very low-carb diet for those with chronic insulin resistance and associated illnesses.

In my case I figured it wasn't necessary to go that hard. I decided I’d introduce carbs again to a moderate level, up until the point where my body can handle them well. I’m still playing around with it, but somewhere around 100-120g of carbohydrates per day seems to be working well so far. The other critical factor is that for the first time I am paying close attention to micro-nutrients. And that means eating a wide variety of vegetables, nuts, seeds, and in my case, a little (but not too much) fruit.

It’s only been a week or so, but I feel huge improvements already. I’m sleeping a straight 7 hours through the night. The dark circles under my eyes are gone. My energy is better and I’m able to workout harder. And most importantly, my mood is good and I don’t feel anxious anymore.

It’s taken me this long.. after more than a decade studying these topics to work it out. I guess it goes to show, sometimes it takes much longer to work things out that you might think. But if you’re reading this, it doesn’t have to take so long for you. Use my (at times rather painful) experience to save yourself the time.

Work out how much protein, fat and carbohydrate your body needs and how much it can tolerate in the case of carbs. Then make sure you’re getting enough variety of food to cover off your micro-nutrient needs. I know.. it’s quite technical and hard. I wish it didn’t need to be that hard. But we’ve messed up our modern diets so much, that the only way to get it right is to take charge yourself. To become your own nutritionist to some degree.

From my experience it is worth the effort. I went from anxious and not able to sleep through the night to sleeping perfectly and feeling calm within two weeks. Your struggles might well be different, but I’m certain that you’ll perform better too once you get your diet right.

I think it’s quite common to look at a million different factors as to why we might be struggling with general happiness or mental health. What I’ve realised is that a lot of the time it just comes down to diet and exercise. If you get those right, and you’ll know it when you do, then I think you can probably solve 80% of whatever problems you thought you had. Sure there are still challenges in life, but when you’re fully charged up, all those challenges just seem so much easier to deal with.

A word of caution too for the younger readers. When you’re in your 20’s, you can actually get away with a lot more in terms of your diet. Because your body is so young and vital, even if your nutrition isn’t optimal, you’ll still feel pretty much ok. But over time if you keep throwing crap into your body, or just too much sugar for example, you’ll start to wear your body out. As you get into your thirties, your energy, sleep and a lot of other things will begin to get a lot worse. So don’t wait until then. Start from now and that way you can maintain your energy levels throughout your life.

As for the mystery of why I was sleeping so soundly back in Melbourne, aside from the comforts of home and family, it’s because I was eating well-rounded and nutritious meals. Courtesy of my Mum, who has been telling me for years to eat more vegetables. Well, sometimes you have to learn the hard way.