What am I supposed to eat - Booknotes

As part of my Self goal category this year, I am learning more about nutrition. I’m an active person, and I want to be a healthy and active person, so learning about how best to fuel myself seems like a good place to start.
Being an active and healthy person is a life long goal for me, so I figure the more I learn, the better habits I’ll build, and strengthen the relationship with my body and what I put in it.

I started reading What am I supposed to eat? by Dr. Libby Weaver in January. It took me until March to finish the book, reading a few pages every other day.
The book is set out in article-length topics that are between 1 to about a dozen pages long. This made it easy to pick up and note take as I read each topic.

The byline of the book is Making sense of food confusion. The book did not do this for me, I found some of the information just as confusing as anything else you read about food. For example, in a topic about how to eat for healthy sleep, one page says 'Eat a small
meal before bed', and literally on the opposite page it says 'Don't eat after 6:30pm, it makes it hard to fall asleep and stay asleep if you've just eaten dinner'.
For a book that sets out to peel away food confusion, it gives a lot of advice on lots of different food topics that do nothing to help make nutrition any easier to understand.

I found 2 topics to be valuable parts of this book:
1. The basic science topics of how digestion works and what different types of vitamins and minerals give your body.
2. How to change your mindset around food and nutrition.

This second one was the most helpful area for me to learn more about. Although I still have lots to learn about nutrition, focusing on mindset before getting into the food itself feels like a good foundation for that future learning.

My key takeaways:

• The way you feed yourself is the most basic, fundamental way you demonstrate care for yourself
• Food isn't healthy or unhealthy, people are
• Food is more, or less, nourishing
• You literally become what you eat as the nutrients in foods convert to do what they need to do inside your body
• Ask 'Will this nourish me?' for soul food as well as physical health
• Trust your body knows what it needs
• Some people eat their feelings, they eat stress (I'm one of these people)
• Take notice of how you feel after you eat certain things, your body will tell you if it suits you or not
• Disordered eating is never about the food

After finishing reading this book, I feel the basic tenets of nutritious eating are a bit like exercise: so basic and boring you know you need to do them, but you're looking for a quick win or something more exciting to achieve your goals.

Basic tenets for nutritious eating as I see them:
- Eat more plants
- Eat less processed foods
- Eat less sugar
- Don't eat too much
- Move your body

If people are looking for some basic information on nutrition and food mindset I would recommend this book. For people who are beyond the basics or looking for truly clear nutritional information, leave this one on the shelf.

Remember you can check out my GoodReads profile to see the books I've read and still want to read, for both enjoyment and learning.