10 Essential Eating Principles for Men’s Health
“You are what you eat!“
This timeless adage contains the single, most vital health concept—the cornerstone for achieving a long, vibrant, and functional life. For men, whose goal is to maintain physical strength, muscular body shape, strong sexual drive and function as well as healthy body weight – what you put in your body will be the primary factor in driving those goals.
But I exercise several times a week, isn’t that enough? Nope it isn’t.
Exercise is vital for maintaining cardiovascular health, flexibility, muscularity, strength, coordination, balance, etc. However, it only accounts for 20% of your overall long-term health and functionality. What you eat – food and drink – account for the other 80%. What you eat also has a profound effect both positively and negatively on the benefits you receive from exercise.
For the purposes of this discussion, we’ll leave out proper sleep, spirituality, and emotional stability in the health equation since they are advanced concepts in promoting a healthy lifestyle. We’ll get to these at a later time, but for now let’s get to the eating principles that will provide your best chance for health success.
Our relationship with food must be our priority relationship. It’s the most important thing in your life. Eating healthy makes you strong and stable and able to do all of the things you do in your life. We must move eating from a second or last minute thought, a stress soother, a partner pleasing activity, to a conscious and controlled process.
- Plan Next Day Eating: Every evening we plan out, to the best of our ability, what we are going to eat the next day. Know what and when you will have breakfast, lunch and dinner. Take control of the process so when you know for example you will be having a big lunch make sure dinner is appropriately adjusted down. Make sure you cover the eating nutrient principles covered below. You are what you eat so let’s plan what that will be. When you don’t plan you essentially have no control over what happens. If you are headed to Thanksgiving dinner or your favorite restaurant, a great practice is to write out in advance what you will eat. This prevents you from overeating and then regretting.
- 2000 Calories: you want to lose weight you need to keep your caloric consumption below 2000 calories per day. I am not a fan of exact counting because it is psychologically not good, but understand the caloric value of what you are eating and adjust accordingly. To lose a pound of fat, you need roughly a 3500 calorie reduction over what your body needs. So, if you need 2000 calories a day, and you consume 1500, it will take 7 days like that to lose a pound. This is not exact science as the techniques described here, exercise and muscle building will speed your caloric burn, but it’s a great reference guide.
- Protein 1g/lb of bodyweight: There is no escaping the need for a man to consume protein and the general rule if you want to add muscle is one gram of protein per pound of bodyweight. Now bodyweight means proper bodyweight. If you are 200lbs and should be 150lbs, you need 150g protein / day, not 200g! Distribute Protein: Aim to consume 20–40 grams of protein at each main meal (and potentially snacks) to maximize muscle protein synthesis throughout the day.
| Goal/Activity Level | g/Body Weight |
| Muscle Maintenance/Moderate Lifting | 0.5−0.7 g/lb |
| Muscle Gain (Bulking)/High-Volume Lifting | 0.7−1.0 g/lb |
| Fat Loss (Cutting) to Preserve Muscle | 0.7−1.1 g/lb |
- Carbohydrates Decrease: Your most carb heavy meal should be in the morning or lunch and from there carbs decrease throughout the day. There is no evidence to suggest making breakfast huge is required but having protein at every meal is a very good policy. Most important is to not consume prodigious amounts of carbs within 4 hours of your bedtime. When I lost 100lbs, my last meal of the day was 6ozs of turkey or chicken and a cup of blueberries – no bread, rice or taters. Those 3 happen at lunchtime for weight losers. Lunch can be pizza, but dinner should be a protein, vegetable and 100 calories (one potato, half cup rice, slice of bread).
- Sugar and Alcohol are Poison: To be fair sugar is poison only in significant quantities. Consume sugar like you take Advil. 2 Advil is good. 20 Advil is bad. One cookie ok, 10 cookies poison. All alcohol is poison and it;;s only because G-d made our bodies with amazing processors that we can consume it at all. Drink, even one per day, at your own peril. So, avid sugar in particular when it is not attached to nutrition, in foods such as candy, juice, and processed bread. Cutting out sugar and alcohol is hard at first. But eventually your tastes change and life becomes good again. I learned that when I eliminated sugar from my coffee. I suffered for a month with black coffee but then when I drank coffee again with sugar, I wanted to spit it out. It tasted awful. My tastes changed – for better health.
- Simple Meals: Your food should be easily identifiable. I remember seeing a list where the chicken Caesar salad at a particular champion restaurant was the most caloric item on the menu. It’s not the chicken, cheese or lettuce – it’s the dressing in which you can’t identify the ingredients so you don’t know what’s in it. Try to eat one ingredient foods. The perfect meal is a piece of meat/chicken/fish, a green vegetable, and rice/potato/bread – no high calorie sauces. If you use ketchup, no corn syrup brands only.
- Know What You Eat: Read the label of EVERYTHING you buy. Avoid seed oils, artificial anything, chemicals you can’t pronounce – in other words, basically only shop around the outer aisles of the supermarket. Stuff in boxes is rarely good eating. As a dare, try to fined a boxed compound product (more than 1-3 ingredients like almonds) that doesn’t have soy product in it. Say NO to SOY. It’s testosterone lowering for men. Read the labels on bread and bakery items. You’ll be shocked. Look for flour, water, yeast, salt and not much more.
- 50% Carbs • 30% Protein • 20% Fat
That’s where your calories should come from. It’s a guide, not to be taken like religion.
https://www.menshealth.com/nutrition/how-much-fat-and-carbs-should-you-eat
Here’s an amazing video on protein: https://youtu.be/BqmG2y4IeY8?si=xjunHXkk0JrFnzmV
- Water, Coffee, Tea, Milk: Those are the only 4 things you should ever drink. And stay hydrated but you don’t necessarily need 8 glasses of water a day. If you are thirsty it means you aren’t drinking enough. Let your body tell you how much to drink.
- 12 Hour Fast Everyday: A 12-hour fast every day—often called the 12:12 method or simply Time-Restricted Eating (TRE). The 12-hour mark is significant because it’s around the time your body begins to deplete its stored sugar (glycogen) and switches to using stored body fat for energy. This is known as metabolic switching. It can help your body become more responsive to insulin, which is beneficial for managing blood sugar levels and reducing the risk of Type 2 diabetes. I consider it a proven fact that if you make a habit of eating essentially zero from the last meal of the day (no late night snacking) until morning coffee/breakfast. You will live longer and have better health.
The point of these principles is to have you in total control of the most important part of your physical being here on Earth. Don’t let others influence your eating. The skinny wife who wants to eat at 11pm should not get you to eat if you don’t want to. Make your plan the night before and try to stick to it. Take the kids for ice cream and get them large and you get the kiddie cup. “But I cooked this especially for you!” – ok, take a bite, say it’s amazing and be done. There are no “cheat” days. Consume 4500 calories of sugar in one day and you’ll throw yourself off for a week.
The plan and lifestyle I have outlined here is actually easy to implement once you practice a bit and quite frankly it is enjoyable. I rarely feel hungry, unless I am trying to lose, and I don’t feel deprived because I can have that dessert (a small one) and eat almost all the foods I like.
Eating healthy, living longer and better is totally in your control. It’s simply a question of how badly you want it.
10 Essential Eating Principles for Men’s Health
