Book excerpt from Healthy Running, Step by Step

Real foods control your insulin, help you burn more fat as fuel, and help deliver optimal performance.

Training is only half the battle when it comes to achieving the body you desire.. Food is the other.

 Just like with your training, a science-based approach to what you put in your body and when you do it has a great effect on your ability to achieve your athletic and health goals. My approach to health and fitness involves guided exercise and an easy-to-follow, "close-to-the- earth" diet. Both are designed for one singular goal: metabolic efficiency-to make you a better butter burner. We have discussed the importance of precision heart-rate training to develop your fat-burning metabolism in chapter 4; now it's time to dial in your diet to further serve this goal.

All of us, especially athletes, need to alter our relationship with food. We need to view daily nutrition as the source of our life energy and focus on foods that further health, not disease. In recent decades, we've been told more about what not to eat than what to eat to stay healthy. Slowly, our relationship with food is changing as our food supply is being exposed as corrupted and unnatural. We are realizing that we need natural foods to help keep us healthy and make us stronger, leaner, and more resistant to disease.

Fact: Most foods in the grocery store have been processed to such a degree by the giant food corporations that they have little nutritional resemblance to their root food sources. Based on extensive and costly research from farming to processing to packaging, the food industries try to get us hooked with appearance and addictive combinations of salt, sugar, and fat. Natural nutritional integrity be damned! What's worse is that medical and health experts have unintentionally played into the "laboratory-food- is-better-than-nature" syndrome by incorrectly tarring eggs, butter, and other healthy foods as health killers.

The key concept you need to remember about healthy nutrition is that you should eat foods that are close to the ground-meaning unadulterated and unprocessed. It's rare to find a food that comes out of the ground with unhealthy proportions of sugar, salt, and fat and that is damaging to our bodies.

I feel the best diet plan is simple, science based, easy to achieve, and can be boiled down to one sentence: Control insulin levels throughout the day and train your metabolism to be efficient at burning fat, not storing it.

What is a Resting Metabolic Rate?

Your Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR) is the number of calories used to maintain basic life functions such as brain activity, heart and lung function, tissue growth and repair, internal organ functions. It measures EXACTLY how many calories you will burn, without exercise, on a given day (K/Cal/day). Your RMR is the largest factor in determining overall metabolic rate and how many calories you need to maintain, lose or gain weight. Calories are burned by bodily processes such as respiration, the pumping of blood around the body and maintenance of body temperature.

Your RMR can be responsible for burning up to 70% of the total calories expended, but this figure varies due to different factors. Your body will burn more calories in addition to the calories burned due to RMR. This is why there is a lifestyle factor that is included on top of your RMR. This factor accounts for functional activity like brushing your teeth, walking to your car etc.