What Should You Eat for Longevity, Weight Loss, and Muscle Gain | Ronan Oliveira

What are the best foods for you to eat, what to eat with? Rodan if you ask most people to base their food decisions on everything that they like the most, they may end up with something that is not functional. But if you ask them to focus on all the foods that are the best for their bodies, they may end up feeling very miserable. So the idea is to find a happy intersection, something that you enjoy and something that is good for your body at the same time. There are millions of ways to think about that. And I came up with a framework that is not. The framework is the way that I think about it. But it turns out to be very useful, not only for me, but for a lot of people that I've worked with. So for that, I will invite you to take a look at food for a little bit more scientific and structural point of view. Alright. Now that we have the appropriate setting to talk about food in a more structural view, the first thing that we want to know is that all types of food, they'll be broken down into one of three macronutrients. We are talking about protein, carbohydrates and fats. And different types of food will have a different ratio of this combination. And so I am calling here a big circle of all the protein dominant foods. And here in the middle of the circle is where I position things like lean meat. So I'm thinking, I'm talking about chicken breast and fish and lean cuts of red meat, for example, or turkey. And you can see. Ah, but there's a little bit of fat. Yes, but it's a protein dominant food. There is a majority of protein in it. And then we can start walking to the left here where we have the circle of carbohydrate dominant foods. We see that there's a intersection. There are a couple of foods that they are kind of half, half. They are part carbohydrates and part protein. And this is where we place things, for example, like beans and legumes. You know, when we talk about black beans and chickpeas and lentils, they are sources of protein and sources of carbohydrates at the same time. Then you can go on to something that is dominantly carbohydrate. And here we can also do a little division. One is a side that goes to more fiber and less sugar and another that goes to more sugar and less fiber. So let's populate this area of the chart first. And here is where we have things like cruciferous vegetables, you know, broccoli and Brussels sprouts and Things like this. And you have the green leafy vegetables, kale and spinach and lettuce. And here's where you have zucchini and all the water based vegetables as well, bell peppers and all these kind of things. They are more fiber than they are sugar. And then you can have the other way of going to carbohydrates that are more sugar than fiber. And this is when you have your starches, for example. And we are talking about potatoes and pumpkins and this type, type of vegetables, root vegetables. Come here you have fruit that is also more sugar than fiber most of the times. And then you can say, yeah, but you can, you know, you can have berries that have less sugar than other types of fruit. Yeah. If you zoom in in these types of fruit, you see that it's like a constellation map. You can still further position, further change the position of this type of food. But taking an overview and grouping this food group into one fruit will be more on the sugar side rather than on the fiber side. And then you have whole grains, things like rice and oats and quinoa will be somewhere like here. Quinoa itself will be more or less on the protein intersection, but in general, whole grains will be on this side. And then you have things that are more refined. And then we're talking about purely sugar, things like honey or refined sugar. And then you have the refined cereals. And then you have your gummy bears and your jelly beans. And all these kind of things are very, very dominantly sugar. This is where we have half of our chart. And then let's look at the other side. Now to the protein and fat composition. You see that there's an intersection here. So here is where I place things like eggs. Eggs is a protein source, but it's also a fat source, especially if you have the whole eggs. If you separate egg whites and egg yolks, yes, you can have egg whites will be on the protein side and egg yolks will be on the fat side. But looking at the whole food in one group, this is more or less where egg would be placed. Then we have things like fatty meats, so a ribeye steak or a salmon steak. Be more or less. Here you have dairy, the full fat dairy, because all the low fat or low fat dairy are all processed foods that will be more on the carbohydrate side. But I'm talking about whole foods here. And then nuts and seeds. Even though a couple of seeds or nuts, like cashew nuts or some seeds, maybe like pumpkin seeds will have a bit More of carbohydrates as well. But they are, it makes sense to make them, to put them in the intersection between protein and fat. And then you can go into the fat domain where things are dominantly fat. And you can also divide them into two areas. You can have something that is a more natural type of fat and can have the common processed type of fat. So in the natural side, I will place something like grass fed butter and olive and coconut oil. On the more processed side, I'll place things like processed vegetable oil. So this is your sunflower oil, your canola oil or safflower oil and hydrogenated oil that is also called trans fats that you find in margarine and all the highly processed types of fats. Then looking at this chart, one question that comes up is what about the intersection between carbohydrates and fats? So it turns out that nature didn't make an abundance of food that are high in carbohydrates and high in fats at the same time. But at some point in history we found this out that if we mix those guys, we make something that is crazily tasty and that makes people overeat. So people who are selling food and industrializing the production of food said, hey, mixing sugar and oil is a great thing. And if nature doesn't give us many options about this, what about we make our own? So this is when we came up with great inventions that make this bridge between carbohydrates and fats. And the results were things like cake and ice cream and java chip frappuccino and cookies and candies and chips and pizza. All of these options that are mixing these both intersections here that coincidentally are very hard to eat. One little piece only. No one talks about my candies and potato chips. After mapping out all these types of food, there are a couple of principles that I like to apply to choose what and when to eat. The first principle here is having lean protein and fiber as base for all meals. So these two green post its here the dominant types of meat and the fiber rich and low sugar types of vegetables. So from the broccoli and zucchini to the green leafy vegetables, they are in every single meal as much as possible. These are the basis of all the things that I eat that works very well for most people. Then the second thing is to remove all the red lights. You know, I'm talking about the very processed sugar here, the pure sugar, all the processed oil that increases a lot your level of inflammation. I cook with sunflower Oil sunflower is a vegetable. It's natural. It's good for me. But the process of making the sunflower oil adds a lot of things to it that your body is not capable of digesting. So. So swapping those types of processed oils, we do olive and coconut oil is one of the great things to do. And hydrogenated oils. Olive trans fat is something that makes your life shorter, so it's for sure something you don't want. And these guys here in the middle, this little bridge between carbohydrates and fat, this is also things that most of the times are highly industrialized, also have a lot of different chemicals added to them, and they are also really hard to eat. Just a little bit. And bear in mind that this is the chart for the most quantity of food that is added to a diet. That doesn't mean that I will never eat one item of this or one item of this, but when I'm planning what predominantly I'm eating, these guys are not part of the plan. I'm not trying to make my bulk of meat on the red light. So these guys are items that I am removing. The third is a process, is a principle of Wing and Yang. You know, there are three different macronutrients here. One way of thinking about them is choose two to be your main combination. So you can have protein and carbs with a little bit of fat, or the opposite protein and fats with a little bit of carbohydrates. So you have a dominance of one axis with an inclusion of the other. And these choices can be either or depending on your preferences. But I like to do a rule that works very well for me is that I go left when I want to focus on building muscle and I go right when I want to focus on lunatic losing fat. That is not the only way of doing this, but it's a very reasonable and practical way of doing. If I want to build more muscle and gain weight, I will focus on protein and carbohydrates. For example, on this side of the carbohydrate chart, there are really good foods that I can use for before and after my workout. You know, things like starch and fruit and whole grains mixed with protein or something in this intersection can feel my training and can also help me recover my muscle mass. And this helps me to build more muscle and gain more weight. If I am trying to lose to burn fat and lose weight, I'll keep protein that will always be in the center because it will always be present. But then I decrease this carbohydrate side and I focus more more on the protein and fat type. That is not the only way. If you follow, for example a vegan diet, you see, hey, I can lose a lot of fat only focusing on this part of the chart or even including starch and fruit. Yes, you can do it. There's not only one way of doing this, but this is a very practical way of starting to think about your food strategies. This way, this way I use to gain weight and this way I use to burn fat. These are a couple of principles that I use. They are not the absolute truth, but they have been very useful for me and for many other people to think to start thinking about what types of food I should make my meals of and in what times of the year should I focus on each one of them. I want to know if you have any comments or if you have your own ways of thinking, your own frameworks for thinking of what foods are best for you and leave them in the comments below and we keep that conversation going. Going forward, we are going to look into the possibility of going a bit more a bit more meticulous and quantifying the macronutrients and calories even should you count calories and macronutrients, should you not? What are the pros and cons? This is something that that I'm bringing up in more details in an upcoming video. So if you like videos like that, hit the bell button and subscribe because you know when the next video is coming. And if you want a program that takes you by the hand for three months and does this all for you, improves your life and quality of life, longevity and make you lose weight, I'll leave the link for wildfit program because it puts you in a framework that can change your life by making you to make wiser choices for what to eat and what not to eat. I see you in the next video.