How To Eat Healthy

Hey guys, how’s it going? This is Leo for Acualized.org and in this video I thought I’d do something a little bit different because some of you have been asking me about nutrition. I’ve posted a few videos out there about proper nutrition and I’ve been criticizing a lot of you for eating junk food so I thought that I would show you something practical, something that I like to make and how I like to eat clean.

I’ve really worked on my diet a lot, over the last few years especially, just been cleaning it up through going and cleaning it up in phases basically, trying different diets, experimenting with different stuff, reading a lot of books on nutrition and fitness and just trying to be healthier because I actually want to value my health. Not saying that I value my health but practically valuing my health and what that means is what I’m going to show you guys here.

What It Means To Eat Something Healthy

I’m going to show you what it really means to eat something healthy. For many of you this is going to blow your minds. As simple as it is, it’s going to shock you what I’m going to show you. Honestly it took me about eight years because I used to be fat. I used to be sixty-five pounds heavier than I am now. I was that way for my whole life and it took me about eight years after I lost all of that weight.

Even though I lost the weight I was still eating a lot of junk food. I was eating garbage, just horrible stuff that has been causing me all sorts of problems and would have really destroyed my body down the road if I had continued that way. So progressively what I started doing is cleaning up my diet more and more and more and now I’m at that point where I’m eating really, really healthy and this is something that’s a part of my lifestyle.

This is something I love. Where before I had to really force myself to do it, now it’s really something that I’m passionate about and I continue to work on this. I’m still not 100% clean. Right now I’m actually going kind of through a vegetarian phase where I’m experimenting with vegetarianism, which is something I thought I would never try but given the research that shows that it’s so healthy for you I am on board. Let me show you how to actually create something healthy. Let’s see, what I’m going to do is basically create a salad.

I feel like I’m Emeril Lagasse here or Rachael Ray from the Food Network. I’ve got all this produce, all this stuff, they’re really very simple. The bottom line is that you need to be eating a lot of vegetables in your diet. Some people will lump fruits and vegetables together. No, that’s wrong. Fruits are okay, you can eat them in moderation, but you should not be relying on fruits, you should be relying on vegetables.

More Vegetables

The bulk of your diet should be green, leafy vegetables and other vegetables that have all sorts of different pigments and colors because the pigments and colors in the vegetables have all sorts of natural nutrients that you can’t get anywhere else. You can’t get them in synthetic form you can’t get them in a McDonald’s cheese burger. This is the stuff you really should be eating. This is what your ancestors were eating a hundred thousand years ago. They were not eating giant genetically modified fruits, they were not eating cheese burgers and they were not eating wheat, they were not eating bread, they were not eating pasta, they were not eating any of the nonsense garbage you guys are eating.

Here’s what we want, we want the maximum possible vegetables and we want them cooked as little as possible so ideally raw. Raw is what you want to be eating. That’s what your body burns the best, it burns the cleanest it makes you feel good, it makes you feel energetic and light. It doesn’t make you drowsy and it’s the healthiest. It produces the least toxins which ultimately are going to lead to all sorts of nasty diseases down the road.

Here what I’ve got is some wild arugula from Trader Joe’s. I’m going to pile that on, I like to pile on the greens. I’m also going to take some romaine lettuce, also from Trader Joe’s it’s organic. Everything that I’m using here is going to be organic. I’m going to pile that on in large quantities. Then what else do we have? I’ve just recently tried Chinese seasoning or sugar snap peas, also organic. They look like little green beans and you can just eat them raw. They’re really good. I’m going to pile those on and then what I’ve got here is some organic red bell peppers. These guys I sliced a few days ago and I just kept them in my fridge. I did some of the prep work here.

In reality this is going to take you longer to do than what I’m showing you here because I’ve already washed some of this stuff, I’ve already prepared it, I’ve sliced some of it so that’s prep work that you’re going to have to. I’ve got some radishes here, nice red radish. These guys I have to slice up. Basically, what you’ve got to start doing and what I’ve gotten on board to is eating more raw because even when you read a nutrition book and they tell you to eat more vegetables you tend to think, “Okay, more vegetables what does that mean? That means I’ll more potatoes and I’ll eat more sautéed vegetables, or stir fried vegetables, or even fried vegetables and you’ll count that as a vegetable. That’s not really a vegetable that is you kidding yourself.

A real vegetable is either raw or in almost raw form so maybe if you lightly steam it like steamed broccoli or you very lightly sauté something. Otherwise don’t delude yourself into thinking you’re eating vegetables and potatoes do not count as a vegetable neither does rice, neither does grain. I’m talking about vegetables that your Mom forced you to eat when you were a kid. That’s basically what’s the healthiest for you. All these vegetables I get organic. Who really knows if organic is better, I haven’t really found conclusive evidence of that, but if you care about your health, and you want to avoid potential problems down the road, why not? I think it’s a good expense to have. I mean organic vegetables will cost you about twice as much, a little bit less than twice as much than conventional, but when it comes to your health you don’t want to be cheap.

So we’ve got that. What else do I want? Tomato. Let’s slice this guy up. He’s also organic. What this is going to do is it’s going to create a salad. I’ve also got some pasture raised eggs that I’m going to throw on top of that that I’ve already cooked up on a skillet. So we’ve got tomatoes.

The Million Dollar Trick

Here’s a trick that I just recently discovered which is, I would say, is a million dollar trick and that is get a big plate if you’re eating lots of vegetables you need to eat a large quantity of them otherwise you’re going to be hungry just because there’s more volume and less calories. They are less calorie dense so this is not like eating a candy bar, a Snickers bar, which takes this much volume but has a thousand calories in it. This whole thing right here, this whole plate, look at this, this is a massive plate of food. This is something that they would serve to probably a family of four. This is vegetables so you can’t get fat off this if you eat this.

So you want large volume of vegetables. That means you have to buy more of them, really stock up on a lot of them. Don’t be afraid to pile them on. You’re going to need them otherwise you’re going to feel hungry. So this meal, I actually burn through pretty quick and I’ll start to feel hungry in a couple of hours just because they’re vegetables, that’s how it’s supposed to be.

The trick is get a large plate. Look at these, these are the plates I had that I used previously when I was not eating so many vegetables. Really this plate is too small. You can’t fit enough vegetables on this plate. So this is very practical but if you don’t have a large plate and you don’t get this idea then you’re going to be struggling and you’re not going to be getting enough and you’re going to feel hungry and basically hen you’re going to drop off you’re vegetarian diet or you’re going to drop off some healthy diet because you’re simply not having enough vegetables.

You need huge quantities, don’t be shy. This is basically what I’ve got here and what I’m going to do is I’m going to make a dressing for my salad and what I’ve got here is I’ve got organic extra virgin olive oil first cold press. This is the best that you can get. So by that I’m just going to pour that into my cup and with it I’m going to mix half a lemon. Just going to squeeze that in there.

What You Should BuyOrganic

Lemons are not important to buy organic because really organic you need to buy if you’re going to be eating the outer part of the vegetable or fruit. So any kind of fruit or vegetable that you end up peeling it’s not so important because the pesticides and whatever chemicals they use when they’re spraying them with non-organic vegetables that stuff is going to be discarded anyway if you’re not going to eat the peel.

For example, stuff like tomatoes you’re not going to peel so you want those to be organic and things like baby carrots, you’re not going to peel those and you’re not going to peel you’re leaves so your greens you want those organic for sure. So I’ve got that. This is lemon juice and olive oil.

The other thing I do is I buy this organic brown mustard which is made with apple cider vinegar and really the ingredients are whole organic mustard seeds, organic apple cider, vinegar water and sea salt so this is good and healthy stuff. I’m going to take a scoop of that and just mix it all in here and I just eyeball all of this I don’t measure anything. It takes too long to measure stuff. I eyeball to get enough dressing to cover as much salad as you want and just pour it on like that.

Then I am going to salt this guy. So salt. As far as salt goes, get rid of all your white table salt. That stuff is poison for you. It’s chemically processed and stripped of all nutrients. This what I have is pink Himalayan sea salt.

You can also get other varieties of natural salts like Celtic sea salt. First of all you find that they taste so much better and you can just see that this is natural. This is what you would imagine them picking out of the sea or filtering from the ground or however they obtain this stuff, but what’s nice about this is this kind of salt is actually good for you. It’s got nutrients in it, minerals in it that your white table salt doesn’t have.

Your Tastes Start To Change

This I use in large quantities. I’m not afraid to salt stuff. I’ll salt a large quantity because these vegetables otherwise they are pretty bland. There’s nothing too exciting going on here. One of the things you notice is once you start to wean yourself off of junk food and you start to wean yourself off even the more healthy food that is still more junky, like if you’re eating bread or if you’re eating any kind of grains really, once you start to wean yourself off that stuff you start to feel so much better and your tastes start to change and the stuff you thought you needed like you needed that barbeque sauce, that ranch dressing and that mayo… All those bold titillating flavors, you’re going to notice that they’re not that important and you don’t really miss them and you start to develop this higher value, high appreciation.

Eating food for you that’s actually healthy. Something that’s actually healthy like this. Like now if I gave you this salad even though it looks nice and everything, if I gave you this and told you, “Eat this for a week, make this every day and just eat for a week”, your mind and your body and your taste buds would just rebel against it because you’re so used to all the junk that you’re eating. You’re eating standard American diet. You’re eating all these sugars, all these lattes that you’re buying, all the milk products that you’re buying, the diary the wheat, I’m not even talking about the worst of the junk food.

Even the stuff you get at a decent restaurant is garbage, it’s just garbage. It’s destroying you from the inside, it’s causing cancer, it’s causing Alzheimer’s disease, it’s causing heart disease, it’s causing diabetes, of course it’s causing all your weight gain all your fat. If you’re fat the only reason that you’re fat is because you eat a very poor diet and you also don’t exercise ever. So that’s what’s killing you there and that’s going to have a horrible, horrible effect on your performance in life and what you can really achieve.

So if I gave this salad to you, my point was, is that you would eat it but you wouldn’t be satisfied with it. You’d want that bold, stimulating flavor that you would get right now from whatever it is you’re addicted to food wise. It takes some time to wean yourself off of it and eventually when you do wean yourself off you feel so much better and what you discover is that you start to actually a get a sense of appreciation for eating something healthy even though it doesn’t taste as good.

You Have To Train Yourself

This doesn’t taste as good as a Big Mac. It doesn’t taste as good as a steak smothered in barbecue sauce, or ribs with barbeque sauce or something like that, but it feels good. It feels good to eat it because you know that you’re burning clean. It’s like you’re putting clean fuel into your car but your car here is your body. Your body is your car. It also affects the performance of your mind. This stuff, you have to really train yourself to like this, but when you do you do actually like this. Now I enjoy this and I enjoy it on different levels. I enjoy it both on the level of taste, but also on the level of the higher values that I’m after.

Real Eggs

So the other thing that I’ve got that I’m going to put on here because there’s not much protein her is eggs. Most of you probably have not even had a real egg in your life and don’t know what a real egg is. What is a real egg? A real egg is this. It’s a pasture raised egg.

This is not simply organic, this is pasture raised. This means that the hen was let out to pasture and was let out to roam around in the sun on a prairie and actually eat bugs and grass and whatever it is that hens eat. They were able to eat that stuff, what they naturally eat and they were able to be outdoors and then they were able to lay these eggs and then you get these eggs. Pasture raised eggs. I get these guys at Whole Foods.

This carton costs about seven dollars. What is the standard carton of eggs cost? A standard carton of eggs costs about two dollars. You could probably even get them for a dollar fifty if you get larger than a dozen. Organic eggs cost about four fifty. This is almost twice as expensive as an organic egg. An organic egg is almost twice as expensive as a standard egg.

So this is about, I would say, seven times, maybe six seven times more expensive than a standard egg. You might wonder, “Well that’s expensive. I don’t have that kind of money to burn on stupid eggs”. What you don’t realize is you haven’t really read some of the shocking things about how eggs are produced and what they feed those hens.

What they feed traditional hens, those cheap white eggs that you buy at Wal-Mart or whatever, what they feed them is corn and soy beans and they basically disease them from the inside out because they feed them the lowest quality food that can possibly be fed in order to keep that hen literally barely breathing and laying eggs. Then that hen pops out that egg and that egg is cartoned and then you buy it at Wal-Mart. What happens is that then you’re eating that egg, but the nutritional value of that egg is significantly lower than the nutritional value of this egg.

You can actually see it. When you start cracking these eggs, I’ll actually should show you in another segment, when you actually start cracking these eggs you’ll see that they crack different. Their shell, it actually breaks apart differently than a tradition egg. Also the yolk, the yolk is a deep, rich orange. It’s not a yellow color, it’s not that pale yellow yolk.

These are real eggs and when you actually buy this-I encourage you to buy them even once even if you’re not going to be making a habit of it- buy it once and take a look at the consistency of the yolk and the white and the shell, and you’re going to see that there’s something to this idea that these are really different than what you’re used to.

Pasture raised eggs. They’re expensive but this is the stuff you should be eating if you’re going to be eating any kind of animal protein at all. It should be pasture raised, it should not be factory formed. I’ve already cooked up some eggs. I made three of them. Just put them in a pan and fried them up for five minutes.

I’m just going to toss these on top. I already salted them and that is it. So that’s my meal. This will last me for pretty much half the day.

Right now I’m not eating that much, I’m not working out at the gym that much, I’m not trying to put on too much muscle, I’m actually trying to lose that and that means that I can get away with eating less like this. If I was really working out a lot and I needed a lot of energy and I was burning through a lot calories I’d probably have to eat about three of these salads a day plus all the other stuff I eat. This isn’t all I eat. I’ll eat dark chocolate, I’ll eat wild Alaskan smoked salmon.

What else do I eat? I’ll eat these desserts that I make from frozen berries, organic frozen berries which are really awesome. Before I went on this vegetarian phase I really liked to eat grass-fed organic steak which you can get a Whole Foods and other places like the higher quality markets. So basically this is what I eat.

Now you’ve got to ask yourself, how close is your diet to this? Are you eating this or what are you eating? How much of your diet is fried? How much of it is just totally overcooked? How much of it is seared and grilled and charred?

What Are You Eating?

How much of it is totally stewed and sautéed so all the nutrients are gone? How much of it is coming from high quality ingredients versus low quality ingredients? What percentage of your diet is vegetable and what percentage of it fruit? And I mean real vegetables not potatoes and other junk vegetables. I mean real leafy either green or red or orange vegetables? How much is your diet like that versus the standard American diet?

I’m willing to bet that what you’re eating right now is a hundred times worse than what I’m showing you guys and the reason that is, is because I know how hard it is to make this switch. It takes discipline. It also takes a higher awareness and understanding of what the hell is going on. You have to read nutrition books to really make a case for yourself to convince yourself why you should be eating this way versus not. To eat like this even though this was a simple set up that I had here and I made this meal in about ten minutes, this is not something you’re going to do, this is not something that comes naturally, easily in our culture.

In our culture what comes naturally and easily are the doughnuts and bagels at work. It’s the McDonald’s breakfast sandwich that you get on your way to work when you’re rushed. It’s the McDonald’s that you get for your kids when you got to take them to soccer practice and you don’t have much time.

It’s the expensive restaurant that you go out to and that expensive steak that you buy with your boyfriend or girlfriend, you go out and do that a couple of times a week, a couple of times a month. What do you think? You think that expensive steak, you think that is an organic steak? Do you think that is a pasture raised steak, grass-fed steak? No that’s the cheapest possible steak that they could buy so that that restaurant should have the highest profit margin.

So even if you’re going to a really expensive steak house that’s charging you forty dollars for a New York strip, that New York that they’re serving you, that’s the lowest possible cut, the lowest possible quality of meat that they could have found and sold you because they’re trying to keep their margins up. So even though you’re paying a lot for it, maybe it comes with fancy side dishes and a fancy service and a fancy decor and a fancy tablecloth, what you’re actually feeding your body is still garbage.

Make A Case In Your Mind So The Transition Is Easier

Like I was saying, this is a tough transition to make and to start to make this transition you have to build a case in your mind for why it’s important. You have to start to notice the effects that all the junk food that you’re eating is having on your performance at work, on your performance with your family, on your performance in bed, on your mood, and ultimately on your health. The reason that I’m bought into this is because I want to live a long life and I want to live a healthy life.

I don’t want cancer. I don’t want Alzheimer’s disease. I don’t want to be fat, I was that way and it’s horrible. It’s disgusting, it’s pathetic, it’s hurts your self-esteem, it hurts your ability to be in a successful relationship, whether or not you believe that it actually does, as shallow as that may sound. All these are factors.

For me probably the most important factor is that I really value the purpose in life and I value the work that I do. I really want to have an impact on people. To do that and that means, (a) I need to live long enough to do that and I want to live as long as I can because in my later years when I’m going to be sixty and seventy and eighty hopefully I get to that point, that’s when some of my best work can happen because my work is intellectual. By that point I can just imagine how much knowledge I’ve built up, how much wisdom I have and how well I can communicate that to the people.

That’s when I’m really going to be in my prime, it’s when I’m older not right now. Right now I’m just starting off. So to be at that older age and to be able to have the kind of impact that I want, I know that I need to be healthy because if I’m going to be sixty years old let’s say, and I’m going to have back problems and I’m going to have cancer problems and I’m going to have various diseases and I’ll be overweight, I’m not going to have energy. I’m going to be impotent.

Not Just For The Future

If I have all those problems then how am I going to be able to communicate? How am I going to be able to go out there with energy and give a speech? How am I going to be able to write something powerful? How am I going to be able to coach people? How am I going to be able to do whatever it is I’m doing at that point? I’ll probably have many things that I can’t even imagine on my plate then that I don’t have right now, so how am I going to have the energy and the health to do that?

This is it right here. This is not just for the future. This is giving me health right now. This is giving me energy right now. If I was to replace this right now with a cheeseburger and fries and a milkshake and that’s what I was going to eat, I’d literally feel so bad that I wouldn’t be able to continue to work after shooting this video.

I’d have to go sit down and take a breather for a couple of hours just to recuperate. I remember how that was, feeling lethargic and sleepy and just absolutely god awful. So this is serving me right now because I’m going to eat it and I’m going to feel light and empty and I’m going to be able to go and do whatever I wasn’t to do. I just came back from the gym so I’m already feeling pumped and I wanted to shoot this video with you guys because I knew you guys were asking about nutrition and I wanted to show you what it really looks like to eat healthy.

So if you’re taking one thing away from this, it’s eat more green vegetables, start cleaning up your diet because it’s really important to the performance and the quality of life that you’re going to have. If you want to have an extraordinary kind of life, the kind of life that I want for you guys, if you want to really become self-actualized, the mission of Actualized.org, then you have to start looking after your nutrition. It’s all connected together. Don’t start to separate different parts of your lives, you have to see how everything is intertwined.

Wrap Up

All right, this is Leo. I’m going to be signing off. I’m going to enjoy my tasty meal here and what I would like from you is I would like you to leave some comments down below, share your experiences with cleaning up your diets. Like this and share this, spread the message. I’d like you to check out our newsletter at Actualized.org where you can go and sign up for the newsletter which means you’re going to get awesome weekly updates, free videos that I release every week, articles and other downloads that I plan to have.

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