SDS 258: Eating S.L.O.W.L.Y.

Welcome back to the SuperDataScience podcast ladies and gentlemen, super excited to have you back here on the show today because today we’ve got another episode about health. Now, as you know, on these FiveMinuteFriday episodes, we sometimes have episodes about data science, mindfulness, career building and tips and tricks and things like that. Today is an episode specifically about health.

So what’s going on right now in my life is that I am on a 10 day fast. I’m on actually day 8 of the 10 day fast. So that means that for eight days I have not eaten anything. Absolutely anything. This fast is very limited to just water, tea, coconut water, and some very diluted juices such as diluted watermelon juice or diluted pineapple juice and things like that. I feel fantastic. Feel totally fine. And in fact, if you’ve been with this podcast for a while, you know that I did exactly the same fast exactly a year ago.

It’s becoming kind of a ritual for me where I take myself to Bali. I’m in Bali right now in Ubud, at this retreat called The Natural Instinct Healing retreat. And I do this fast and the whole reason is to kind of like maintain my body and reset my digestive system. So I feel great for the following year. If you’d like to learn more details about the fast then check out episode number 162, it’s called 10 Day Detox. I actually re-listened to it myself just recently to make sure I don’t repeat myself on this podcast and don’t bore you to death. But if you want to check out more details there, you can find them in episode 162 where I described the whole process, the whole fast in quite a lot of detail.

In today’s episode, we’re not going to go into the fast itself, but I would like to share some great takeaways I got from one of the workshops here.

So here at Natural Instinct Healing, not only you do the fast and you’re supervised so that you’re feeling great, but also you’re provided with lots of interesting and insightful workshops that help your health, food, mindset and any other aspects of your life that you rarely think about during our day to day lives. And so this one was on food, it was on nutrition, we talked a lot about carbs, fats, proteins and things like that. And then towards the end, they provide or the person who was running the workshop provided a great piece of advice about how to eat. And bear in mind, this is not going to be concerning the specific diet that you have picked. So you might be on a low carb diet or you might be on a low fat diet, you might be on a vegan diet on a vegetarian diet, pescatarian diet or any kind of diet.

It doesn’t really matter. This affects just how you select your products and how you think about them. So I think this advice can be very helpful for everybody. And the way to think about food in a nutshell is slowly and slowly is actually an abbreviation, stands for seasonal, local, organic, whole foods, love and your intention. So the first four letters are to do, have to do with what you choose and what you eat. And the last two letters have to do with how you eat. So let’s have a look and see why this is important.

So number one, when you go to the grocery store and you pick your food, a good tip or good rule of thumb is to pick seasonal food. The food that is seasonal for your location, where you’re in. Why is that important? Well, that’s because it doesn’t have to be stored for a long time, meaning that it doesn’t have to have a lot of different chemicals or packaging ways to preserve it.

It’s just, it’s fresh, it’s recent, it’s seasonal, is from the ground or from wherever it comes from. But basically it’s fresh and that means it has minimal chemicals and modifications to it and therefore it’s much more likely to be more nutritious. So that’s the s in slowly and stands for seasonal. The l stands for local. So why is it important to pick local foods? Well, that’s because they don’t have to be imported. They don’t have to travel a long way. And once again, when foods travel, they can lose in nutrition. They can be maybe exposed to sunlight or different conditions and certain parts of their journey and therefore not be as nutritious as in the cases when they are right away grown locally and seasonally. And chances are if you’re picking a local food, then you are already as a consequence picking seasonal food as well anyway.

Letter number three is O. O stands for organic. Organic food contains less pesticides, chemicals and fertilizers, and therefore it’s good for you. And actually it’s also good for the environment, good for sustainable farming, good for our planet. So if you take those two into consideration, it can be very good to pick organic food in the cases when it is possible. You might not be able to do it every single time. May not be available or sometimes they’re just ridiculously expensive in supermarkets, but when it is possible, then always try to go for organic food.

Whole foods. That’s the w. So we’re up to the fourth letter. Why are whole foods important? So I really liked this one because for me it was quite insightful during these workshops. And plus I did a bit of additional research for this podcast on what whole food actually means.

So I found a great article on foodandnutrition.org we’ll share that in the show notes, which you can find at www.superdatascience.com/258. And what whole foods actually means is, well first of all, whole foods are nutritious, nutrient dense, whereas the opposite processed foods are energy dense. So nutrition means that they have fiber, vitamins and minerals and other things that are good for you, good for your body, whereas processed foods have little of that, but they have a lot of calories. And, the question is what are you going to do with those calories, if you’re like running a marathon and you’re practicing and training, doing heavy lifting, then maybe you need a lot of calories. But if you’re sitting on your chair and doing data science work, yes, your brain requires calories, but probably not as much as is contained in processed foods.

So what’s a good rule of thumb to distinguish between whole foods and processed foods? Well, whole foods are foods that contain one ingredient. Fullstop. A cucumber, one ingredient or a tomato, one ingredient, or, if you’re eating meat like a piece of chicken, that’s one ingredient or an egg, that’s one ingredient. Whereas processed foods are foods that contain two ingredients or more. So for instance, here’s a great example. Once again, this is from the website I just mentioned. A potato is a wholefood whereas mashed potatoes are most likely not whole foods, especially if you buy them in the supermarket. So for instance, Hungry Jack instant mashed potatoes include the following: potato flakes, sodium bisulfite, bha and citric acid added to protect color and flavor. Contains 2% or more or less of monoglycerides, partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil, natural flavors, sodium acid pyrophosphate and butter oil.

So that’s seven ingredients in something seemingly so innocent as mashed potatoes. So be careful of that. Every time you pick whole foods, foods that haven’t been broken down and processed, you are taking care of your body and providing more nutrients and vitamins and minerals for yourself and reducing that calorie intake because your stomach has a certain size and to get full you need to pretty much like fill it up to a certain level. Whether you fill it up with whole foods and get the nutrients and less calories or whether you fill it up with processed foods and get less nutrients but more calories, you’re going to feel the same way. You’re going to feel full in either case. Is just that in the second example, you’re going to get so much more calories, so much more energy, which you probably aren’t going to burn off. And that’s going to turn into fat. That is going to negatively affect your health in the long run. So better get full with whole foods and vitamins and minerals and fiber.

So that’s the first four letters. S L O W, which stand for seasonal, local, organic and whole foods. Now moving on and that’s what you choose. Now we’re moving on to the last two letters, love and your intention. And these are actually quite important. So love. Why is that important? Well, we often, especially in our professions, as data scientists, we often find ourselves with lack of time to sit down and enjoy a meal and actually eat properly and do it with love and care. And so we do it on the goal and you know, hence the whole fast food. That’s what fast food represents. You need to fast, you are doing it on the go.

Well it might sound very airy fairy that you need to eat food with love and mindfulness. And be caring when you’re doing it. Actually there is science behind it. So your nervous system consists of two parts, the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous systems. They work in combination, they work, obviously you don’t have control over how they work. You have some control over how the sympathetic part works. Zero control how the parasympathetic part works. They just, they just do their thing. The sympathetic part of your nervous system is responsible for the flight or fight response, meaning when there’s a tiger chasing you that the sympathetic nervous system kicks in. So it basically works with your muscles and makes them contract and activate. So that’s your sympathetic system and makes you run or fight and things like that.

Your parasympathetic nervous system is responsible for the rest and digest part. It mostly controls all your inner organs and also lets you relax and digest, and things like that. The thing is between these two nervous systems, by the way, there’s a great article or great diagram I found and a description to it. So we’ll also link to that in the show notes. I’ve found it very insightful. I always knew about the sympathetic parasympathetic, but never knew them, knew the difference that well and I highly recommend checking it out. So the thing between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems is that they don’t work well together. They don’t work well at the same time. It’s kind of hard to rest and digest while you’re running from a tiger, in those terms. So what is important to understand is that you’re not going to digest the same way. It’s just a fact. You’re not going to digest the same way if you’re in your sympathetic nervous system state, basically you’re running from a tiger. Your body is not really going to be focused on just digestion versus if you’re like relaxing, you’re calm, you’re very mindful about your food, then you’re in your parasympathetic state and now you are going to digest everything much better. You’re going to absorb the nutrients, they’re going to flow through your system and feed all your organs and you’re going to get maximum value out of it.

So think about that next time you’re grabbing food on the go or you’re, that’s probably the worst case scenario when you pop into McDonald’s or Hungry Jack something, you grab some food and you go back to work or you’re driving while you’re eating or you’re like walking or something like that, you’re kind of on the go.

That’s why it’s best to minimize those scenarios. But even goes as far as ordering food in, like for instance, ordering Uber Eats like, I love Uber Eats, I love, or Deliveroo, whatever other app you use to get your food. It’s great. But what tends to happen is once the food arrives, we just jump straight into eating it and like, we might be watching a movie and things like that. So, yes, we might be already kind of like resting, but maybe not. Maybe we were, you know, actually having an active debate with someone. Maybe we just got back from work and haven’t had time to relax. We just got back from training or things like that. So make sure even if you’re ordering food in that you go through the process of like sitting down and calming down, even taking some time to smell the food and letting your body adapt to the moment or kind of like get into the moment that yes, you’re going to be eating food now and you’re going to be doing it with love and mindfully.

So even though it’s love, it actually has a lot of scientific backing to it. And finally, your intention, the y in slowly stands for your intention. You should ask yourself the question, why are you going for what you’re going for right now in terms of food like, is it really necessary to eat those Cheetos or Doritos or that ice cream or have that coffee, fifth one in the day or is it really necessary to grab that snack that you’re about to grab. Always have an intention behind food. If you are indeed hungry and you need energy, yes, that’s important. Or if you want to enjoy a certain food right now, even if it’s a snack, but you’re like, you really are mindful about it and you think, okay, I want to slow down for a bit and I want to enjoy this piece, that’s great.

But if you’re just like kind of eating as a way of like in the background, you’re not even noticing. You’re just grabbing some food and just starting to munch on it. That might not be the best thing to do because it’s kind of like on autopilot and therefore there is no mindfulness to it or nothing like that. It’s just a habit and not the best habit out of the ones that you could be having.

So there we go, that’s eating slowly: seasonal, local, organic, whole food, love and your intention. Big kudos to Natural Instinct Healing for teaching me this stuff. If, by the way, if you’re interested in doing this retreat, I mentioned this last time in episode 162, it is of course available online. You can find it. What I didn’t mention is that they have a special coupon code, which you can use, you can also find it in the show notes. We’ll share it at www.superdatascience.com/258. You can use that for your special discount. I don’t have any affiliation with them, is just a coupon code they provided for people who, when friends bring friends, and you guys are all my friends, so you can definitely jump on that. And in fact, this time I brought one of my friends, Mike, who’s a really successful, impactful lawyer in Sydney, one of the best lawyers I know in Australia, and he’s enjoying it so much. So highly recommend checking it out. It’s naturalinstincthealing.com.

On that note, we’ll share all of these resources that I mentioned during this episode, including the coupon and including the link to the retreat in the show notes at www.superdatascience.com/258 and plus, on top of that, I wanted to say that health is important, right? It’s important for data scientists, for us to develop our minds and analytical skills. But without your health, you are not going to be able to do your work. And as smart as you can be, what you eat and how you feel directly impacts your productivity and ability, capacity to create amazing things and actually do the work that you want to do. And therefore it’s super important. And that’s why we’re releasing, apart from, of course, this episode and all the things that we discussed, we’re also releasing a series of articles on the topic of health. So these articles are going to discuss things like carbohydrates and how they’re specifically important for data scientists, fats, how they’re important for data scientists, proteins, how they’re important for the brain and data science work, what are nootropics and things like that.

This is going to be several articles in the series on health. You’ll find them on our blog at www.superdatascience.com/blog plus we’ll link to them in the show notes of this episode as well. And I hope you check them out because I think these are very important topics and we want to make sure that we are very, very healthy and therefore we can do our work at its best. On that note, thanks so much for being here and checking out this episode. I look forward to seeing you next time. And until then, happy analyzing.