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LenDentonThrive Letter #32

Welcome to the LenDentonThrive Letter! My mission is to help Over-50 Guys Get Lighter and Leaner, Get Stronger, and Live Longer. We do that by building our ThriveLife!

This edition is part of my 6-part series to help you build your own custom-tuned ThriveLife in 2024. Here’s where we’ve been thus far:

• In Part 1, I explained what the ThriveLife is, and why you need your own personal ThriveLife.

• In Part 2, I laid the foundation for your ThriveLife with ThriveLife Principles 1 & 2.

In today’s edition, we’ll continue the series with a specific focus on the best way to fuel your ThriveLife. In other words, let’s talk about food!

Fueling Your ThriveLife

One of my favorite subjects is FOOD! Reason #1 is because I really like to eat! And, Reason #2 is because I think that nutrition is the single most important aspect of your health and fitness journey. Your nutrition and food choices will either fuel your ThriveLife or derail it!

Nutrition is important and complex, so we won’t be able to do a full deep dive on the overall topic in the space available in this edition of the newsletter. However, in today’s edition, I’ll share how you can quickly start putting food to work for you and stop it from working against you. I’ve also written extensively on nutrition in previous editions, so I’ll share some links to that additional information at the end of the newsletter.

Your Weight Loss Battle

ThriveLife focuses on nutrition as the top priority. That is not to say that exercise isn’t important, because it is. It’s just that getting your diet under control is the key to eliminating excess calories, which also helps your exercise become more effective.

The simple truth is that your weight loss battle will be won in the kitchen, not the gym!

Here are three key points to consider:

First, you can’t outwork a bad diet! Your current weight situation is 80-85% a result of your diet, not your exercise routine. That’s because of the way your body stores and uses energy. Voluntary exercise (like going to the gym or doing high-intensity interval training) only accounts for around 15-20% of your total calorie burn. This means that working extra hard at exercise so you can eat whatever you want is a waste of your time and energy!

Second, it’s easier to avoid unnecessary calories instead of working them off. Five minutes of good meal planning every morning could help you avoid more calories than you would burn off in an hour or two of hard work at the gym. This is a Master Move that I learned early in my journey that many guys never figure out!

Third, dump the SAD! We need to break our dependence on the Standard American Diet (known as SAD)! This is the “boxes and brands” approach to packaged and highly processed foods that we all grew up with. These foods are highly engineered to include hidden sugars and fillers that are added by industrial food manufacturers to make food tastier, less expensive…and more addictive! The SAD is the #1 reason for the epidemic of obesity being experienced today by American men!

ThriveLife Principle #3 - Eat Smarter

Eating smarter is the ThriveLife alternative to eating the SAD. This is how I was able to win my weight loss battle when I began my own ThriveLife journey in 2014.

Eating smarter doesn’t mean eating less!

It means avoiding those SAD foods that contain high levels of sugar or that overdrive your blood glucose levels after you eat them. It means replacing bad calories with good calories. It means fueling your body with wholesome, nutrient-dense foods that you enjoy while avoiding deprivation and hunger.

To help you Eat Smarter, I’ve created the Eat Smarter food zones. All foods fall into one of three food zones as shown in Figure 2 below.

Green Zone: These are nutrient-dense whole foods like lean meats, poultry and fish, eggs, and fresh vegetables. They have a low glycemic index so they impact blood sugar levels minimally. The Eat Smarter goal is to eat 80% of your calories from Green Zone foods.

Yellow Zone: These are processed and natural foods that should be checked for their ingredients before consuming them. These are medium-glycemic index foods and include dairy, pasta, and commercially produced foods with boxes and brands. We check the labels on these foods to make sure that they don’t contain Red Zone ingredients. The Eat Smarter goal is to limit your Yellow Zone calories to 20% of your diet.

Red Zone: These are sugary foods with high glycemic indexes that have a high impact on blood sugar levels. Red Zone foods should be eliminated from your diet.

Exit the Red Zone

It can take time to completely recalibrate your daily nutrition practices (aka diet) to Eat Smarter, but it’s worth it. The results of Eating Smarter had a dramatic impact on my weight and fat loss. It can do the same for you.

If you’re just beginning to Eat Smarter, I recommend that you focus your energy on exiting the Red Zone by eliminating those 6 key Red Zone foods from your diet. It may take you a few weeks to eliminate them. Don’t worry about eliminating calories at this point. Instead, you can replace Red Zone calories with Green Zone calories and still experience weight loss.

Once you’ve successfully eliminated Red Zone foods from your daily diet, you can begin to rebalance your diet to limit Yellow Zone foods to 20% of your daily intake with Green Zone foods at 80%.

In the past, whenever I’ve started a new nutrition approach, I’ve always wondered: “What can I eat?”

With ThriveLife’s Eat Smarter plan, the answer is simple:

Get rid of the Red Zone foods, then eat whatever you want!  

In Closing

ThriveLife Principle #3 is Eat Smarter. When we begin to Eat Smarter, we put food to work for us, and stop it from working against us. This is how we fuel our ThriveLife.

The ThriveLife is a better system for attaining your health and fitness goals. If you’re an Over-50 Guy who is looking to lose 20 or more pounds, then developing better daily practices based on the ThriveLife Principles will help you to build your sustainable, healthy lifestyle that I call the ThriveLife.

Our unique, personalized versions of the ThriveLife are built on these ThriveLife Principles:

• Principle 1 - Take Action

• Principle 2 - Measure What Matters

• Principle 3 - Eat Smarter

In this series, we’re building a step-by-step blueprint for your ThriveLife in 2024. Next week, we’ll discuss how to exercise and how it helps us Keep Moving with ThriveLife Principle 4.

Thanks for your time and attention. Happy holidays! See you next Saturday.

Thrive & Prosper,

Len

Additional Information on Nutrition

• Read more about the ThriveLife Eat Smarter system here.

• Read more about the Standard American Diet here.

• Read more about Eating Smart while dining out here.

• Read more about the Weight Loss Dashboard here.

I write this newsletter hoping to make a positive impact on the lives of Over-50 Guys and and their families. If you found this information useful, please consider subscribing to receive new editions each week.

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