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LenDentonThrive Letter #4 - Simple Rule #2 Boost Your FoodIQ

Part 2B of the 4-Part ThriveAge Simple Rules Series

Happy Saturday! I’m Len Denton, and I’m glad you’re here!

This week, we’re talking about one of my favorite subjects - FOOD!

The ThriveAge FoodIQ system is all about helping you to eat smarter! The system is composed of two parts.

Part 1 is the three FoodIQ Food Zones (Green, Yellow and Red) that I introduced you to in last week’s newsletter. These food zones help you to make healthy choices that put food to work for you by increasing your calorie deficit and thus accelerating your calorie burn. This results in faster, more sustainable weight loss.

Part 2 is the four FoodIQ Action Levels that guide you through a controlled sequence of actions to help you reshape your diet with minimal effort. That’s the Big Idea in this edition of the newsletter.

Boosting my FoodIQ helped me to go from a Food Zero to a Food Hero, and helped me to lose 70 pounds. It can do the same for you!

Here’s a quick overview of this week’s edition of the LenDentonThrive Letter:

• The Big Idea - This week, we tackle Part 2 of Simple Rule #2 - Boost Your FoodIQ by exploring the four FoodIQ Action Levels.

• Tip of the Week - this week, I’ll share a simple trick that I use to avoid hundreds of unnecessary calories a day.

• What I’m Eating - a quick look at a typical ThriveAge-compatible meal or snack. (Warning - non-professional food photos below!)

• What I’m reading - some additional insights from the second half of James Clear’s Atomic Habits book.

I’m really glad that you’re here! We have a lot to cover in ten minutes or less, so let’s get started!

1. The Big Idea - ThriveAge Simple Rule #2

Food can be a blessing or a curse!

And, if you are an Over-50 Guy, who is accustomed to eating according to the Standard American Diet, (or SAD) then it’s almost a certainty that you’re operating at the curse end of the food spectrum. The SAD is filled with hidden sugars that are over-driving your body’s digestive and endocrine systems and causing you to gain weight and retain fat. This is usually evidenced by carrying excessive belly fat around the waist area.

The antidote to the SAD is to eat smarter. Not less! Just smarter!

The Thriveage FoodIQ system helps you find and eliminate the hidden sugars in your daily eating strategy and replaces them with nutrient-dense foods that you enjoy. You often find yourself eating more while you’re losing weight following the FoodIQ approach!

FoodIQ’s Food Zones (Green, Yellow and Red) help you make the right food choices. The FoodIQ Action Levels provide you with a guided approach to redesigning your diet and implementing a smarter, more sustainable food strategy.

Four Action Levels

Now, let’s explore the four FoodIQ Action Levels. Together, the four levels provide a roadmap to help you go from being a Food Zero to a Food Hero! We’ll explore each one of the levels below.

1. Baseline - This is the initial step in the process. The goal of Baseline is simply to document where you are in your food journey. There is no changing any of your eating habits at this point. Baseline is simply the act of measuring the starting point. In Baseline, you’ll familiarize yourself with the simple portion-counting strategy that FoodIQ relies on. It’s quick and simple and DOES NOT REQUIRE ANY WEIGHING FOOD OR CALORIE COUNTING!

   
   Goals: There are two goals in the Baseline stage. First, you’ll familiarize yourself with the basic FoodIQ counting process. And second, you’ll obtain a snapshot of your actual eating habits as you begin the FoodIQ process.

   
   Time duration: 3-4 days

2. Red-Zero - Equipped with the snapshot of your current diet that you developed in Baseline, you are ready to begin the first stage of modifying your eating habits. As the name implies, Red-Zero is where you systematically analyze your regular eating habits to find the sources of sugars and sugar-laden foods in your diet. Then, you replace those sugary, Red Zone foods with Green Zone choices. The idea is to swap Green Zone foods for Red Zone foods, without regard to calorie content.
    

   Here are a couple of examples - Your Baseline snapshot shows that white bread is a normal part of your diet. So, instead of completely eliminating bread, you simply swap whole wheat bread for white bread. You would also replace sugary desserts with an extra helping of meat or vegetables. The overall objective is to replace bad calories (Red Zone) with better ones (Green Zone).

   
   Most guys begin to experience weight loss as soon as they remove Red Zone foods from their diets! This is because you will begin to develop a calorie deficit, which is essential to weight loss, as soon as the Reds are gone.

   
   Goals: First, identify all Red Zone foods in your usual diet. Second, you replace those Red Zone foods with foods you enjoy from the Green Zone.
   

   Time Duration: Red-Zero usually takes 2-3 weeks

3. Yellow-Twenty - Once you have eliminated the Red Zone foods from your diet, you will be ready to focus on reducing the amount of Yellow Zone foods. A well-structured ThriveAge diet will include no more than 20% of its daily portions from the Yellow Zone. As you did in the Red-Zero level, you’ll systematically replace excess Yellow Zone foods with Green Zone foods of your liking. Reducing the Yellow foods in your diet will further increase your calorie deficit, and weight loss will likely accelerate as you complete this level.

   
   For many, reaching and maintaining Yellow-Twenty will be sufficient to reach their weight loss goals.

   
   Goals: First, identify all Yellow Zone foods in your usual diet. Second, you replace those Yellow Zone foods with foods you enjoy from the Green Zone.

   
   Time Duration: Red-Zero usually takes 3-4 weeks

4. Calorie Setpoint - Calorie Setpoint is the final level of the FoodIQ system. It is also optional.

   This level is designed to allow you to take a more focused approach to managing the calorie deficit, and thus accelerate your weight loss. This requires careful tracking of food consumed and calories expended. The best way to do this is to use a tracking app such as Fitbit, MyFitnessPal or Strava.

   
   (Because Calorie Setpoint is optional, and more complex to implement, I’ll cover it in greater detail in a future article or newsletter edition.)

   
   Goals: Carefully track all calories that you consume. Then compare calories consumed (your daily diet) against calories expended (daily exercise) to calculate your calorie deficit. First, identify all Yellow Zone foods in your usual diet. Second, you replace those Yellow Zone foods with foods you enjoy from the Green Zone.
    

   Time Duration: Calorie Setpoint usually takes 1-2 weeks to implement. It may last for extended durations.

What I Did To Lose 70 Pounds

When I started my weight loss journey, there was no FoodIQ system to rely upon. I experimented with changes in my diet that closely resemble the action levels of today’s FoodIQ system. I eliminated the sugars in my diet (Red-Zero) almost immediately, then more gradually arrived at something resembling Yellow-Twenty. I also spent about 3 months operating with Calorie Setpoint to accelerate my weight loss, and stayed in that mode until I had lost a total of 70 pounds. It took a total of seven months of trial and error to achieve those results.

Today, I spend almost 100% of my time operating at Level 3. It is more than sufficient to allow me to maintain my weight within 1-2 pounds of my target 173 pounds. On occasion, such as after holiday feasts, I’ll jump into Level 4 for a few days if my weight has jumped above 175 due to enjoying much feasting! But, that’s the exception case. I typically spend 98% of my time maintaining my weight in Level 3.

The Food Quotient

The Food Quotient is a simple monitoring tool to help you track how well you are following the FoodIQ system’s principles on a daily basis, or even from meal-to-meal. Just like with human IQ, the higher the Food Quotient, the better. The maximum Food Quotient is 300 points, which would represent a diet that was 100% Green Zone foods. By comparison, the diet that meets the recommended 80-20-0 (Green-Yellow-Red) standard, scores 260 points on the Food Quotient scale.

Let’s use some examples to see how the Food Quotient can help you manage your daily food consumption from the three food zones (Green-Yellow-Red):

Day 1 - your eating totals (70-30-0) for a Food Quotient of 240. Not bad, but slightly below the goal of 260 or better.

Day 2 - your eating totals slip when you allow Red foods back into your diet for a total of (70-20-10) for a Food Quotient of 190. Let’s do better tomorrow!

Day 3 - you knock it out of the park with a perfect score of (100-0-0) and a maximum Food Quotient of 300. Well done!

Day 4 - a good day right on your (80-20-0) target and a Food Quotient of 260.

The goal of the Food Quotient is to provide you with information to help you eat to score 260 or better on a daily basis. When you do that, you’ll be eating well and will be able to sustainably lose weight.

Summary

ThriveAge is a food-first approach to fitness that puts food to work for you! The FoodIQ approach is designed to help you to eat smarter in the following ways:

1. Food Zones help you make smarter choices by replacing sugary foods with healthy (and tasty) alternatives.

2. Action Levels provide you with a structured, guided way to modify your nutritional strategies quickly and easily.

3. The Food Quotient is a simple number to help you see how closely your efforts are aligned with the overall FoodIQ strategy.

That’s how ThriveAge helps you to lose weight, get fit and stay fit for life!

Want to Go Deeper?

Do you want to dive deeper into ThriveAge and what it can do in your life? If that sounds like a smart move for you, then consider subscribing to the LenDentonThrive Letter. It’s totally free!

As a bonus, new subscribers will receive a free .pdf version of Chapter 1 of my upcoming new book, The ThriveAge Way (The Over-50 Way To Lose Weight, Get Fit & Stay Fit For Life).

ThriveAge is the roadmap to your custom-built ThriveLife!

2. Tip of the Week: Planning for Calorie Avoidance

The average Over-50 Guy will burn around 350 calories during one hour of moderate cardio exercise (walking or jogging). That’s a lot of time and work for a rather small amount of calorie burn.

It’s actually easier to avoid calories than to burn them off. That’s why I always remember the quote: “You lose weight in the kitchen and get fit in the gym.”

You could avoid the same 350 calories with five minutes of planning at the start of the day. Just think about what’s ahead and plan for a healthy meal in advance. Are you meeting a friend for lunch? Just choose a restaurant with healthy options.

I call this the Mind-Over-Muscle approach to weight loss. It works. Every calorie you can avoid through planning is a calorie you don’t have to burn while exercising. We’ll dive into exercise in next week’s edition of the newsletter.

Give calorie avoidance a try!

3. What I’m Eating

ThriveAge is a food-first approach to health and fitness. I call it '“fitness for food lovers!” So, each week I’ll be giving you a quick insight into one of my typical meals. No crazy diets, just real food.

This week’s entry is my very favorite Sunday lunch.

Here’s the break-down:

• 2 smoked pork ribs

• ¼ link of smoked turkey sausage.

• Sweet potato fries

• Spicy home-made barbeque beans (G. Hughes brand)

• Spicy G. Hughes barbeque sauce

This is a total of about 550 calories. But, more important to ThriveAgers, this is a 6 Greens, 0 Yellows and 0 Reds dinner with a FoodIQ of 300. It’s another perfect ThriveAge meal.

Really good!

4. What I’m Reading

This week, I’ve reached the ¾-mark of reading Atomic Habits by James Clear. I think it’s important to understand the science and philosophy behind creating new habits because we’re in the process of building healthy new habits and lifestyles as we journey to our Thrivelife. With that in mind, here are a few tips on starting good new habits or behaviors:

1. Human behavior follows the Law of Least Effort, meaning that we tend to gravitate toward the option that requires the least amount of work.

2. Create environments where doing the right thing is as easy as possible. This reduces the friction to getting the new behavior you want to encourage.

3. To keep new habit-making simple, start small by using The Two-Minute Rule; which says: new habits should take less than two minutes. So, instead of planning a 30-minute weight-lifting routine at the gym, simply start by putting on your workout clothes. These simple, small successes link to further successes down the road.

Recommendation - For ongoing insights into James Clear’s thinking, sign-up for his 3-2-1-Thursdays. It’s a short, wisdom-packed newsletter that I read every week. Sign up for your copy at: https://jamesclear.com/3-2-1

I’m Writing A Book!

I’m a busy Over-50 Guy who has spent the past ten years building a practice of personal health and fitness that relies on real food and smart exercise instead of crazy diets and killer workouts. This process, called ThriveAge, helped me to lose 70 pounds and keep it off for going on ten years. Now, I want to share what I have learned with other Over-50 Guys. So, I wrote the book!

In The ThriveAge Way (The Over-50 Way To Lose Weight, Get Fit & Stay Fit For Life), I share everything I’ve learned about the principles and practices necessary to create and sustain a healthy lifestyle. I call it my ThriveLife.

New subscribers to the LenDentonThrive Letter will receive Chapter 1 of my new book for free. To get your free copy of Chapter 1, just subscribe to the LenDentonThrive Letter.

Upcoming Topics

Here’s a quick look at some of the topics I’m working on for upcoming editions of the newsletter.

• ThriveAge Simple Rule #3 - Remain-in-Motion

• ThriveLife - What It Is, And How To Get There

• Ten Things I Would Tell My 50-Year-Old Self

• Develop a Longevity Mindset to Add Years to Your Life

Please let me know if you have a particular preference in how I prioritize these for publishing, or if there’s a topic you’d like to see in future editions.

Thanks for your time and attention. Have a great weekend. See you next Saturday!

Thrive & Prosper,

Len

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