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Self-Evidence– Nutrition and the Power of Feel

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A friend of mine, Peter Attia, made a major announcement the other day. He and his colleagues founded the Nutrition Science Initiative. The goal is simple, though not easy. To ensure sound science behind how and what we eat by bringing together the best minds and scientists in what Four Hour Work Week author, Tim Ferris, called “The Manhattan Project to End Diet Fads.” Ferris described it like this.

“Today, a dream of mine came true.  Imagine what could be done if we had an X-men-like group of the world’s best scientists, independently funded and uninfluenced by industry, tackling the most important questions in nutrition?  Starting today, we have such a group: the Nutrition Science Initiative (NuSI).”

Peter’s goal is an ambitious, but admirable one, and if anyone can pull this off, it is Peter. So how did he get so inspired? Peter is a trained heart surgeon who got fed up with health care and walked away. He went on to McKinsey where he excelled as a business consultant. But it was his own experience of himself that drove him to tackle one of the biggest problems our future faces.

Peter is a competitive athlete who for years has pushed his performance and training limits. He did what the available “science” told him. He did the “right” things. Yet looking at him at the time, you’d never know he worked out as much as he did. It didn’t feel right, the extra weight around his middle, for all the effort he put into doing what he was supposed to do. He began what he called “self-experimentation” gradually changing the way he ate and paying attention to the results. He slowly eliminated bad carbs from his diet. If you’d like to know more of his story go to eatingacademy.com.

I tell Peter’s story for a simple reason. We started talking back when he was in his residency, when he realized he didn’t feel how he thought he should feel given that he was doing everything he was supposed to be doing. His career didn’t feel right for lots of reasons even though he was at one of the best heart surgery training programs in the world. His body didn’t look or feel right even though he’d done all the right things. Things just weren’t adding up. What he was supposed to do wasn’t working. No one told him that. He felt it and saw it for himself. Self-evidence.

Somewhere along the line, he read my book, The Most Important Lesson No One Ever Taught Me, and we talked about it, specifically about feel. His world wasn’t making sense. That dissonance caused frustration, even anger, at the way the world “worked.” Here’s what he said about my book:

“It’s one of the most enlightening books I’ve ever read. I’ve read this book three times, at three different stages of my life, and I’ve always learned something new. The most important thing has been that how I feel actually matters.”

He decided he needed to change, to find where he felt a fit.

Peter is one of the most data driven people you’ll ever meet. He wants evidence. But how do you get evidence if you can’t trust the experts who tell you how things work only to find they’re not working for you? We’ve all felt this way. And you’re left with three choices.

1. You do nothing and just go along.

2. You blame yourself for not trying hard enough, for not being good enough, or not smart enough. Who are you to question what is right, what you’re supposed to do?

3. You look for answers that fit you, that actually work. You methodically test in a sensible way new ways of doing things. You collect self-evidence.

And it begins with feel. That feeling that doing what you’re supposed to do isn’t working for you. I’m not sure that Peter even considered feel as evidence he could listen to, or even trust, until we talked. Most people don’t. Feel is taken for granted, ignored, or confused with our feelings, our emotional responses. Others mistake it for intuition.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying just do what feels good. I am saying feel is an important part of the puzzle. It is the data that gets your attention, whispers or screams at you that something needs to be changed or embraced. It tells you that you are in exactly the right place or that you are not protecting what’s right about you. Feel gets the ball rolling. When your intellect cannot make sense of things, feel doesn’t go away, doesn’t let you off the hook. You can choose to ignore it or numb yourself to its message, but we feel for a reason. To protect ourselves, to inspire ourselves, to get ourselves moving in the right direction– for us. Through feel, we can match what’s happening inside ourselves to what’s happening outside ourselves.

Like Peter, I deal only in data, in evidence, self-evidence, when I work with someone. For most of my clients, when something is working it feels good for one reason or another. It gets results. The goal becomes matching how and what we feel to what works for us. Feeling good is not of much use if it doesn’t match your results. Like Peter, my goal has been to find the fit between what we do and what we feel so that we can rely on ourselves to do the things that work more effectively.

Peter and I share a common hero, physicist Richard Feynman. My favorite idea of his is that one real value of science is not that it is all-knowing or right, but that it leaves us the freedom to doubt. It not only leaves us that freedom, but demands it, thrives on it. Too often, we turn that doubt on ourselves, take for gospel the word of experts.

Worst of all, we doubt what we feel instead of doubting what we’re doing when something isn’t working. That’s not intelligent. Feel is the self-evidence of freedom and responsibility. It deserves what William James called “a quiet hearing.” President John Adams once said “happiness is the ability to think for myself.” The ability to feel intelligently for ourselves, in my experience, leads to sustainable happiness.

Feel is a skill, something we can get better at. Feel is also self-evidence, data that something fits us or not. But feel, in and of itself, is not enough. Maybe feel forms the hypothesis you need to check out more scientifically, to put to the test. Maybe feel is the doubt that makes you look for better answers. What feel is not is something you should ignore. No one else can feel for you nor know exactly what you feel.

We’re on the edge, I believe, of figuring out feel more scientifically with the advances in neurosciences, but we’re a long way from understanding it. For now, the best we can do is listen to how and what we feel and how it meshes with the world around us. What I know, what I am sure Peter would agree with, is if you eat the right things for your body, you will feel better than if you don’t. In a perfect world, you will feel your food instead of feeding your feelings.

Before the Founding Fathers created this country, before they wrote the Constitution, they wrote and signed the Declaration of Independence. These people with one of the highest standards of living in the world at that time risked everything. They knew they might be signing their own death certificate. They knew they’d be hanged if they were caught, these men of wealth and means. They signed anyway. If only we could all be so brave.

I often tell my clients that they must claim their own independence, write their own Declaration of Independence, before they write their own Constitution. They must be free first. Peter is a great example of this thinking turned into action. He had to let go of what he thought he knew, of what he was supposed to do, before he could be free to self-experiment, to uncover what Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson described as “self-evident,” the freedom to think and feel for ourselves.

Best-selling author Allison Winn Scotch described her career success in my interview with her:

“I trusted myself to go after it because it felt right and it felt good. If you’ve done the work, you trust that you can do it.”

From what I know about Peter, that’s the goal he has for all of us, to be able to trust how we eat because we have the right information, that we can eat in a way that feels good and feels right…because it is.

 

 

 

 

 

The post Self-Evidence– Nutrition and the Power of Feel appeared first on Doug Newburg.


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