Calorie counting, a curious cat, and not raw milk.

Oh, the allure of counting calories.

The promised land of health is just one skipped breakfast or rejected chocolate muffin away. It’s sold to us as being so easy, yet we always seem to fall back down the calorie cliff.

What if we told you calories aren’t the answer? And that working out isn’t either? The answer also isn’t raw milk, no matter how much we wish it was.

Yes, it’s true: caloric deficit leads to weight loss.

But weight doesn’t mean just fat. Let’s say you are in a caloric deficit. You consume less than you burn from activity and daily life. But if all those calories are just oats or spinach, you’re missing out on key macro and micro nutrients to support your health. An incomplete calorie deficit leads to losing muscle and skeletal mass instead of fat. And these losses mean experiencing a decline in hormonal, cognitive, and immune function.

Elimination diets like carnivore, vegan, and even eating insects (if you’re into that) fail to address our tendency to crave substitutes. We might stop eating animal products, but replace those calories with Oreos, Sour Patch Kids, and Pringles. We might stop eating plants, but eat ultra-processed sausage, seed-oil fried chicken, and grain-fed burger patties. In turn these health attempts become inflammatory, full of fillers, and simply not healthy or sustainable for our day to day.

On top of that, elimination diets often rely on external supplementation for appropriate bodily function even if followed to the T. So much work, money, and restraint for such little return.

There’s a reason why “quality over quantity” is a universal belief. Food quality is the most important factor to feeling your best and staying in tip top shape. While food quality alone doesn’t help with fitness goals, it is the foundation to build your health habits on.

Quality has been shown to naturally increases feelings of fullness and slow digestion, minimizing glucose spikes, energy fluctuations, and thus, keeping you away from reaching for that snack in the back of your cabinet (yeah, we know where you hide that chocolate bar— we do the same).

Food quality encompasses many things, but let’s stick with the main ones: ingredients and sourcing. High-quality ingredients are whole foods that have not been stripped from their natural state. Here’s where you welcome grass-fed raw milk, raw unrefined honey, sea salt, and wild rice. Conversely, we want to minimize the number of synthetic additives in our foods. Our bodies do not recognize corn syrup, erythritol (which is just glucose derived from corn, ha!), white rice and canola oil. Highly-processed ingredients often lead to leaky gut disease and inflammation. Our bodies beg for complexity, not refinement.

Sourcing is probably the most important, as we have discussed in previous editions. We tend to think that everything in the “fresh” or “organic” section of the supermarket is the same. The truth is that our food’s nutritional profile can immensely change depending on who produced it and where it was produced. A blueberry from a regenerative, rich-soil farm will be more densely packed in vitamins and minerals than a heavily-fertilized mono-agriculture blueberry. And if that blueberry travelled thousands of miles to your morning parfait, it might’ve lost about 50% of its nutritional content. Maybe you should’ve picked that nice winter squash from your local farmer. Maple-syrup baked squash with yogurt? YUM.

We hope you throw calories out, and bring quality in. Seek minimally processed, cared-for foods. Not only are they more complex in flavor, their complex nutrients will care for your complex body! We encourage you to source one small item this week from your area. Maybe it will be some local artesian jam, an apple from the nearby orchard or that random berry you’ve never heard of before. You’ll see that once you source local and eat whole, your body will thank you for years to come.

Get what the grocery store is hiding from you!

Talk again soon! Tell us what quality foods you’re looking at adding to your next meal. You already know one of ours… 😉

To sunny days,

rearchitecting the broken food system. freeing the food.