A simple study break meal for optimizing mental performance

Key Takeaways

hello everyone and welcome to my cooking show you can tell I'm a professional because I have a tea towel over my shoulder and I noticed before that my white shirts a little bit dirty we never trust a chef that doesn't have day shows in today's video we're going to cook a meal that I like to eat during like a study or work break little path should we are smelling the meals and making sure they taste amazing do this in pants thank you all right so this is one of the meals I like to eat the most during a study break or work break the idea is to maximize mental health and optimize physical recovery so let's do about six animals six animals going on this is an evening show will resume you tell me I'd like to keep the food that I eat nice and simple so that's what this meal will be it's basically just eggs oil nuts rings we're getting two hands heating up we'll check what we hear a lot heat mushrooms asparagus avocado Oh I've noticed over there kale beans [Music] actually tea town doesn't fall off I've got onions so lots of vegetables you want to you know try at least get a big pile of green vegetables in your meals at least once per day at least that's what I try to do it no we need a cutting utensil North tik chopping board tip right first things first and prep the vegetables now someone asked me the other day at jujitsu what my hello gets so lean because I am pretty shredded but it's taking a lot of work to get there wasn't my way I was an overweight teenager and so at a high school I kind of got into well I did get into health and fitness I got into bodybuilding I did a nutrition degree kind of taught myself about health and fitness by watching YouTube by looking at people's blogs or different types of online resources and so that was what 2011 I started getting the health and fitness and now it's 2019 and I've kind of been refining the process over the last eight years or so and the way you what you'll see with like food and nutrition and health is that everyone is like different dogmas of like different ways to do things and so the preface to everything that I say in this video is take the best you hear from everyone including me and create your own style which is what I've done right so you'll have some people that preach a certain type of eating other people that say oh that's bad for you you should do this you should do that and so what I kind of realized is that although a lot of the advices well-meaning has some good aspects to it a lot of it as well really comes down to the individual and so that is what I figured out is that I want to eat like that person is telling me to do you know what sometimes I want to go against my own rules and eat whatever I want the majority of the time I figured out if you take care of its like the 8020 rule right if you take care of take care of eating well and working out majority of the time then every so often you're getting whatever the hell you want and it won't really matter the important thing is to to make sure the trend line follows a few simple principles for example eating simple foods so all of these foods here are simple kale greens all that are out of the ground I was talking to my little brother last night he's actually behind the camera how are you in and and he was saying that he was telling his friends because I've been kind of if you hang around me you start to eat a little bit better and it started you start to get feet up because that's just that's just the vibe I give up you know and so he was talking to his friends and one of his friends wanted to lose weight and since since Sam has been doing the same Ben gave me the jujitsu with me and eating head up Sam's tips for his friend was to eat less often and to reduce the eat the eat foods that have a less number of steps what it takes to get to you so basically unrefined unprocessed let's get this on revisit both of those in a second so what I'm gonna do take the pan off the heat because we don't want it too hot big drizzle of olive oil in here because that's where all the flavor is again simple food olive oil this is just pure olive oil avoid you want to avoid plant oils at all cost like sunflower oil seed oils that sort of stuff olive oil avocado oil both good options coconut oil grass-fed butter if you want we're gonna put all this in here so get nice and simple we only got we've got two pans happening and about four ingredients so far we're gonna get some eggs on as well pour a bit more olive oil in there so as I said I've been kind of refining my own process of of how I like to eat of how what works best for me and I encourage you to do the same but what after all these years the main two things that I've come across well the the simple tips that basically anyone can incorporate you don't need a nutrition degree or years of study to think about this is two or maybe three things number one learn to cook I learn to cook your own food because that way I know exactly what's going into what I'm eating number two eat less often so it's about it's 1:30 p.m. right now and this is my first meal of the day your is it a big stigma going around all over the last few decades of breakfast being the most is what meal a day and going out visited I used to think that I'm not saying again there but just because I do it doesn't mean you have to this is just what I found through trial and error I'm gonna get some seasoning of it so the process of me why I haven't eaten between dinner last night and 1:30 p.m. cause I practice intermittent fasting and what what does that mean well it's kind of simple really because remember that's that's my whole philosophy the simple shredded maybe that's the idea for the subpoena and there we could call that there we go that's a nice sauce on there never leave that running intermittent fasting so the whole premise of that is that you eat between a certain window of a day so my window is typically 12 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. which means I don't eat anything in the morning so I wake up I might have some water might have some black coffee I might go for a little bike ride or a little walk or something like that and then once 12 p.m. hits I'll hook a meal like this like this is a meal like I'd basically eat almost every day it's absolutely delicious wait till you see the finished product and then once a p.m. hits at night I don't need to eat anything else so a typical day for me might be wake up 7:30 a.m. something around there water like coffee a little bit of salt and water tha's water if that helps with the hydration then I'll do some work and study in the morning because that's what I'm most productive at about 12:00 p.m. oh I'll have a meal usually it's something like this so this kind of meal is plenty of greens we got eggs so it's low carbohydrate low refined carbohydrates which is the most important thing and I find if I eat refined carbohydrates they slow me down but if I eat a meal that's high in fat and protein I don't get that bursting full feeling of eating a carbohydrate heavy meal but I do get that satiated feeling and satiate is just know to feeling not hungry and then I find that quite a meal I eat this now 1:30 p.m. I could go till till dinner like I don't have to eat until dinner and then in between that I'm doing more work I'm doing other things that have to get done during the day remember what my goal is right it's to optimize mental health like mental capability so when I'm working on projects that to the best of my ability and physical recovery which is why we've got things like the eggs and the yolk and the greens because I do a lot of it do a lot of hard training so I want to make sure my body is recovered well for the next training session so that's number 2 eating less often you could practice in two minute fasting that's what I do or like reduce the number of meals you eat per day so things like you don't actually need to snack what I'm trying to do with that is minimise my insulin spikes and so give me a second I come over here I've been tracking my blood glucose you might have seen it in a in a previous video I did a faster four days and I use this glucose meter to track my blood glucose so part of the reason I do intermittent fasting alongside eating like this is to minimize my blood glucose spikes what happens when blood glucose spikes is that insulin in the body which is a hormone goes up and insulin is a growth hormone so essentially it's going to start triggering your body to store energy in the form of new cells in the form of fat cells which is what I don't want so my whole I would say way of eating now is about controlling into and controlling hormones if you can control your hormones through things like getting better sleep eating well etc you'll control your your weight loss your your concentration levels so that's my whole premise now is to try and control my hormones do this no point trying to battle against hormones that are working against you I'm actually reading an amazing book somewhere over here conveniently-placed book called genius foods by Max like a beer Lou beer and so if you like me and you want to eat eat foods that help out with cognitive function which is probably what you should do right because a lot of us we have to use our brains actually some of you might not have to very much but um that's an amazing book and I've kind of I'm kind of stoked actually I've you can you might get to see the front cover I've kind of worked these foods out for myself on trial and error by going okay I ate this food today and I felt like this and I ate this type of meal and I felt amazing so then I just noticed the trends and started eating more of the food that made me feel amazing then don't get me wrong there are foods like 10-minute feeds like fried chicken wings fries I had some of them yesterday I'm saying this I'm doing a cooking video made and healthy and yesterday I had fried wings and fries but I caught up with one of my friends right and we had we had lunch and I knew I could eat whatever I wanted because remember my average is eating stuff like this you want to treat yourself like an experiment avocado and so some of the foods that that max talks about really it's genius foods are really just adhere to the same sort of principles is what we've talked to them and they're that they're simple right that what you could go out in the wild in find and now what I'm eating now is based on what I have available to me I can go to the supermarket I can buy these ingredients myself very easily so it's not like I'm having to to source these from some special place this is just at my local supermarket I'm gonna plate this up look at that that volume see this is how unable to only wonder three meals a day or sometimes actually for the last couple of weeks it's been two meals a day is because there's such a volume here like this is gonna fill me up and it won't give me that I said it as I said before that you know when you eat a carbohydrate heavy meal like something like bread or sandwiches or something like that you feel full to the point of expansion you know I don't like that feeling because first of all it hinders the my ability to perform mentally and him is my ability to perform physically which is what I'm optimizing for we got here a little bit of we're gonna get half an avocado on this bad boy well a meal oh I'm getting excited dee-licious will save this other half a life now I need a tulip oh there we go now if you had the base the greens are a great base to have with almost anything so you could cook up this greens we've got some kale we've got some beans we've got mushrooms asparagus onion a little bit of spice on top you can add whatever spice you want salt and pepper works fine and then you could sub up the eggs for something like like salmon or some grass-fed meat or whatever whatever you have access to and remember depending on where you from where you're from you're depending will depend on what kind of meal you're going to eat so for example I was chatting to my friend je and he's from India and he asked me like what sort of stuff do I eat and I told him this but he told me what he regularly eats which is like curry and roti for breakfast and that's that's that's his culture and this is my culture whereas actually my culture is more like just eat crap like refined crap so the important thing is to remember is to treat yourself like an experiment and use the confines of the food that's available to you to figure out what best works for you why because if you're eating multiple times per day that's something you should care about because that influences your health nutrition and sleep are the force multipliers of life now your goals might be different to mine you might want to only optimize mentally but this the beautiful thing about eating like this right learning to cook even less often and eating less refined foods is that it actually works both floor mentor and physical performance so my goal mental physical performance yours may be different a lot a lot of people I know want to want to lose weight want to stay lean eating like this is a way to do it and so I think this is almost it I want to make more of these videos right now I'm just doing simple simple cooking videos this one was more of a just give you some like philosophies on food and now I can talk all I want and you can listen all you want to this sort of stuff but at the end of the day none of it is going to work unless you give it a try unless you start to actually follow the principles yourself that's what that's the biggest thing that I noticed all right you can have all the information in the world all the knowledge about how to eat healthy or whatever you want but none of it will work unless you try it out unless you give it a shot treat yourself like an experiment see what works see what doesn't create your own style which is what I've done over the past few years and now look at this it is a beautiful style isn't it we're gonna cut this egg we're gonna spread it through here we've got salt and pepper a nice little glass of water boom what was that how long that takes am 28 minutes 28 minutes about 30 minutes a little bit of chitchat in between so realistically this thing I'd probably take you 20 minutes if you had it down pat simple nice and quick good way to spend a study break optimizing for mental and physical performance but that's it happy eating keep moving keep learning