Eat Rebel Food, Not Frankenfood

Those engineered concoctions that corporations are feeding you aren't right.

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Frankenfoods. Food-like substances squeezed out of a factory tube. Created by engineers and scientists to be so addictive you can’t say no. This stuff is the cause of so many diseases we have today.

It’s not a conspiracy if they do it in plain sight. They call it advertising, marketing, and business.

“Come on, Tim. There’s no way they would sell food that isn’t good for us!”

Okay, well, what if that stuff isn’t really food? And why would you think strangers running huge factories care about our long-term health? As long as we hand them all our money and don’t get REALLY sick for at least a decade, maybe we can’t even prove they had anything to do with it.

Newsflash: The government is in on it. Corporations and big businesses have a lot to say in government activities.

Your body doesn’t thrive on ultra-processed junk. If you want to be healthy, you have to join the rebellion and eat what the rebels eat.

What’s a rebel food? What do corporations and their paid-for politicians not want you to eat?

We’ll get to that.

But first. Let’s talk about a food situation I witnessed at the office last week.

Lance walks over to Carl’s desk carrying a tray of sweets.

“Want a butter tart, Carl?”

“No thanks. All I have to do is look at food, and I get fatter.” Carl looks away.

“Jeez, Carl. You JUST NEED to exercise more.”

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You Can’t Outrun Your Fork

Part of the whole corporate smokeshow over food is the idea that a calorie is a calorie no matter where you get it. If you gain weight, all you gotta do is exercise more and eat a little less.

In other words, they tell you it’s your fault.

Don’t ever examine the food they sell you, because a calorie is a calorie.

I’ve been down that road. I used to think I could exercise to make up for my poor food choices. It didn’t work. I proved that an active human could gain fat while running, lifting, rucking, and walking his ass off.

I never considered that the quality of the food was more important than how much I ate. It was the unnatural food.

My gut got bigger, and it seemed like a mystery. I was running ten miles a week. I was rucking twice a week for a couple of hours. I did kettlebell workouts. I pounded out the pushups. I went to hot yoga classes. I intermittently fasted till the cows came home.

But. When no one was looking, I stuffed my face with processed food and candy bars.

I thought I was doomed to go round and round on the short bus for chunky losers. I would gain weight and then move mountains, trying to lose it again. Up and down ten pounds.

I was motivated and did 99% of everything right except for the nutrition.

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I Was Driven By Guilt and Shame

I’ve read a lot written by women who struggle with food. I don’t hear much from the guys. I know I’m not the only one out there who has a garbage relationship with eating. That’s why I talk about it.

If that’s you, I hope you know you aren’t alone. This is a common problem, and you can overcome it. The first step is awareness.

Here’s what I wasn’t consciously aware of. I was obsessed with looking “cool” and young, which meant no belly. I didn’t want a dickdo (when your belly sticks out farther than your man parts.)

But I would have told you that I didn’t care about looks.

I wasn’t aware that I felt deep shame about overeating. That’s why I skipped breakfast most days. I called it intermittent fasting, but what it really was was shame. I was trying to make up for bingeing the night before.

The biggest thing I wasn’t aware of was why I was binge eating. Two reasons: Emotional pain and processed food addiction. (If you want to read about my binge eating struggles, check out Binge Eating Made Me Want to Kill Myself.)

I’m convinced that removing the processed food removed my depression. Yes, I also had to do the work. But getting the food trigger out of the way gave me space to examine my inner world.

“Okay, Tim, so how did you stop this crazy cycle? What did you do?”

The first thing I did was talk to someone about it, and just by opening up, I realized that I wasn’t alone. Other people knew my struggle. That made a huge difference somehow.

I got a nutritional coach, and she suggested small changes for me. Some were so small that you wouldn’t think it could make much difference.

Carlee never once asked me to remove anything from my life. Instead, she added new things.

The first week, she got breakfast back in my life. But not a processed Frankenfood concoction. It had to have at least 30 grams of protein, too.

Her mission was to teach me to eat what my body needed. It made all the difference.

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Are There Frankenfoods In Your Pantry?

Modern humans think they’re so advanced. But if we consider our food habits, we’re getting more primitive in some ways. We eat too much or too little, and all the wrong things.

“Humans are the only animals smart enough to make processed food, and dumb enough to eat it.” — Ben Azadi, Keto Kamp Podcast

If you eat too many food-like substances from a factory, your hormones, emotions, and even your thoughts are a little off. Your judgment is suspect. Your choices are under the influence. Hormones affect how the brain works, and if your chemical balance is off, you will be a mental mess. That can help feed anxiety and depression.

Our bodies are finely calibrated instruments that can assess the value of natural food as we eat it. We measure the nutrient density of an apple or a steak, and when we have had enough, we get the “Stop eating!” signal.

This is why you or I will never binge on apples or steaks. YOU CAN’T. Your body shuts you down. You will never eat two sacks of apples in one sitting. And two large steaks, by themselves? Iffy.

That’s not true for the ultra-processed stuff. You can eat the whole thing if you buy a family-sized bag of potato chips. Two or three candy bars or a sack of M&M’s can vanish down that bottomless hole.

When binge eating, I could easily eat more than one fast food meal in under an hour. But I never once chomped down a sack of cucumbers or an entire bag of carrots. I didn’t go nuts on a giant stack of pork chops.

Processed foods have had the signaling elements minced, burned, and chemically treated out of them. Without the natural proportions of fiber to fat to protein and nutrients, you won’t know when to stop. Your body isn’t calibrated to read these food-like substances, so you never get the signal to quit eating.

We haven’t even gotten into what kind of havoc a steady diet of ultra-processed junk is causing to your insides. It all starts with the gut and microbiome. There isn’t a single function of your body that isn’t disrupted by eating unnatural substances daily.

Switch To Rebel Foods

What makes them rebel foods is that billionaire business owners don’t want you to eat them. They want to sell you beige glop squeezed out of a factory tube. They can’t squeeze out your money by getting you hooked on cucumbers, salad, and ground beef.

Big-money corporations want to hand you a box of sugary desserts labeled breakfast cereal, a Pepsi, and a Big Mac. They’ll sell you power bars and “healthy,” fat-free, low-calorie snacks.

They want you addicted, and hungry.

When their food makes you sick with high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, pre-diabetes, or a mysterious chronic illness, they want to sell you medication. You are the goose that lays their golden egg until they kill the goose by slowly poisoning it over decades of poor nutrition.

But by then, that goose is exhausted anyway. It’s laid all the eggs, and the owners don’t care if it croaks.

It’s time to rebel. And the food of the rebellion is obvious. Real food.

Rebel foods are the ones we evolved to eat. Whole, minimally processed, and good for you.

Plants. Animal products. Nuts. Berries.

You won't have to outrun your fork if you eat these things most of the time. You will be able to eat intuitively, and everything will find a balance.

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