Get everyone. Sam Wood here with another episode of the Wood Life. Recently, we brought out a new program on my fitness program called Back to Basics, and we did a food one and we did a fitness one, and it is really simple ten minute workouts, how to do very basic shopping, how to cook recipes with four to five ingredients. And it was a real eye opener to how well received it was because we're not talking. It's not about going from a seven to ten. It's about
going from a three to a six. And really, when you think of the state that we're in as a country from a health perspective, most of us probably are in the three to six category, and yet talking to people at the seven to eight is probably not that help for many many people. So today we're doing exactly that, We're going back to Basics, and we're doing that with someone who just makes so much sense when it comes to nutrition. We've got a wonderful dietitian coming into the show.
And then I'm going to help you fix you back. If you've got a saw back, you need to improve your posture, not the mindset. Great, so a bit hypocritical, I'm your guy. That's all coming up today in the wood Life, So this is rare. We don't often get repeat guests back on the wood Life, but I have one of our favorites back sitting in front of me, the wonderful Tim Crow, who is an advanced accredited practicing dietitian who spent most of his career in the world
of universe and nutrition training and research. He now works as a freelance health and medical writer and scientific consultant. If there's anything you want to know about food, he's your guy. Tim.
Welcome back, Sam, I'm in rare a thank you very much for the second invitation to come back. I must have been Okama first.
That's right, that's right. We like to spread you out because we can't give too much Tim or that the crowd will just laugh at mind, you know, but we get more food questions than anything else. And I'm a fitness guy much more than I'm a food guy. And one thing that always jumps out at me, and I have to always remind myself of it, is just don't assume that everybody understands nutrition. In fact, probably assume the opposite, because it is so damn confusing. The science is great
and the education is great. And the history of these challenges is wonderful. But sometimes it's just really refreshing and nice and easy and fast to find out what should I be eating? So I thought i'd get you in Spring is here. What do you love about spring from a food perspective? From what gives us energy? What seasonal? What jumps out at you mate when springtime rolls around.
Well, first of all, spring it's obviously in the southern hemisphere down here in Melbourne Way and in the southern latitudes it gets warmer, the days get longer. We feel better, we feel happier, and with that our foods start to change a little bit. And one of the first thing you notice is stone fruits, berries, all these things, and that is the big signal for spring and summer.
And cherries on the side of the road in Tassie you get a massive bag for ten bucks and you make yourself sick. That's my happy childhood memories right there.
And that's spring. That's the start of the new season. And with that we start hopefully changing our diets a little bit. We start eating some of these different foods. We move from the winter foods into more of the spring and summer foods. So yeah, I've mentioned the berries, the stone fruits, but also things like broccoli, colifflower, tomato, sweet potatoes. They are all seasonal to an extent. Yeah, and when you're eating seasonally, there are three major big wins.
First of all, they taste better.
Yep.
They're better nutritionally. They're cheaper because they have picked at the peak of ripeness, and they have less transport and less storage that goes with them and joining them all local, so they're great for the environment. They're cheaper, they're better for your health. It's just wins all around.
There's no downside. Is that it's really interesting you say they're seasonal, because because of the way foods can be processed and kept these days, we sort of forget, like it's not that you can't get a tomato or sweet potato twelve months of the year. You know, they're there
all year round. So to actually have the knowledge or have a little list of yep, they're there all year round, but this is the peak season where I should be having a higher volume of these foods in my diet, I think is actually a really smart little strategy completely right.
We are living with the most abundant nutritious, healthy food supply in the history of humankind. Today, just we can get anything we want in the fresh produce department. We have the choice it's going to go uber eats or you're going to go out of seasoned fruit and vegetable.
So while we may argue and debate about nutritional merits of seasonal versus non seasonal for the healthiest foods, the fact is that always available, and research out only this week from the CSIRO found that strain adults, only twenty percent of us are eating enough vegetables to start with. So I don't argue and debate about nutrients of organic versus not organic, and seasonal versus not not seasonal. Eat more of them that will be doing. Just go seasonal. That'll be.
That's a little ten percent on top. That is the source I like that I'd love to get from you, being such a food expert. What are your favorite things for brecky lunch and dinner. Can you reel off a couple of things that you either in it from an ingredient standpoint or a whole meal standpoint.
So for this time of the year, it is it's going to get into the berries. If I had to choose one fruit that really deserves true superhero status would be the berries. They are really awesome. Those different colors of the reds and the blues are there because of different pigments, different chemicals in their food, which do a world of good for us to deal with our heart health and our brain health. So really, the berries by far some of the best fruits you're commuting.
And frozen fresh well, the.
Thing about frozen is that when their food's frozen, we lose a small amount of nutrition, but most of it's locked in, so it's a convenient option. And being a research noted, we know that people that have more frozen produce at home eat more fruit and vegetables, so they're actually nutrition They are pretty good. Nothing beats what you grow in your own garden, but frozen and even canned is a pretty good backup option to supplement your diet as well.
So that's actually that's a great stat So that's proven out those that eat frozen or put canned in that same category actually eat more fruits and vegetables than those that don't.
That's right if you just rely on fresh, which is fantastic, but if you have fresh and frozen as a backup for convenience. Overall on our re dule, ate more of them and that's going to be a big health wind.
Yeah, I like it. And what about lunches and dinners? Do you have any any favorite pretty stable tuna, grains, canned tuna, can tuna, yep, yeah, I love can tuna.
Convenient, quick, easy, simple. But the core principles of what a healthy diet is is going to be most mostly plants. And if you choose to, you can have some animal foods in there, some dairy, some tuna, some red meat, some chicken if you're so desire, But if you've got the core of mostly plant foods and a variety of foods.
And the big win about seasonal produce is when you're eating seasonally, you're increasing your variety over the course of the year, and changing colors and changing seasons means in changing nutrition and changing chemicals which are going to be good for us overall. So it's way it just looks for color. If you're eating more colors in a day
than you're doing, your health the world of good. So long as those colors are not from skipples and m and ms coming from the berries and fruits and vegetables and so on. That is that's all you need to know about nutrition, Just choose on colors.
And what about nuts, because I'm a nut nut.
They are all I mean, the nuts for the research to do with nuts is pretty fantastic. They're actually good for weight management, good.
Denting, calorie dent.
Here's the fun fact about nuts. When you're eating them whole, because we don't chew them fully, you actually don't, for one of a better word, to absorb a lot of the fat from them, not fully, so they're not as fattening as what we think they are.
Them.
And they're great. They're great, probably really good for your heart, really good source of healthy fat. So they're great to include, and that's why they're in our dietary guidelines. When having nuts every day. And if you ask me what's the best nut, whatever one you're like, Brazil, cashiw mecademia, Well, nuts, they're.
All good them all. And they're not seasonal as much.
Not as nuts as much because they can they keep quite a while.
What about energy, because I feel like we're all exhausted. I feel like I don't know. I had to chat with a couple of people at work there was a bit of post winter fatigue. You know, you're on Instagram. It feels like every second person you know is in the Greek Islands. It's not really true, but that's what Instagram does to you. You're you know, it's been these long, short days, and I know spring naturally helps with longer
days and modern day daylight sunlight. But from a food perspective, do you have any little energy hacks that you that you like to prescribe to people?
So probably it's leveraging off I've already spoken about in spring, that's when we're starting to see a change in the food that's available to us. So making those sort of choices in the warman, whether we're more like a bearding outdoors yea, and things like snacks and things like that work really well for this time of the year. So because we're eating outside or doing more things outdoors, it changes the sort of food we may take, whether it's
compared to winter food. So there's no hacks, there's nothing, nothing complain, but just be focused a bit more on going for some of those food swaps. I've spoken about having more berries, Like for breakfast, you may have eggs, but putting in some of the seasonal things such as spinach and tomatoes with it will taste better, be better for you. Yeah, and just having more snacks for the go.
And we've already mentioned nuts. They are pretty incredible foods to be having dried fruit really convenient way to have more fruit. All those are just simple things to be doing. I think complex, No, and it's not.
I mean, I know there's no silver bullet here. I don't know. I feel like my relationship with food is better at this time of year. I don't not enjoy my winter foods, but it's a bit more of a grind. So something else that happens at this time of year. And it might not be the start of spring necessarily, it could be sort of any time in spring. And I wanted to talk to you about it is detoxes because it's either I've got to repent for my winter
sins or I've got to undo the damage. You know, I'm being extreme, but these are the terms I hear from people, or it I need to get myself in shape for some same things. So what kind of extreme ten day, seven day, fourteen day, whatever it is, method is going to help me with that? What is your take on detoxes, the good, the bad, the ugly. What do you think?
So over my twenty years in the media, detox has meaning that one topic I speak about, and it's always in January. I don't know why that January maybe could help me out year it's going on in January, it's always detox. That the flippant approach is you just say, look, you know, we don't need a detox. We've got kidneys and lungs that do this really well. All the detox diet is it's a Marco Force cut out all these
food team. You're putting less rubbish in in the first place, You're not getting rid of more rubbish to start with. So it just gets you focused on eedting better. Whether it's a one day detox, the five days seven day, whether to rejuice fast.
What about them? What about those ones? What about you know some of them are wacky, like some of them are pretty extrame lemon and water only for seven days.
Yeah, you'll lose weight for sure, as.
Much fun as a car crashing.
Worse, they're not obviously not sustainable options. It's probably been replaced a little bit with in a minute fasting that really is hugely on trends, and that's sort of toxing quite a bit because it's a different focus. I like what I like about the minute fasting, even though the oven says it's not better or worse for you for weight loss, it's pretty pretty average. In the end, it's
not about what you eat. It's just when you don't eat, and then when you eat well, you just eat healthy structure. Do matic about cut out carbs, cut out this cut out. That's just extend the periods of time that you donate and if it works for you, do it. If it doesn't do something else, there's nothing that.
Spectatul sustainable provided structure. It gives a snack less that you might eat a few less calories exactly, Those late night snackings and those in danger times are probably cut out exactly. It's common sense when you boil it down. But it's just beautifully packaged.
It's mad and I love it because a book about detoxing is a very short read. There's no extensive recipe section. It's just about different protocols, and in the end, there's there's no one right way of doing whatever works for you. So I'll be leaning to more intimateute fasting than there's the detox is just jump in there and go hard on a juice cleans for a couple of days. It does very little to educate you about healthy food choices.
But the only positive thing about a detox it may get you focused on making a shift from having a pretty crap diet to eating better and that's a good thing. But it's not a purge for all of your sins over the last one or two years.
It's a really good point. I share a very similar view. I think if it's for a couple of days as the catalyst or the kick in the pants that they needed, sure do it. Yep. What I have very rarely have ever seen is people that do it for a long period of time then transition well into good sustainable eating.
That's the problem.
It's normally celebrated with seventy two beers and a partner, and it's kind of I've just done done every bit of good work that you've put yourself through over five year days of torture, and it doesn't give them the results or at stack up. It's not the answer at all.
And then you've got the more the expensive ones that I've have all sorts of pills and patients and so ons to go with it. So I look, if you're going to detox to it for one or two days, if it makes you concentrating better for the next stage, that's great. But I'll be leaning to maybe a short fast as a better option.
Okay, I love that.
Give that a go. And you know it's more of a sustainable thing if it works for you. You know, in the end, if it works for you, don't do it.
Just be a healthier Yeah. I know, it sounds so simple, doesn't it. What about budget hacks or money saving hacks, because I mean, food has never been more expensive, Inflation has never been worse, cost of living in general has never been worse, or not not. I mean it probably has, but not really in my adult lifetime that I can think of. And I get I guess I'm probably right in it now and getting more questions about it than
ever from my community. What are your top tips on without compromising taste, without compromising nutrition, How we can help the bank balance a little bit.
The good news is I've covered half of them already. Seasonal produce and canned and frozen is perfectly healthy and nutritious, and it can be a lot cheaper, and they.
Do get sort of their nose turned up. It's particularly canned.
It's a big myth. Yeah, nutrition, it's pretty it's just seems that it's not going to be as good as fresh fruit food. But what we consider fresh produce has been picked somewhere and transported and sat on a showful little period of time. Then it makes it to our home, sits in the vegetable crisper for a couple of days, and then we eat it.
So we lose some nutrio.
Yeah, a garden.
The home run, isn't it?
So I say, don't fight it. The research is pretty clear nutritionally canned and frozen is nutritionally just as almost as good as what we consider true fresh produce from green gracer that certainly will be cheaper. And the young sung heroes for nutrition the world iver and they're incredibly unloved foods. They're legames. They are incredible source of protein, carbohydrates, Flight of the Middles, so few of them. They are dry,
and they are tools dirt cheap, absolute dirt cheap. And for the bang for the buck you get for nutrition, nothing beats legames and for your health benefits they are way up. They are a true superfood. And yet if I may be boring, even a cannon baked beans, that counts as.
My cheapest best lunch. And I have this if I'm working out of my gym. Is one of those microwave Besmarti rices, A can of tuna and a mixed a little bean mixed in those tiny little tins with a little bit about mcvinegar on top. Probably costs two dollars fifty. Legams love it? Are they seasonal? Like? Is there a better legam in spring or something that we should be looking out for. I actually have no idea about legumes. Legims would be one of my topics, so please enlightenment.
Legs, lentils, chickpeas, chi chi, kidney kidney beans. It is about about a dozen of them. They are mostly dried and they are all around and just get them off the shelf, or you can get them canned. So they're not really seasonal because they're always available. They store really well. Yeah, so that's why they've been supplement and they're the only food that appeared twice in the Ditchy guidelines. Are both a vegetable and a protein food. There is your fun fact for the day.
I love that. I love that I think with food, but probably think too small picture, like we're so hell bent on variety in this in each individual day, variety in each individual week, which is great in principle, but it gets very expensive and a lot to think about. It makes your head hurt actually doing variety on a seasonal, quarterly basis, And yeah, okay, well across a year, I have wonderful variety is actually such a much simpler, better way to think of it.
I'm a mono eater, yeah, because I'm a bit repellient too, And okay, it makes life simpler.
I do, and and then I get guilty, like, oh, you know, I've probably had the same lunch three days in a row here where it whereas a big deal. Then in come spring, I'm going to shake the whole thing up. I probably won't need any of those foods again for nine months, six months. So actually, I think that it's a really powerful thing to share with our listeners that don't don't stress if you've had a similar type lunch or breakfast for a couple of months in
a row. Now, now it's spring, let's shake things up and do things differently. Yeah, I love that I'm get one more question.
Yep.
We've spoken a lot about the good anything bad that you want to warn people on.
No, I rarely will talk about anything you do.
You do, yeah, which which I love. You're very positive.
I focus more on the positive. If you're eating more of what I consider more healthier foods, you're going to be eating less.
So.
Yeah, when we can eat generic and talk about the ultra process foods and foods tine and added salt and sugar and so on, that's a given most people know about that. It's reinforcing. Here the foods that we know are good for us. Ignore all the noise misinformation about carbs are bad, grains are bad. Fruit's bad for you because it contains too much sugar. That's all right. They
are all perfectly healthy foods to it. So I focus on the positive message of these positive foods, not so much on you know, the junk food and all that stuff, because we know about them.
Which is actually quite refreshing, isn't it nice to speak to a nutrition expert and it's all about focusing on what you're putting in rather than what you're cutting out.
Yeah, it's more of a positive message that it.
Is it is, and I think it's a great, a great message.
To finish on fantastic thank you.
So it's really interesting jetting to Tim because he just
makes sense. He's really good with common sense. As my dad says, common sense is not that common, but it is great to I just think cut through all the bs, and I feel calmer after I talk to Tim, because food can be so overwhelming, even though I get confused and overwhelmed by it, and I'm sure many of you are listening, yep, absolutely so, distilling it down to its simplest form, I think can be really really powerful, and it's just reminding us that it's not as scary or
as stressful or as overwhelming as perhaps sometimes it feels. And there's ways that we can work around it by just focusing on the basics and doing the basics well. The other thing I'd say is too hard on yourself. I think I don't know. I think we assume everybody else is eating it a ten out of ten or better than us, or you know, it's very easy to have guilt attached to when we have one bad meal or we've got a little vice that's out. Kind of go to life is to be lived and you need
to enjoy yourself. If you eat pretty well most of the time, then you're actually doing better than most. So the p word, oh dear posture. I do say I'm one of my twenty eight videos that I'm as flexible as a bathroom tied well, and that's kind of the reputation I now have within the whole twenty hour community. And it's true. I am getting a bit more flexible, particularly through my life back and hamstrings, but I have a long way to go. We have spoken about posture before.
We spoke about it specifically with what was it called technic where your head protrudes forward because you spend so much time either looking at your phone or looking at your computer or driving or whatever it might be. And that is a real thing, and it is a real challenge of today's society with so much technology and sedentary lifestyle. And that is real, and I think it's a very safe statement to say across the board, our posture is
definitely getting worse. So when I got this question come through from Mitch, I thought, you know what, it's time to talk posture.
Hey, Sam, been seeing a lot about posture braces, just wondering if they work, and if they're worth dropping some money on.
I feel like this is not Sam the expert, this is Sam the opinion. I feel like there's probably some good ones out there if you have severe posture issues or you're recovering from an accident, that are medically sound and do a wonderful job and serve a great purpose. And then there's the next rung down of Instagram advertising crap that is probably just a bit of a scam to sell you something that you don't really need. An example of one of these things that I thought was
and maybe I'm wrong. So if there's people out there that have used these braces with great success, I would love to hear from you. I mean, it is interesting when you go to the physio and you get strapped and it's just a reminder for when your shoulder blades sort of coming forward or when your head's coming forward that the tape sort of pulls, and it's like, oh, that actually is quite powerful to have a queue that jogs your memory that you're going into poor posture and
it sort of pulls your back. Often we don't realize you're im poor posture. We've been there for if not minutes hours, So I understand that that can be quite a simple but effective method. It is interesting, though, you know I'm being a bit of a cynic. But these things that are on social media, you know, they blast you with ads it what is that thing that being said? I did buy one of those things, so I'm digressing.
He has got nothing to do with posture. I bought a toe spacer, which is those funny little webbed rubber things that you put between your times and it is bloody amazing. So maybe I'm wrong on the braces. We really are. Sorry, Mitch, this is this is the worst answer to your question, mate, but I sort of that's my gut feel. My gut feel with your question is there's probably some need. But if you're just thinking a posture could be a little bit better, I really need
one of those things. I'm going to get into how you can actually improve your posture in a second, in much simpler ways, I believe. But these toe space of things, if you get sore feet, or you like training bare feet, or you run a lot and you feel like you're feeding an squashing your shoes, couldn't recommend them more highly. I'm sure there's lots of different brands out there. I think mam is just called a toe spacer. Anyway, a lot of them, they came in the mail. Snays absolutely
is repulsed by it. She thinks it's the grossest thing you've ever seen, because I'm walking around the house like I'm an avatar. But it's cool and they work and they're great. But anyway, so there's a little by the bye fixing our back posture. However, I think it's three things. I think it's sort of the shape of our spine and actually changing. Typically we sway too much through our lower back, and we arch or around too much through
our upper back. So if you side on your S is too pronounced, a nice subtle S or subtle S curve is what you want. Little arch in your lower back, round in your upper back, not a big one. If you've got a big one on your head's recruiting forward or you've got a big arch in your lower back, then your hips are really tight and you get lower back pain. So once you know where you sort of stand, then you've got to go, well, how do I fix that?
So typically, if you try to get yours less pronounced, you want to get on the phone roller across your shoulder blades to open up your upper back so it doesn't round. You actually go backwards against the way that your poor posture is probably sending you, and slowly but surely you open up your vertebra, you open up your spine.
The other way, you want to stretch your peck muscles, your chest muscles, because if they're really short and tight from doing lots of push ups or sitting at your computer for long periods of time or driving, then you need to stretch them. And you need to strengthen your glutes so you can tuck your butt under. And you need to strengthen your back muscles so you can hold your shoulder blades back. So when I think of your question, Mitch, sure maybe we get to brace stage, but I'd do
this first for three to six months. And the great thing is you can kind of do these things every day in sort of ten to fifteen minutes. Am I doing some kind of row on a little band or something where I'm strengthening my back muscles, particularly my upper back muscles. If I'm doing that, I will hold my shoulder blades back better. Am I then complimenting that with a nice chest stretch so that my shoulders naturally go
back and they're not pulled forward and tight. And am I getting on the foam roller to open up my thoracic spine? And am I doing some kind of pelvic tilt exercise where I tuck my butt under and squeeze my butt Because even me sitting here in the podcast studio now, if I'm in a big extended lumbar spine so or a big curve in my lower back, there's a lot of load on my back when I do that. If I tuck my butt under, all the pain, all
the load is alleviated. But most of us don't have very good glute strength, and we don't and we're tight through our hips, so to tuck our butt under becomes quite difficult. So the reality is most of us, probably eighty or ninety percent, would benefit from doing those things every day. There might be one or two of them that help you more than the others.
But if you get saw back, if you get a saw back, if you feel like your hips are tight, your peck muscles are tight, your back is a bit weak, your posture, particularly that upper body posture.
Definitely could do with some work. They're definitely the places that I would start. There we go, what do you know what today was? Today was just really refreshingly simple. I think we can all benefit from better posture and we can all benefit from eating better. So hopefully you're listening today and you're like, you know what, I got one to three to five things out of that that I can start implementing tomorrow and be better off for it,
Because really, that's what this show is all about. That's what I'm all about. Until next week, remember reach out at any time. Give us a follow the wood Life on our Instagram. We'd love to hear from you. We're always sharing little snippets of shows that perhaps you've missed on our Instagram channel and I'll catch you next week