PODCAST - I ate out 5 times last week (here’s what happened)
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[00:00:00] I remember when I was a kid, I would go to school and I was always the one that had the sack lunch packed for them. My mom was a nutritionist and she always made sure ~that ~I had high quality lunches in school, but I looked around and I was one of only a handful of kids that were actually bringing lunch to school.
Everyone else ate in the cafeteria. They went up to the assembly line and would get what looked to me like really good food. It was food that just looked, ~uh, ~a little more tasty than what I was eating. I was eating carrots ~and ~fruit ~and soups. ~Homemade soups, homemade sandwiches, all these things, ~and all ~my friends were eating french fries ~and ~burgers ~and ~yogurts ~and ~puddings ~and ~cookies ~and all this stuff, ~and I thought I was missing out.
~Fast forward to college and I actually got a ~fast forward to college ~and ~I was ~also ~eating in the cafeteria, ~and I was eating the ~fries ~and the ~burgers and all these things. Well, today I'm gonna go through how in the past few years I have ~actually ~[00:01:00] gone back to my roots of bringing my lunches ~with me and mostly eating at home and, ~and mostly eating at home. Typically, I only eat one to two meals out ~of the house ~per week.
Well, last week I out five times and I'm gonna share with you exactly what happened.
Welcome to the Athlete with Asthma Show. I'm your host Johnny Ha, an ultra runner endurance athlete, and yes, a guy who's had an inhaler prescribed since birth. Despite doctors telling me I could never play soccer nor run a marathon, let alone a hundred K ultra. I prove them all wrong. This show is where I share everything I've learned from breathing techniques to mindset shifts to help you become the athlete and the person you truly want to be.
So if you're ready to achieve your goals, despite limitations, [00:02:00] let's get started.
~So first of all, I don't, well, ~first of all, I don't opt for eating in homemade food and buying groceries for monetary purposes. Yes, a side benefit of it is I do end up saving a lot of money. But I do it because of the way I feel eating whole foods, like fruits, vegetables, staying away from processed foods.
When I'm eating animal protein, I'm eating organic free range chicken. I'm eating wild caught fish. I am getting a solid mix of all these things. ~Well, what I find is ~when I eat out, I need to be a lot more on my toes with what I'm eating
because when I'm not, so many things waterfall. In my life. So why did I eat out so much last week? Two and a [00:03:00] half times more than I typically do. Well, sometimes I just schedule too many things. ~So ~I scheduled a dinner with my dad, and that was probably the healthiest meal I had. ~That week. ~I scheduled a meal with a client and we went to a restaurant where I was tempted to get one of my favorite things, which is terrible for you unless you make 'em homemade ~and you take all the.~
~Where ~I ate chili anos, which are terrible for you, but you can make a healthier version at home. But I also found myself starting to crave the food, I also threw in a couple fast food restaurants ~in there. Well, well, really ~what ended up happening is I. Packed my schedule too tight. ~And when you pack your schedule too tight, you, and ~when you pack your schedule too tight, it becomes more convenient to go and eat out instead of taking that forethought into play and having a salad, making sure you're getting your cruciferous vegetables, your broccoli [00:04:00] and cauliflower or your arugula, making sure you're getting your.
Fruits for antioxidants, making sure ~that ~you're getting your nutrients through powerful protein sources.
So here's what happened. The first thing that happened is my sleep quality tanked.
I went from sleeping a solid seven to eight hours per night and getting very high quality sleep when I'm eating at home, and even when I eat out one or two meals in a week, as long as I eat out early ~enough ~in the day, ~it doesn't have that big of a. ~It doesn't affect my sleep quality that much, but when I ate out five days, which is almost every single day, my sleep quality went from six to seven nights. Of seven plus hours of sleep ~two. Fuck me, man. There we go. Just outta it. Two. All the way ~to one to two nights ~and ~the rest of the nights [00:05:00] weren't six. There were some nights where I was only getting two to three hours. I was tossing and turning. And why does this happen?
This happens because when you eat out, you don't have the quality control to make sure that you're not getting excess sugar, you're not getting excess sodium, and that really throws me off ~it. And that can really throw you off, and ~that threw my sleep quality down the drain.
The second thing is I was getting a lot of dry mouth and dehydration. ~And ~this ~kind of ~reinforced ~the ~poor sleep quality because ~since I had so much dry mouth and dehydration at night, ~I felt like I had to drink a bunch of water 'cause my mouth kept getting dried. Wake up with cotton mouth. And what did I do?
~I drank more water and since ~I drank more water and my body was flushing out these toxins, flushing out the excess sugar, ~flushing out the ~excess sodium, ~the other, ~the other chemicals ~that were ~going into my system. 'cause I was eating out, [00:06:00] I was using the restroom a lot. ~So I was waking up ~instead of waking up once ~a night, ~I was waking up three or four times.
~So.~
~And ~the crazy thing is this didn't just affect me the day ~that ~I ate out. ~What happens is since ~substances stay in our system for a while ~and different and different substances can stay in our system longer than others, eating out five nights in a week, ~eating out five nights ~in ~a week, even if you eat out every other day
you're going to feel the benefits or the obstacles, the challenges that it creates for multiple days. So this wasn't just on the days ~that ~I ate out, this was the entire week, plus a couple days.
Hey, friend, I wanted to take a moment to ask you a quick question. Are you struggling to lose weight due to your asthma? If so, I get it. I used [00:07:00] to run marathons and still kept gaining weight. It wasn't until I learned about the three pillars of healthy living that everything changed,
so I put together a healthy living guide that you can access absolutely free by clicking the link in the description. This guide shares these amazing three pillars of healthy living that you can easily integrate into your life. To start losing weight and live healthier today. Click the link in the description or go to athlete with asthma.com/healthy-living-guide to grab your free copy.
Now let's get [00:08:00] back to the rest of the show.
The next thing that happened, well, irritability.
And anxiety increase. This is crazy to me. We think ~that ~it's normal in America to feel these ways. To have poor sleep quality. ~We think that it's okay in America ~to be a little dehydrated, and we think ~that ~our anxiety is caused by something other than what we put in our body. ~Well, I'll tell you this.~
When I eat healthy food at my house that Tatiana and I cook, my irritability and anxiety plummets when I eat out, especially ~when I'm getting ~sugar. ~Especially when I'm getting ~processed sugar ~and ~more sodium, ~more ~fried foods, other chemicals ~that are in the food in my system, ~my body. ~It ~starts going on high alert.
I ~get irritable and I also ~get irritable 'cause my sleep quality is [00:09:00] bad. ~All of this stuff reinforces each other. ~My anxiety goes up 'cause my sleep quality is bad. I have an entire podcast episode about how important sleep is, and I highly recommend you check that out. My dry mouth and dehydration goes into this irritability.
So if you are feeling irritable and anxious ~and things aren't working to. And maybe you've tried a ton of things to help yourself and maybe, so if you have ever felt irritable or anxious, I highly recommend that you ~look at your diet, see what you're eating, eat in more, not just to save money, but to save your body.
That brings me to the next one. ~This one is one where I think we all look at this as normal as well. I. ~Heartburn. I had heartburn almost every day this week that I ate out five times. This can be diagnosed as, ~oh, you have ~irritable bowel syndrome. ~Oh, you have an issue 'cause. ~The medical diagnosis with heartburn is ~so ~interesting, and ~by the way, ~I have a disclaimer in the show notes.
I'm not a medical doctor, so everything I talk about ~on this channel, I highly recommend you. And I have a disclaimer in my show notes, and I have a disclaimer in the show notes and in the YouTube video description. I'm not a medical doctor. I every, I'm not a medical doctor. Everything I teach ~on this channel ~is through my own experience, so ~I highly recommend ~that ~you see your healthcare professional or medical doctor with anything and everything that I talk about [00:10:00] heartburn is diagnosed all the time.
And, ~uh, ~prescriptions are given for it, prescriptions that can help alleviate it. The thing is, when I eat at home and I know what I'm eating, my heart burn is nothing. It goes away almost completely. But when I eat out, I go from having heartburn zero days a week to having heartburn almost daily.
~So ~I invite ~you, the reason why I'm sharing all this with you is 'cause I am inviting ~you to look at your life and what you're putting in your body and take control of it. That doesn't mean you have to stop eating out. Maybe you can be more strategic with where you eat out. Whenever I go to Chicago with my dad.
~And ~we go to high quality restaurants like Frontera Grill, and I focus on eating more plant-based, avoiding meat, maybe eating white meats, like ~avoiding red meat, and then eating, avoiding red meat, and maybe eating ~fish [00:11:00] and chicken. This stuff doesn't happen. But if I find myself starting to eat the pizza, the burgers, the fries, these highly processed foods or foods that have all this extra sugar and sodium, that's when this happens.
And the great thing is when you eat at home is you can eat some of your favorite meals that if you eat 'em at a restaurant and you go to the wrong restaurant and this stuff happens, you could eat that exact same meal cooked at home. And take the processed sugar out. Take the excess sodium, add more whole foods, fresh foods into it, and you'll have no issues. So I invite you to ~really ~look at what you're doing and see the results that you get when you start eating at home more. When you start being more mindful of what you're putting in your body. And the crazy thing about all this, and this is number five, ~and it ~gets its own side of the board if you're watching this on YouTube, because [00:12:00] this is crazy.
~'cause ~this is ~all ~a reinforcing loop. I started craving eating out
~so. ~The more you eat out, the more you want to ~eat out, ~and the harder it is to stop ~eating out. So that's why if you're eating out every day or a couple meals a day or so, ~if you're eating out every day or a couple meals a day, ~I don't expect you to go from that to none, but ~at least cut it back to once a day and then start cutting it back even more.
~And ~being more mindful of what you're eating when you're ~eating ~out. ~The crazy thing though is ~I may not go to a fast food restaurant for months ~and then I'll go to the, and then I'll go to a fast food restaurant, and ~then I'll eat there three times in the same week because I start craving it. I go from not craving it at all to craving it, and there's some science behind this.
Our gut is built to crave what we feed it. So if you start feeding your gut more fruits and vegetables and healthy foods, you're gonna start craving healthy foods. If you are feeding it unhealthy foods, all these foods that you get when you eat out, then you're gonna start craving that. [00:13:00] So what you need to do is take control of your mind or ~just ~take your mind out of it completely.
~And ~start feeding yourself healthier foods, being ~more ~mindful of what you're eating when you eat out. Take control of your life ~and take control of your and eat out and.~
And treating yourself even better, and that's why I have a gift for you. My three pillars of Healthy Living Guide. The first pillar is movement. The second is ~tracking. So ~tracking things like your sleep quality. Your how much water you're taking in per day, what you're eating, how you're feeling, ~and then ~the third pillar is accountability.
When you combine these three pillars, you will start living a healthier life. I was ~actually ~able to lose 40 pounds and keep it off by integrating these three pillars of healthy living into my life. And you can grab your free copy of my Healthy Living Guide linked in the show notes or on the description on YouTube, or go to www.athletewithasthma.com/healthy-living-guide to [00:14:00] grab your free copy today.
It's gonna take you less than one or two minutes to ~digest and ~read this guide and start integrating it into your life. I'll see you in the next one.
Thanks for tuning in to the Athlete with Asthma Show. I hope today's episode inspired you to overcome any perceived limitations you may have. Remember, your health and wellness journey isn't about perfection. I. It is about progress. So I invite you to take a small step right now towards your goals, and if you found something helpful here, make sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share the podcast with others on a similar path.
Until next time, keep challenging yourself and redefining what's possible.
