 If you take a child who's growing, the hormones that are making him grow, it's like a genetic plan, and he's going to be hungry and he's going to eat to fuel that. If you feed him loads and loads more calories, he's not just going to get taller and taller, he's just going to get fat. It's a very similar process if you're looking to build muscle. So this is leading towards how to eat later, the importance of eating to appetite and sort of listening to your body. So I sort of want to skim through that, you know, food does contain calories. You need calories to live, you need calories to move, you need calories to burn muscle. You might want to reduce those calories to burn fat, that's the general sort of concept people have of food, which is, you know, true. But what often gets overlooked and what I really want to focus on today is that food is a lot more than just calories, you know, you're not just like an engine that burns petrol. Your food is a source of raw materials for you. And I say when you eat that food, food is another living organism or it should be, you break it down into tiny little particles, you absorb it into yourself and you put it back together as you. I think that's an important concept to try and sort of get in your head as you're stuffing down the McDonald's meal after being drinking it all last night, you know. That's going to get broken down and potentially incorporated into you. So what is it that you are made of? Um, the body requires certain raw materials from the diet, namely essential amino acids, essential fatty acids, essential vitamins and minerals, and other things like cholesterol, choline, I've put X there, which I'll come on to. Um, essential amino acids, think of them like building blocks, you know, this is, everything's protein, amino acids, muscle. This is true, muscles are made out of amino acids, but so is so much more. You know, your brain, your hair, your fingernails, your internal organs, hormones. You need protein for digestion, for muscle contractions, essential amino acids are used for all sorts of different things. And so the only place you're going to get them from is your diet. If you're not getting the right quality in there, you know, you've not got the right raw materials to work with, then your body is not going to be in the condition that it could be. Very similar, essential fatty acids, people have heard of like omega-3s, omega-6s. These, again, are essential used for all sorts of different things in your brain. When you learn a new movement, or when you learn a new skill, forming new synaptic pathways, that requires omega-3 fatty acids, inflammation throughout your body, your immune system, everything modulated by essential fatty acids. So, really, really critical for health. Vitamins and minerals, again, using all sorts of different processes, your metabolism. Every process in your body requires some, you know, pretty precise balance of vitamins and minerals. If you don't have them, enough of them, or you don't have them in the right balance, then your processes aren't going to work as efficiently. And then, you know, things like cholesterol, much more lined. You know, it's not bad for you. It's bad when it gets damaged, but it's actually critical for health. You know, every cell in your body requires cholesterol. The formation of hormones like testosterone is based on cholesterol. Making vitamin D from sunlight requires cholesterol. Absolutely critical. And, you know, you can produce it yourself, but, you know, getting it from your diet makes life a lot easier for your body. And I put choline, essential for the liver. I really put that there. It's like one of the more recently discovered things. And I put X there because there's still that element of the unknown now. You know, we talk a lot about nutrition. You see nutrition in the news all the time, science reports. We've just discovered this. We've just discovered that. In reality, you know, we don't know what we don't know yet. You know, there's a lot of things that are still getting discovered that we don't understand, which I think is why it's important to eat a big, varied diet and eat real food. I'll just come on to in a sec. More format and issues here. So still on the subject of essential nutrition. Can you have too much of a good thing? We just said, right, you've got your essential amino acids, your essential fatty acids, essential vitamins and minerals. They're essential. So we just want loads and loads and loads and more and more and more of them. That's not necessarily the case. This should say essential does not equal more is better. I'm going to use an analogy. Amino acids like building blocks. If you imagine your body is like a building site, you've got builders on there. You've got a plan that you want to build. You've got so many builders. Just delivering more and more bricks at a faster and faster rate is not going to help the building get built any quicker or any better. In actual fact, if you've got builders there and they're constantly having to take these deliveries of loads and loads of bricks, it's actually going to take them away from the job of actually building the building. So you're going to be counterproductive there. You've just got bricks lying around everywhere. Nightmare. You want to get sufficient, but you don't want to go crazy in. Just go overboard. Same with the essential fatty acids. There's a massive market now in selling omega-3 capsules because they are essential. This is important, and a lot of people are in balance. They've got too much omega-6 from eating processed foods. I don't know if omega-3. So they say, well, have all these omega-3 tablets, redress your balance. A little analogy here is like ovens and fridges. You've got a house. It's pretty essential to have an oven. It's pretty essential to have a fridge. If you end up with five ovens, the solution is not to buy an extra four fridges to redress the balance. It's just madness, really. There is to get rid of some of the ovens. It's a more sensible solution. Very similar to the vitamins and minerals. Yes, they're critical, but generally, there's always an exception to the rule. I don't say there's one diet, there's one rule for everybody. But be very wary if you're taking any vitamin and mineral supplements because it's quite easy to have too much of one, not enough of another. Another thing that you don't really hear much about in the mainstream press, mainstream media is that food is also potentially a source of toxins and anti-nutrients. Real food has not been designed. There's not even really such a thing as food. Food is just a name we give to certain living organisms that we have chosen to devour and incorporate into ourselves. No food is perfect. And the effects that it has on your particular body are going to be different depending on a number of different factors. For example, genetics. Two different people can eat the same foods, can affect them in a very, very different way. Some people can be much more reactive to one food than another. Digestive health. This is a really important factor, which is going to come onto the second main part of the talk. Somebody who's got poor digestion can eat a food. You might be able to extract the same nutrition out of it, or it might affect your health in a more negative way.