G.8: When You’re Eating Well, You’re Well
Post 10 of 11 in a series on the intersection of data and fitness.
Click here for the rest of the series.
We’re going to talk about food in this post, because nutrition is a key part of readiness. But food is not simple and it’s not straight forward.1 I am also very unqualified to give specific nutrition advice to anyone, never mind everyone.
There is good science out there, but it tends to get lost in a mountain of shitty studies and even shittier ‘journalism’. I highly recommend checking out Doctor Aaron Carroll, who runs an excellent YouTube channel Healthcare Triage that regularly explains where many nutritional studies fall short. I also recommend his book The Bad Food Bible as a great primer on how to read nutrition and health news.
It’s also worth your time to watch Kurzgesagt’s excellent video 'We Need to Rethink Exercise', which explains about how your body will respond to changes in your fitness regimen. The idea that exercise automatically leads to weight loss is misguided and is probably part of why many people get frustrated and stop trying.
Most restrictive diets are dumb, but that doesn’t mean what you put in the engine doesn’t matter. Very broadly, what you should eat isn’t particularly complicated. There are no ‘super foods the corporations don’t want you to know about’.
Instead, you should try to get most of your energy from fresh meats, fruits, and vegetables, with modest amounts of multi-grain breads and dairy products — if you can digest them. As a general rule, the fewer steps between you and the food you eat the better. The more sugar and salt that gets added to make it taste better or last a hundred days on a shelf, the less benefit it’s going to give you. But there is room in your diet for indulgence. Not all sugar is bad. But before we get too far, we have to get something out of the way.
BMI Is Fucking Stupid
BMI might be the dumbest calculation anyone ever made. It’s also — ironically — incredibly lazy.2 All you do is divide someone’s weight by the square of their height. That ratio tells you astonishingly little about a person, and yet for 42 years it has been the way the army has decided if you are fit or not. We’ve had height and weight standards since the Civil War, but the BMI tape test has been the law of the land going back to 1981.
I didn’t start out getting taped. I was fresh out of a decade as a competitive swimmer and, despite eating about 7,000 calories a day, I couldn’t break 150 pounds.3 But when I joined ROTC at Michigan State back in 1999, I had to start doing push-ups. Thanks to my swimming background I could do pull-ups for days, but push-ups required upper body muscles my swimming / volleyball / theater days hadn’t.4 When I commissioned into the infantry, I had to get into rucking, which meant I needed more shoulder muscles and stronger legs. By 2006, I was getting ready to head out to SFAS, which was defined by even longer rucks with even heavier packs.5 When I got off the scale at our final APFT in ICCC, the grader told me I was overweight and to get in line to get taped.6 My small group instructor, a Green Beret, spotted me as he walked by and asked me what I was doing in the tape test line. I shrugged, so he brought me to an open room.
‘Take your shirt off’. He took one look at me and then shook his head before telling me to put my shirt back on without taping me. He didn’t have to, because I was at one of the highest levels of readiness I’ve been in my life. I needed to be, since if I was fortunate enough to get selected at SFAS, I was headed directly to the Q-course, a yearlong slog which was going to make those 24 days of selection seem like a bad weekend. My BMI indicated I was ‘overweight’ while I was at peak fitness. I continued to get taped from that day right up until 2023 when the army rolled out its ‘540 and above’ policy.
Weighing Readiness
Ready is never going to be a simple math problem, because we don’t know for sure what we need to be ready for. But if you’re determined to use a formula, you are better off using percentage of body fat (PBF) over BMI. Calculating body fat can be tricky, mostly because until recently it was pretty expensive to accurately measure it. You could try using a variety of calipers or the gold standard dunk tank, but those aren’t quick and they aren’t cheap. Thankfully the army has rolled out InBody or similar scanners at almost all installations, which can give you a decent estimation in a few minutes .
My tape test at CAP put my PBF at 20%, while the InBody scanner back at Fort Liberty put it at 13.8%. My weight between the two was only 1.6 pounds different, so fairly negligible. The tape test is at best a guess, but an InBody scan can separate my skeletal muscle mass and all that water I’m carrying around, which is why I got a 31% lower PBF. While my BMI puts me overweight verging on obese, InBody puts me toward the bottom end of PBF for people my age.
A 27.7 BMI represents a spectrum of possibilities. Someone with just 5% PBF could have 23.9% more muscle mass than I have, while someone with a 50% PBF could have as little as 1.2% of mine. One of those two people can have a defined six pack while the other would struggle to pass any event in the ACFT. Both with the same BMI.
But that guy with the perfect six-pack might not be ready either. In Afghanistan, we had a prison-style gym, and the members of our ODA were hitting it hard. Several of the younger guys were also cutting their food intake to get a nice defined six-pack to accompany their new beards. It might have looked cool, but when a morning patrol went sideways and we didn’t get back until the following day, those were the guys who were barely able to stand.
I have excellent abdominal strength, but my six pack is hiding under that 13.8% body fat, something I’ve affectionally referred to as my ‘10 pounds of survival weight’. I’d learned my lesson back in 2003 when I went to Ranger School. I graduated almost 40 pounds lighter than when I started. Upon graduation I could barely do ten push-ups, and I don’t think I could run a full mile. I was not ready.
The next time I was going to be deprived of food like that, at SERE School, I got ready.7 I gorged on snacks during the classroom portion and never skipped a single dessert. As we prepared to set out on the final culmination exercise, a peer remarked on how much weight I’d gained in such a short amount of time. ‘When I say the letter “B”, I can feel it in my face’, I laughed. Four days later, when the rest of my team was lying on the ground with hunger pains and no energy, I was sitting quietly thinking, I could eat.
What You Should And Should Not Count
Focus on ability, not weight. It’s that simple. The problem has been, up until 2023, that actually wasn’t an option. The army only counted pounds. This is particularly pernicious for female soldiers.
Back in ROTC, we had a female cadet who was a beast. She never once scored less than 270 on the 17-21 male standards and always earned a 300+ on hers. She could ruck, she could run, and she could lift. But the army told her she was fat.
Now the army has told me I was overweight for nearly half my life, but I got a ton of positive reinforcement as well. I passed SFAS and had plenty of peers and leaders who praised my fitness. I could also rely on instructors and commanders who regularly skipped my tape tests based off my performance every day. To them, all that matters was I was ready.
That experience doesn’t describe the one of any female soldiers I know. Females get told they’re fat every day, just walking past a newsstand, or the checkout line, or a billboard, or a TV, or just about anything that can hold an advertisement. When these soldiers get to work, a place that ostensibly should be focused on their performance, they can end up being told they are fat there too. Female soldiers almost never get to skip a tape test.
Back in our ROTC battalion, I hated seeing our cadets get their readiness ignored at the expense of BMI and a bullshit tape measure. I worked with that one cadet, coaching her in swimming a few days a week. I didn’t do much to improve her readiness, but the swimming didn’t hurt either. I still remember one APFT when she put in a particularly impressive performance, only to come up .5% over on the tape test. After confirming with an NCO there was no rule on how many times she could be taped in a day, I told her to meet me at the pool. An hour later she came back and was .5% under. All I did was get her to sweat out some of that extracellular water you can see at the top of my InBody scan.
She stuck with the ROTC program, continuing to be one of the fittest cadets we had. Not relatively, not ‘good for a girl’, but by raw reps. I don’t know why she didn’t stay in past her initial four-year commitment, but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear the army’s refusal to focus on her readiness was part of the decision.
The only pounds you should be counting are the ones you’re adding to your deadlift bar.
Eating Well Is Hard
‘The easiest part is the training; the hardest part is the diet.’ - Hafthor Bjornsson.
That’s the world’s strongest man saying that. He holds the record for heaviest deadlift ever. To measure his strength, they’ve had to invent all new things for him to pick up and carry. If the guy who can bench press a Clydesdale thinks diet is the hard part, give yourself some grace.
Sadly, our DFACs and canteens aren’t helping much either.8 They’ve been deteriorating over the years with dwindling headcounts. A quick scroll of USAWTF will turn up photos of poor-quality food at a variety of bases. The army has also shifted to focusing on kiosks closer to where junior soldiers live, but these are biased toward extra processed foods which can survive on the shelves for days at a time.
SOF DFACs are one shining exception. Our THOR3 programs include a nutritionist, which has had a measurable impact on our unit's readiness. Back when the first nutritionist showed up at my group, we saw a marked and immediate change in the DFAC. The short order line got dramatically curtailed, and the sad salad bar was replaced with three freshly pre-mixed varieties. Breakfast, still the best bang for the buck you’ll find going, always had eggs and bacon along with a spread of fresh fruits.
I’ll concede the DFAC managers themselves are in a bind. Many younger soldiers don’t know how to eat well and choose the short order instead. We can actually measure this with the surprise success of the Soldier Prep Program in basic training. Started back in the summer of 2022 — by a group of SF leaders — the program includes fitness and education prep as well as classes on what to eat to maximize performance. The program had an immediate impact on the success rate of new recruits.
A cooked meal is almost always better for you than something you pulled out of a box or bag. But cooking takes time and that’s not just measured in the time in front of the stove. It’s there in the time to plan a meal and shop for ingredients. It also takes a kitchen, something a lot of our soldiers in barracks don’t have good access to. For single soldiers, that time investment can seem a poor RoI when compared to grabbing a bag or a box from the kiosk.
One technique soldiers can try is to cook for each other in a group. The marginal cost of one more plate is small, much tinier than the upfront cost of cooking. Back in 2007, four of us single soldiers were in language school and we each took turns each cooking one night a week. These shared meals were good fuel for our gains while we were in school, with the added benefit of giving us a solid tribe to belong to. Few things build bonds tighter than eating together. Sharing our cooking also meant we weren’t stuck with the same leftover spaghetti for the next four days straight. One thing my wife and I have tried to do with some regularity wherever we’re stationed is invite a single or geo-bached soldier over to share in a meal.
But soldiers who have families don’t necessarily get it easier either. Both parents work in most military families, which means a cooked meal is coming out of someone’s unavailable time — usually the spouse's. There are meal prep services that can cut some of the time costs, but they cost money. Some DFACs have been branching out into providing similar food prep options, and I think this is something to lean in on. In part because many of our bases are practically food deserts. When I attended the pre-command course last spring, the commander in charge flat out told us, ‘There isn’t really anywhere nearby to eat healthy’. I ended up doing a large shopping trip in Kansas City to get two weeks of supplies to feed myself.
These food deserts and dying DFACs don’t have easy answer, but they demand leader’s attention. Eating well is an investment, one that’s always worth it. Getting ready takes energy and quality food is the best source for it. Bad food, over processed and loaded down with salts and sugars, will fill you up with mass but no energy.
There’s a lot of amazing medical interventions and inventions that are being developed today. We basically live in the greatest time to not die ever. But while some want to find ways to stretch our oldest citizens well into a second century of life, 70% of our issues are things we know how to fix right now, much earlier in life.
Eat better and exercise more. Those two things will help you stave off all but a few of the top ten leading causes of death in the US. Just those two things will add years to your life, and they’ll ensure those years are more enjoyable and productive ones. We’ll close out next week with my advice on how to maximize your readiness over all that new time you bought.
Earn the Turkey
This is my Thanksgiving morning workout. I settled on it because it’s good for balancing out those karmic diet scales when pies and wine start to cover the family table. I also picked it because I’m usually traveling and you don’t need any equipment to do it, though a local high school track helps.
Earn The Turkey is one of my longer slogs, with the body weight movements generally starting to bump up to your maximum effort just in time to enjoy a nice run. ‘Sprint’ might become a relative word each subsequent half-lap turn but focus on running hard right out of each set of lunges and squat jumps. If you need to rest, do it before you start the next set of body weight movements. You’ll be doing 3600 total meters, but don’t run them at a four-mile pace.
If the title of this post brought to mind images of Asterix, Obelix, and Dogmatix, know that you and I shared blessed childhoods.
At least in metric. In America and Myanmar, you need to multiply your measurements by 703.
68 kgs, or just over 10 stones, or Clydesdales or whatever archaic weighing system the UK still uses.
Yes, I lettered in one act plays in high school.
Special Forces Assessment and Selection. The 24-day course candidates attend that tests their ability to train to become a Special Forces soldier - a Green Beret.
Infantry Captains Career Course, now named the Maneuver Captains Career Course, this is one of the courses you attend before getting your first command in the army.
Survival Evasion, Resistance, and Escape, where the army teaches you… well how to do all those things.
Dining FACilities. Also known as chow halls and sometimes cafeterias.