- 3 hours ago
- 3 min read
As a martial artist, you spend a lot of time practicing techniques and strategies designed to help you avoid problems and protect yourself in the event of an assault. Thinking defensively is part of your daily routine. Do you also think defensively when it comes to the food you eat?
You might choose specific foods to improve your strength, stamina, or performance, but what about practicing nutrition as a method of self-defense that not only improves your overall health and vitality but also helps ensure your safety and longevity? When you look at it from that perspective, healthy eating seems just as important as those 37 death strikes you learned last week.
Having been part of the self-defense world for 20 years, I've seen plenty of unhealthy people on the mat—people who are dedicated to mastering their art but who abuse their bodies through poor food choices. I've known accomplished martial artists who struggle to shed pounds or, worse yet, are eating their way into an avoidable disease. The reality that a person could spend years learning to defend himself or herself only to be taken out by a food-related heart attack, combined with the disturbing obesity statistics plaguing our society, inspired me to go back to school in 2007 to learn more about nutrition. My aim was to help people empower themselves with defensive and strategic food choices.
The connection between self-defense and healthy eating is unmistakable. Virtually all the core concepts I teach my self-defense students have direct corollaries in the nutrition world: awareness, safe distance, boundary setting, simple techniques, and so on. That's why I decided to combine the two fields into a program called Kung Food! Master the Art of Healthy Eating.
Success doesn't hinge on following a diet or giving up your favorite foods. Rather, it stems from adopting a nutrition philosophy that encourages you to be proactive and consciously participate in your health by applying simple self-defense strategies when you shop and eat.
Example: If you saw trouble on your side of the street, you'd cross to the other side to avoid it, right? The nutrition corollary would be to shop the outside aisles of the supermarket first—that's where you'll find most whole foods and natural products. If you fill your cart with healthy options, you'll be less likely to visit the inside aisles, where the less-nutritious, processed, and frozen foods lurk. Sometimes you have to set a strong boundary and say "No!" whether your goal is to avoid assault or avoid diabetes.
Like studying a martial art, learning how to choose and prepare healthy food requires dedication and focus, and it can create a sense of balance and confidence in your life. However, it needs to be approached as a lifelong, sustainable practice. If you concentrate only on short-term goals—losing weight or bulking up for a specific event—and then go back to a more convenience-based or fast-food way of eating, you can do more damage than you think. You may have been able to pull that off when you were young, but not now.
The solution entails making healthy eating a priority, just like your martial arts training. You need a framework in which to explore a variety of healthy options so you can figure out what works best for you. You need recipes to follow, as well as explanations of dietary theories and opportunities. Everything in Kung Food is optional, of course, but if you don't know what it feels like to eat vegetarian for a while, wouldn't you like to find out? What if it's awesome?
The aim is to create new habits by adding nutritious choices that will improve your health and performance while "crowding out" the old foods and habits that are doing long-term harm. By no means is it about being perfect; it's about setting realistic goals. My philosophy is, if you can be safety-minded 70 percent of the time when choosing what to eat, you'll be way ahead of the game, even during the other 30 percent.
