Basic Guide to Nutrition
Not a comprehensive guide, but pointing out various directions in painting a bigger picture.
"Weird Al" Yankovic - Eat It
0. General Tips
- If food isn't tasty, it won't stick.
- If you throw up on particular food, give it some time and effor to enjoy it.
- Good food justify the bad addition.
- Any food is better than insufficient food.
- Healthy but pesticide heavy food is better than no healthy food at all.
Obviously if you can, you should pick not as heavly sprayed crops instead.
- [Glyphosate = safe], [Roundup, a brad product containing a mixture with Glyphosate) = bad]. EU was meant to phase it out, but that's gonna take a while.
- Diet is about long term foresight and consistency, not short term missteps.
- Your tolerance will also decrease over time, forcing you to make adjustmens, so prehaps keep notes. :)
- You pretty much can't overeat any of the good stuff.
- Nutrition label may lie or decieve.
- i.e. Serving size vs per 100g.
- i.e. The apple doesn't have a nutrition label.
- i.e. Shitty national guidelines.
- Overall if u don't eat, you'll simply weight less.
- Albeit fat simply may store itself in undesireable places.
- Or on rare occasion there's something wrong with you, and calorie absorption can be less or more than 1 per 1, but probably not.
- Optimnally eat food in a way to preserve the most of its nutritional content,
- i.e. raw > microwave > boiling, etc: https://youtu.be/LFePylTyACs?si=ZNojIvtp59erR9N5
- Just use glass/steel for everything (aka. don't use plastic/wood).
- Optimally always rinse everything.
- If you or someone in your family is dealing with any meat, basically everything is contaminated the fuck out.
- Also keep in mind there's a lot of bad faith in food->nutrition industry, not mentioning influencers, or that people feel very strongly about the things they eat.
1. Counting Calories
- Basic BMI calculator: https://www.bmi-calculator.net/#metric
- Calorie calculator including exercise: https://exrx.net/Calculators/CalRequire
- Further optimal of the optimal BMI: https://youtu.be/5GMdGexw5eo?si=03Nd7FGXBMzp7JxF
2. Science-Based Nutrition Sources
- Easy to digest youtube videos: https://nutritionfacts.org
- diet guidelines: https://nutritionfacts.org/optimum-nutrient-recommendations/
- Individual in-depth: https://examine.com/foods/
- jsyk, it used to be more free... could try using wayback machine for older snapshots: https://web.archive.org/web/20230326011201/https://examine.com/foods/
- Rest of good sources for diet guidelines or further individual questioning:
- https://www.whfoods.info/faqs/the-healthiest-way-of-eating-plan/
- https://veganhealth.org/tips-for-new-vegans/
- r/ScientificNutrition
- r/FoodNerds
- r/HumanMicrobiome
- Not a good way to look up nutrition, but may be helpful:
- Meh nutrition, but alright general health overview: https://forever-healthy.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/ENG/pages/2555973/Health+Longevity+Strategy which is a subsection of https://forever-healthy.org/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietary_Reference_Intake?useskin=vector
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_nutrition?useskin=vector
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthy_diet?useskin=vector
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nutrition_guides?useskin=vector
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant-based_diet?useskin=vector
- r/nutrition
- Listening to random influencers or reading the papers yourself.
3. Actually building your diet
Just by looking around previously mentioned websites:
- You should already know what calorie target you need to hit.
- You should already know what categories of foods are desireable.
- You should already know what categories of foods aren't desireable.
- Make a free* account on https://cronometer.com/ (there's seemingly no good "no-account required" alternative), to easily add each food, and automatically calculate all calories / micro / macro for everything.
- Notice: Not every recommended daily intake provided by cronometer may be accurate, you may have to adjust some individual ones.
4. My braindead take of the above:
- Diet Goals:
- Very Cheap, <145 EUR per month.
- Very fast to prepare, whole day under 1h, only broccoli requires prep once or twice a week.
- Not an unreasonable quantity to consume, especially with a job.
- Tasty enough to stick with, on all day, everyday the same meal basis, with little to no variance.
- Hit all basics and also try to hit other unique health related targets.

Beans = Red lentils.
Frozen Berries.
3 different fruits, for variety and flavonoids = apple, orange.
Cruciferous vegetable = broccoli, critical food for many reasons:
- Only fresh ones, left for a while after cutting up, stored in refridgerator.
Random greens:
- Arugula because of highest nitrate.
- Broccoli sprouts because of high anti-air pollution.
Allium vegetables:
- Garlic = min. 1 clove a day, have to crush it and leave it for some time for process to take place.
- Red onion = generally what's red seems better.
Nuts = peanut butter/peanuts, they act as nuts despite not being them officially, cheapest of nuts, preferable to other cheap sunflower seeds.
Diy blended flaxseeds from refrigerator.
Herbs and spices = basically dump as much as possible of every single-ingredient spice you get your hands on:
- Dried parsley, peppermint / marjoram, tumeric WITH black pepper, ginger powder, cumin powder, rosemary powder, cayenne pepper, nutritional yeast.
Whole-wheat = steel-cut oats, very fast to prepare, basically only edible with milk or cakes in big quantities:
- Without milk, they are somewhat more edible with rasins in particular.
Beverages = either water or improved water like:
- Green tea = there's some variables in source and form of consuption with upper limit due to lead or aluminium present.
- Herbal teas:
- Dandelion.
- Chamomile, lemongrass, rooibos, rosehip.
- Hibiscus tea:
- Drink water afterwards to remove acidic content.
Salt with iodine = ~4g of overall daily salt:
- If u exercise enough to sweat a lot, you'll need to calculate/guess amount of additional salt needed.
Supplements:
- 250mg/d omega 3 from algae.
- Vitamin B12, Cyanocobalamin, 100mcg/d, dosage depends on age.
- Vitamin D, 1000IU/d, because u should always wear sunscreen or cover yourself or any glass with plastic.
The random "bad food" agenda:
Basically anything processed is bad.
- Trans-fat / saturated = optimally 0
- All oils have different spectrum of those.
- Basically everything animals = meat, eggs, fish.
- Heating any oil
- Refined oil = was already heated up in the process.
- Any non-fruit sweeters:
- No need for any of it, but if present should be capped at 50g daily.
- Basmati rice > other rice = but they're still bad due to arsenic.
- Milk
- USA = growth hormone passing down issues.
- Something, something, bad to mix when consuming any more critical nutrition like broccoli..
- Flour = just pick whole-wheat ones instead.