Don't buy my book
Do you ever wonder what it would be like to have a few more hours of feeling fully alert and on form each week? A few years ago, I was following all of my Productivity Ninja rules (of course!) but still finding I was less productive later in the day because I just had less energy. The familiar 4pm slump. I started working with a nutritionist I'd met, Colette Heneghan, to change all this. It worked and I'm still feeling the benefits several years later.
What was remarkable working with Colette (which at the beginning involved me sending her photos via whatsapp of everything I was eating and drinking) was that relatively small changes to recipes or habits could make a big difference. For instance, did you know that if you keep your bread in the freezer before you make toast with it, it's easier for your body to digest (it's down to something called 'resistant starch' which the bread develops when frozen) or that cooking tomatoes makes them more nutritious than eating them cold.
One of the hardest things with food is all the ways advertising and marketing is designed to kind of catch us out. For example, 'low fat' is often a hook for people because it seems healthy, and yet the manufacturers don't tell you that it's high in sugar to compensate for the taste. Sneaky. It often feels like trying to eat well and be healthy is complicated or out of reach.
It can be expensive buying everything from the organic range, but thankfully one of the things I learned from Colette was to be 'label savvy'. Each year, the Environmental Working Group (a big american food organisation) releases a list of "the dirty dozen and the clean fifteen". You can find this years' version here. It doesn't change loads year on year, to be honest. Essentially, the foods that are in the 'dirty' list are more likely to be full of pesticides and chemical residues. The rule of thumb is that if you can afford to buy organic on these items, do. Likewise, the 'clean 15' are foods where any chemical residues don't end up in the final foods. No surprise that foods where you're eating the skins or surfaces are more likely to be in the dirty list than on the clean one. You don't need to worry too much about eating organic for the clean foods - any old cheap avocado or onion will do.
We distilled all of my learning - and even more of Colette's voracious thirst for the geeky science of food - into a book called Work Fuel. It was part productivity book, part lifestyle book... We thought it was a huge gap in the market, but sadly there wasn't a huge market in the gap and it didn't sell anywhere near the levels we expected (despite getting some incredible reviews). It's still available to buy and I'm still very proud of it, BUT if you can wait for a bit, my publishers will be re-releasing it in January 2021 with a new title: How to Have The Energy. I'll tell you more about where you can get a copy closer to the time, and Colette and I will be doing some webinars and podcasts around it too.
So I guess for now, I'm saying 'don't buy my book'...!? Because it's about to get a new title and we really want to hit the amazon charts hard in January with the new title. I mean, feel free to buy them both if you really want to, but it'll be basically the same book twice. You could give one to a friend or something. But seriously, don't buy my book. Yet.