The 90-10 Rule

Caramel. Salted caramel. Salted caramel covered in dark chocolate sold at Whole Foods in aisle 10. My nemesis is salted caramel. This one is full of dairy, sugar and all things ‘forbidden’. But is it? Does committing to a healthy lifestyle mean eating 100% healthy all the time? I say ‘no!’ I believe the best way to sustain a healthy lifestyle is to allow for small indulgences here and there.

Joshua Rosenthal, the founder of the Institute for Integrative Nutrition (IIN) referred to this concept as the 90-10 diet. The only rule to this program is that instead of fighting your cravings, indulge in whatever you want 10 percent of the time. And stick to healthy foods that nourish your body 90 percent of the time. By giving yourself a 10% range of flexibility, you can indulge without guilt and maintain a healthy diet overall.

As a nutrition and wellness coach I help my clients strive for the IIN 90-10 diet, harnessing the benefits of balance. You may be wondering, what do I mean by ‘healthy.’ Case in point, before I went to IIN 10 years ago, I considered myself a ‘healthy eater’ by taking things out of my diet. I didn’t eat fast food, I had given up soda, and I had removed potato chips, cream sauces, and breakfast pastries. I also ate very little red meat and desserts, and I snacked on Power Bars in the afternoon instead of candy. In other words, I must have been a healthy eater because I had taken out all the unhealthy stuff, right? Not true!

Upon closer examination, my diet consisted largely of dairy and grains. Cold cereal for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch and sometimes pasta for dinner. Oh and then there was the cheese, one of the four Icelandic food groups. There was a brick of Gouda cheese in my suitcase every time I came back from Iceland. I grew up with a father who worked at the National Dairy Company, and I believed that dairy was some of the healthiest food I could consume. I thought that milk, yogurt, and cheese were things to be eaten in abundance. I remember debating this with my husband when he gently broke it to me that dairy is not necessarily as healthy as I believed it to be.

With all the grains and dairy, there simply wasn’t enough ‘space’ in my diet for other truly health promoting foods, namely the plant based foods such as vegetables, fruit, beans, nuts, and seeds.

Once in nutrition school, I started understanding that it wasn’t about what I was not eating as it was about what I was eating. In other words, I wasn’t balancing my meals in a way that allowed for plenty of those health promoting, plant based foods. This is when I learned about the concept of ‘crowding out.’ By focusing on consciously adding foods to my diet that promote health such as vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds, I was able to naturally let go of foods that were less health promoting without really missing them. For example I started to have a fruit and veggie smoothie in the morning instead of cereal or toast. I also started eating those dark leafy greens I usually would zoom by at the store with no clue of how to prepare them. For a snack, I dropped the Power Bars and instead snacked on raw veggies and hummus. Little by little, my whole perspective towards eating healthy had changed. It took some time to make this lifestyle change, and for a while I still brought the brick of Gouda cheese back to the US. However, over time I slowly let dairy be an accessory in my diet as opposed to a huge category all on its own.

If you need additional support on how you too can begin crowding out the less healthy foods, join me and a growing group of others on July 14th as we dive into my signature 10-day Clean Eating Program that will reboot your journey to better health and change the way you think about food! At a minimum, we will have a common denominator for what healthy means while eating 100% healthy for 10 days. It will be much easier for you to understand how to then go back to your version of 90/10.