Episode Resources
Welcome back to The Nick Broadhurst Show. I’m your host, Nick Broadhurst, and also known as Broadhurst in the music world. You can catch all of my wok including my music, my music videos, podcasts, blog posts, everything I do over at www.iamnickbroadhurst.com and my music you can catch on your favorite music platform, whatever that is, or if you listen to Spotify head to iamnickbroadhurst.com/spotify. And that song you were listening to is a remix of my very first single and it’s a remix by a British artist called Etherglow. You can catch that at iamnickbroadhurst.com/littlelover.
But today I want to talk to you about something which I had personally struggled with and I think a lot of people may not want to admit this but they probably do struggle from this as well. And it’s something which has been with me for many, many, many years and that is the tendency to overeat, to binge eat. And I think overcoming or defeating binge eating is a really, really important topic because it’s very destructive for your health and it’s very common.
So, I want to talk to you about my own personal relationship with food and talk to you about what I’ve done to really overcome this. And it goes back a long, long way. As a young man, I always wanted to maintain a very ripped physique and for me my body type in the Ayurvedic wellness system which is the ancient system of Ayurvedic medicine that goes back 5,000 or 10,000 years now, in that system, I am a vata pitta body type which means that I’m what’s called a hard gainer.
A hard gainer is someone who basically finds it very hard to put on body fat and to put on muscle mass. And basically unless I trained really, really hard and ate truckloads of food I just could not put on good mass. Now, what I’m really trying to do is basically force myself, force my body to be something that it’s not. I’m trying to force my body to be bigger than it naturally wants to be, and to do that I needed to eat a lot of food.
And basically identifying myself with being a hard gainer as a young man kind of gave me permission to eat everything until the cows came home, literally. I was smashing protein, so much protein. Honestly, I don’t know how I did it, I just would not even have remotely enough digestive power to eat what I used to eat now. But on top of these, I have a very specific genetic predisposition. I can’t remember the exact number but there’s a gene which basically means that you’re more predisposed to addictive behavior.
And it’s funny because when I discovered this gene the person I was working with on my genetics said to me, “You know what, you’re very lucky that you lived the lifestyle that you do because a lot of people with your gene end up being drug addicts and alcoholics.” So, you know, living a healthy lifestyle for me is obviously a non-negotiable.
But I have had a tendency to do things to the extreme which all my friends and family would testify to. But this can be a really good thing as well because it means that I have a lot of drive, it means that I am a perfectionist which can also be a negative as well, but it means I get a lot done, I achieve a lot, and it’s been something which I’ve had to harness for me. And it also means that if I don’t balance myself I become very imbalanced very quickly.
So my pitta constitution, so I’m vata pitta. The pitta is the internal fire, the internal drive. The vata is much more sensitive, it’s air. So when the pitta, the drive, is switched on all the time it tends to aggravate the vata, it imbalances the vata. So it can burn out the vata I should say. And so that’s what’s happened to me in the past.
And, you know, looking back in the years now, back to my sneaky sound system days when I was touring around the world, around Australia, and I was surrounded by drugs and alcohol and I just never got into it. I just never did it because I think deep down I knew that if I did it would be something which I would find hard to stop. So I just literally didn’t do it and I became known as Mr. San Pellegrino because all I drank was sparkling water.
But as I got older I’ve started to switch my focus much more to longevity as opposed to aesthetics. And from these early years of training hard, what has lingered for me is a tendency to eat really, really, really well for 95% of the time, but then just blow out. And I don’t mean unhealthy foods, I mean just eating way too much in one sitting of a good food, and it’s not good for me. In fact, you know, I feel hungover.
And I don’t know, I felt like kind of a ashamed of this, like I had some sort of problem, but if I look at my constitution from the Ayurvedic perspective, the vata side of me needs grounding. So, when I’m ungrounded, my body just wants grounding, and how can I do that? Well, one of the ways, the easiest fastest way is to eat a lot of food. So you can see here that my constitution sets me up for the tendency to overeat but that doesn’t mean it’s okay, at all.
Now I know I talk a lot about Ayurveda, and if you’re not familiar with Ayurveda, I promise you I’m going to do an episode on the basics of Ayurveda like an Ayurveda 101. So, stay tuned for that, I will do that very soon. But if any of this sounds familiar to you, if you have struggled with binge eating, then how do we stop it? What do we do?
So I’m going to revert back to iamnickbroadhurst.com/1. And this was called Living by the Code, and it’s a very good reason I did this as my very, very first episode because it freaking rocks. Seriously. It is so effective, I think that in terms of food I wanted to dedicate its own episode to it and how food applies to the code. And this will be repetitive if you have heard iamnickbroadhurst.com/1, but I’m going to go over it again, just the food component because I think if you have struggled with overeating, this will help you immensely.
I’m so excited to share this with you. It’s something which I came with; I don’t know how, I just did, and it really, really works and living by the code has changed my life. Now, if you go back to Episode 1 and you go to the show notes, you’ll see that I have a table with full columns and they are never always conditional and unrestricted.
And I’ve got a lot of things in there, but today I’m going to focus on the food stuff again. I’m going to drive this home because I know this is a common problem. In my Never Column, these are things that I will never do. I have, I never eat mindlessly and I never eat beyond comfortably full. It’s the first thing I’ve got in there, 80% for me is basically where I want to get to, sometimes 100% if I’m needing more grounding. But that’s it. No more than that.
I never eat dessert because my meals are yummy enough. This one is really, really important for me because that tendency to overeat when it comes to healthy desserts, that’s where I lose control and I don’t have the off switch. So that’s it. I have ruled desserts out. And maybe I’ll bring them back in eventually, but for the time being, for me right now, being on two other stakes are too high. I cannot afford to bloat out on something and feel hungover and terrible the next day and affect my mitochondria and have no energy. I just cannot do it.
I never drink alcohol or eat trans fats or gluten. For me that’s just a given and simple. I never work while I’m eating and that’s because I want to digest the food. Naturally as an A blood type and a vata constitution I have a much weaker digestive power. So I want to be really present when I’m eating and not doing any work, including social media, and I never eat red meat more than once a week because it’s a harder meat to digest and I want to focus on the things that are very easy to digest; mainly for me it’s wild caught seafood.
And then I’ve got the Always Column and in that one I say my plate is always as per the code. Now the code for me is very, very personal. This is what works for me. I’ll tell you what it is, but please don’t copy this. This is very personal. This is what I need to thrive. This is what I eat. When I’m traveling on tour this is what I do because I know guaranteed it will work for me.
So, when I wake up I have my water which has a lot of salt in it, lots of minerals, and it has some ribose which is a type of sugar which fills my mitochondria. Vata constitution, drinking lots of plain water, not such a good idea because it leeches all the minerals out of my body. So I put a lot of stuff in my water. I look at my water as a way of getting nutrition into my cells.
Then I will have a scoop of an All-in-One daily shake which is made by Dr. Stephen Cabral who is my mentor, and you can look at this at stephencabral.com, it’s called All-in-One. And I put some of his deli fruits and vegetable blend in there, which is 22 fruits and vegetables. And this is just a way for me to basically get some nutrition about an hour or so after I wake up. Then I’m going to have a beautiful big bowl of oats which is being soaked overnight, cooked with a cup of wild blueberries, tablespoon of ghee, and two tablespoons of maple syrup.
Now, if you are into ketogenic diets, if you’re into bulletproof diet, if you’re into fasting, this is going to sound like your worst nightmare, but trust me, I have experimented with everything. I have bio hacked the hell out of my body and I am a high carbohydrate person. That is what my body needs. This is why understanding your constitution is so important because it helps you navigate. It helps you realize what is right for you because it’s so personal.
And I’m hesitant to tell you what I eat but I’m just going to say so that it’s out there once and for all, because then I can refer people to this episode. And this will change. This is what works for me right now. Then for lunch I have a lot of big bowl of white rice, which is normally cooked with some Ayurvedic spices, and I will have hemp seeds usually is my protein source and about a cup of green vegetables such as chard or spinach or zucchini, that sort of stuff. Very, very simple. Lots of salt. And I will put on some ghee and some olive oil.
And for dinner I will have very similar. I’ll have a big, big serving of sweet potato roasted with a serving of green vegetables and a serving of protein, which is usually a wild caught fish or chicken. I don’t do a lot of red meat anymore, I do it once a week. But I do do offal. I do liver and sweet reds and these sorts of things as well. And if I’m really hungry, if I’m training, I’ll have an afternoon snack which is generally two scoops of the All-in-One shake with a cup of blueberries.
And that’s, you know, that’s what works for me. Right now I’m thriving on that diet. And when I was doing bulletproof, when I was doing intermittent fasting, all these sorts of things I was not thriving and I had to figure out what it was my body wanted. I always bless my food and take three deep breaths before eating. Again, it comes back to mindfulness and digestion and telling your body that it’s time to digest your food.
What else do I do in here? Now, in the Conditional Column, I always have a 12-hour fast overnight unless I’m touring and I’ve had my approved bedtime snack. My approved bedtime snack is a sweet potato with ghee and cinnamon and salt, and that’s only when I’m touring. When I get off stage and my adrenaline, my cortisol is high, I need to bring that cortisol down and I use starchy carbohydrates to do that.
The only dairy product I eat is ghee because dairy products, casein, lactose, they just don’t work for me personally. I only cook with oil as a treat and for dinner parties because when you cook with oil it oxidizes the oil and why would I want to add any more information into my body. So I steam all of my meats where possible.
I only finish eating after 6 pm when it’s someone else’s house or at a restaurant, and that comes down to going to bed at 20:30 and not having a big full stomach. The only nuts and seeds I eat are hemp seeds and hemp protein, and I do this because I have a tendency to overeat nuts, so I limit it to hemp because hemp feels really good right now.
There’s a whole bunch of other things in there but that will give you essentially the nuts and bolts of what I do day to day and how my code looks. And I really encourage you to create your own code because I live by this and I don’t break it.
There is an Unrestricted Column where vegetables and fruit, so fruit that’s in my code which is mainly low glycemic like wild berries that works for me, papaya works for me, those sorts of things. Unrestricted is water, green juices, herbal teas, those of things. And again, very specific types of green juices that work for me. And if all my other rules are met, I could eat as many calories as I want because, again, my body wants the calories because I burn through everything very, very quickly.
So, there you have it. That is really how I have overcome binge eating because I have a code. I figured out what works for me, I stick to my meals, and that’s it. I’ve taken the guess work and the doubt out of the way that I eat. It’s really that simple. So, I hope that you got something out of that. I really wanted to do another episode on the code because it’s so effective and specifically when it comes to binge eating. So, I hope you enjoyed it.
That is iamnickbroadhurst.com/17 for all the show notes and you can also get a full transcript of the show there as well. And if you could head to iTunes or your favorite podcast app, I would be beyond grateful if you could leave me a 5-star review and a comment because I would love to hear from you and learn more from you. What is it that you want to hear? What can I do for you? I am totally at your service.
And please do me a favor. Share this podcast with someone that you love and if everybody shared this once, then it will grow exponentially. And I’m so excited because this has been featured in the top charts in iTunes podcast already which is super exciting, and it’s thanks to you, it’s thanks to all your amazing reviews, it’s thanks to your sharing, and I’m just so excited that I can do this for you every single day. So, thank you for being here.
I would love to hear from you, so please tag me @IAmNickBroadhurst on social media, and use the hashtag #TheNickBroadhurstShow, or leave me a comment below ( I read every single one!). And if you could take a minute to leave me a 5 star review on iTunes I would be very grateful.