“If you lack the will to eat healthy, you may not be addressing a key factor: the environment”

The journalist Núria Coll has become a benchmark in the world of healthy eating. Her project I am like how was born as a means of communication about healthy eating. Today Núria Coll runs a community that is, according to her own account, “what I would have liked to find when I felt the need to learn to listen to my body through food”.

His experience leading this project has involved continuous contact with professionals in nutrition, healthy cooking, and integrative medicine. He now collects much of what he has learned in these years of walking in the world of healthy eating in i’m like like (Ed. Grijalbo). In it, he also exposes a new concept when it comes to taking care of oneself, what he calls the “wheel of a healthy life”. We have asked him about all this in this interview.

In the book you tell all your experience during 10 years in the world of food, sharing with many nutrition professionals and trying all kinds of diets, from macrobiotic to keto. What have you learned on this tour?
I have learned that excessive consumption of carbohydrates wreaks havoc on people’s health, since insulin increases and this causes elevated glucose levels. Insulin must be well regulated, because it has key functions in the body and the best known is to regulate metabolism and avoid this resistance to insulin that a significant part of the population suffers in silence.

Blood sugar increases with simple carbohydrates that are “sugars”, and with so many people with hypertension, high triglycerides, prediabetes, etc. It is necessary to minimize its consumption, since the conventional Western diet that prevails today contains between 50 and 60% carbohydrates.

And that led me from macrobiotics, to paleo, from paleo to low carb and from low carb to keto, because I saw how the body manages those carbohydrates worse and worse. Not everyone should have a full or near full restriction. It depends on each case. There are situations where you will have more room for maneuver, but what is important is that the population learns to eat foods with a low glycemic load (for example, fruits with less fructose).

What advice do you give to someone who asks you about the way of eating that you consider to be the healthiest?

It depends on the time I have to tell you how to do it and your starting point. But essentially I will tell you that protein is essential and it has been scientifically proven that its optimal consumption together with caloric restriction is what will help you age more and better.

You say you don’t marry any diet. In your case, do you alternate?
I am alternating a low carb diet with the keto diet that I do only occasionally, yes.

In your book you talk about when the enemy is at home. Tell us… what do you mean?
I say that when we say that we lack the willpower to eat healthier, we are not fully addressing the reason, since the context –the environment– is very important to follow a healthier pattern or not. And a key environment is the family.

If your partner does not follow healthy habits, criticizes you and laughs at your philosophy, it is exhausting, demotivating and even drives you away. If there are children, worse, because each one transmits a message that is not consistent between the parents. And especially if there is a divorce and each house eats differently and in one there is a lot of junk.

Many times it happens. The person motivated by health (in 90% of cases they are women) do not have a favorable environment (grandparents, friends who sometimes do not take good care of themselves…). And that is why the concept of Tribe or Community (like Soycomocomo) is so powerful, where we find a group of people with the same priorities.

As you say in your book, if you don’t go into the kitchen, there is no hope. What is your proposal to make the change effective?
You have to cook and recover your love for food and that starts with the act of buying (a good market with small producers and fresh vegetables is half a life), cooking with utensils that make life easier and cook faster, such as a kitchen robot or a low-temperature or multifunction pot, and eat slowly, tasting each food, digesting as it should.

But it’s not just about what you eat… What is the wheel of healthy living?
I was very focused on food for years until I began to understand and draw in my head a wheel that had 6 axes and that they were all equally important to protect our health.

And the key, once identified, is to see how to improve the ones you know you have pending. They are healthy eating, staying away from toxins, sleeping well, practicing sports, having good emotional health and having a tribe.

Those of us who advocate a healthier life are less and less rare. What do you think is missing to make the leap?
Every day there are more people who take the leap. Maybe one day we will be the majority!

The food industry does not make it easy and the administration does not have enough interest in prevention, but the people have more strength than all that and we will achieve it!