After reading my articles people often ask me, “So what can I eat, trainer guy?” I’ll accept the challenge of answering this common question.

I consider myself an expert on eating — ask my friends, I’m really good at it. In my opinion, it’s tough to be an expert on “nutrition” for the simple reason that, like all opportunistic herbivores, we can survive on almost any food. It makes the question of what to eat for optimum health very difficult to answer.

Confusingly, a new “miracle food” is discovered almost every day as if an exotic plant can erase decades of toxicity, abuse and neglect. These natural miracle cures sound a lot like natural-magic-pills to me and are a distraction to the real issue.

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If people can survive and thrive on such a huge variety of foods, then why is our culture so unhealthy? We artificially live a little longer as life expectancy is at an all-time high. However, birth rates are at an all-time low. No wonder so many people are confused about what to eat. How can we have the highest rates of disease and symptoms and live longer. Actually I think that we rank poorly in life expectancy, with the best rating I can find of 34th in the world by the World Health organization. That’s nothing less than deplorable results as we are number one in health care dollars spent by far.

Diets are confusing, opinionated, unrealistic, unattainable, misleading, reliant on frail research, and therefore are mostly pointless. I think that we keep trying them to fulfill the definition of insanity when it comes to diets.

Diets are confusing, opinionated, unrealistic, unattainable, misleading, reliant on frail research, and therefore are mostly pointless. I think that we keep trying them to fulfill the definition of insanity when it comes to diets.

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We are still misled by our belief that we can eat junk, never exercise and still be healthy because we take magic pills, get surgery and occasionally follow a “diet.” This does however, make the belief in unicorns more plausible and gives us hope for world peace.

There are many of you who follow the rules, eat lots of veggies, use a fitness app, are aware of your “macros” and still get poor results. How?

Here is a tip. Our food is not really food. In fact, most of our “food” is a toxic version of something that actually was food a couple of generations ago. I think that modern “nutritionists” are dodging the real issue about our food supply based on the dogma that we are fed as a distraction to the real problem — chemical food.

Most of us “mostly-Americans” eat a completely artificial diet.

If we ate real food, annoying stuff like counting calories, eating a plant based diet, reducing fat, eating tofu, wearing a fitness watch and not bringing any nuts within 500 feet of any school would not matter so much. In fact, it never mattered until the recent advent of artificial food.

The reason we are so fat, sick and lethargic has nothing to do with the lack of adherence to nutritional guidelines. We have more widely distributed expert nutritional advice than ever before available for free. It’s disgusting to me to watch the suffering that people endure as they struggle to adhere to “expert advice” that gets them nowhere and fuels a billion dollar chemical diet-food industry, a billion dollar chemical fertilizer industry, another billion dollar chemical pesticide industry, a billion dollar GMO industry, and you get the idea.

So what’s my nonexpert advice? Stop eating artificial food!

Don’t wait for your life-changing event to clean up your eating. Stop clowning around with little insignificant, weak and misguided attempts at fitness like fat burner pills and new workout outfits. If you wait until it’s too late, it will be!

What is the best diet? A diligent attempt at eliminating toxins from your food and water.

Eating organic food, drinking healthy water, and avoiding cosmetics and sunscreens are quick and easy ways to reduce toxin intake. Yes, I said to avoid cosmetics and sunscreens because your skin absorbs the chemicals you coat it with. Demand whole, unadulterated food from your suppliers and pay the extra money because it’s cheaper to do this than pay for unaffordable affordable health care that puts us in 34th place. Take some initiative to grow, make and process some of your own food. Seek professional advice in testing to see where toxins are causing symptoms and inhibiting nutrition from helping you.

The simple challenge:

Challenge yourself to eat as clean as possible for 30 days. Don’t worry about calories and macro nutrients or how many steps you take. Simply eat real, whole, organic, homemade food. Eliminate all processed, pre-made, fast and non-food foods. Drink nothing other than good water. Make the effort and see if you notice small changes in only 30 days. Then go back to your old ways for a week. This will make you so sick that you’ll go back to the “real-food-diet” quickly. Sometimes you have to prove it to yourself in order to stop fooling yourself.

Steve Wells is a personal trainer and co-owner of Midland Fitness. His column appears on Tuesdays.