Basic Guide to Nutrition

Published at 2026-04-26
Updated within 365 days health

Not a comprehensive guide, but pointing out various directions in painting a bigger picture.

"Weird Al" Yankovic - Eat It

0. General Tips

  1. If food isn't tasty, it won't stick.
  2. If you throw up on particular food, give it some time and effor to enjoy it.
  3. Good food justify the bad addition.
  4. Any food is better than insufficient food.
  5. Healthy but pesticide heavy food is better than no healthy food at all. Obviously if you can, you should pick not as heavly sprayed crops instead.
    • [Glyphosate = safe], [Roundup, a brad product containing a mixture with Glyphosate) = bad]. EU was meant to phase it out, but that's gonna take a while.
  6. Diet is about long term foresight and consistency, not short term missteps.
  7. Your tolerance will also decrease over time, forcing you to make adjustmens, so prehaps keep notes. :)
  8. You pretty much can't overeat any of the good stuff.
  9. Nutrition label may lie or decieve.
    • i.e. Serving size vs per 100g.
    • i.e. The apple doesn't have a nutrition label.
    • i.e. Shitty national guidelines.
  10. Overall if u don't eat, you'll simply weight less.
    • Albeit fat simply may store itself in undesireable places.
    • Or on rare occasion there's something wrong with you, and calorie absorption can be less or more than 1 per 1, but probably not.
  11. Optimnally eat food in a way to preserve the most of its nutritional content,
  12. Just use glass/steel for everything (aka. don't use plastic/wood).
  13. Optimally always rinse everything.
  14. If you or someone in your family is dealing with any meat, basically everything is contaminated the fuck out.
  15. Also keep in mind there's a lot of bad faith in food->nutrition industry, not mentioning influencers, or that people feel very strongly about the things they eat.

1. Counting Calories

2. Science-Based Nutrition Sources

3. Actually building your diet

Just by looking around previously mentioned websites:

  1. You should already know what calorie target you need to hit.
  2. You should already know what categories of foods are desireable.
  3. You should already know what categories of foods aren't desireable.
  4. Make a free* account on https://cronometer.com/ (there's seemingly no good "no-account required" alternative), to easily add each food, and automatically calculate all calories / micro / macro for everything.
  • Notice: Not every recommended daily intake provided by cronometer may be accurate, you may have to adjust some individual ones.

4. My braindead take of the above:

  • Diet Goals:
    1. Very Cheap, <145 EUR per month.
    2. Very fast to prepare, whole day under 1h, only broccoli requires prep once or twice a week.
    3. Not an unreasonable quantity to consume, especially with a job.
    4. Tasty enough to stick with, on all day, everyday the same meal basis, with little to no variance.
    5. Hit all basics and also try to hit other unique health related targets.

cronometer screenshot #1 cronometer screenshot #2

Beans = Red lentils.

Frozen Berries.

3 different fruits, for variety and flavonoids = apple, orange.

Cruciferous vegetable = broccoli, critical food for many reasons:

  • Only fresh ones, left for a while after cutting up, stored in refridgerator.

Random greens:

  • Arugula because of highest nitrate.
  • Broccoli sprouts because of high anti-air pollution.

Allium vegetables:

  • Garlic = min. 1 clove a day, have to crush it and leave it for some time for process to take place.
  • Red onion = generally what's red seems better.

Nuts = peanut butter/peanuts, they act as nuts despite not being them officially, cheapest of nuts, preferable to other cheap sunflower seeds.

Diy blended flaxseeds from refrigerator.

Herbs and spices = basically dump as much as possible of every single-ingredient spice you get your hands on:

  • Dried parsley, peppermint / marjoram, tumeric WITH black pepper, ginger powder, cumin powder, rosemary powder, cayenne pepper, nutritional yeast.

Whole-wheat = steel-cut oats, very fast to prepare, basically only edible with milk or cakes in big quantities:

  • Without milk, they are somewhat more edible with rasins in particular.

Beverages = either water or improved water like:

  • Green tea = there's some variables in source and form of consuption with upper limit due to lead or aluminium present.
  • Herbal teas:
    1. Dandelion.
    2. Chamomile, lemongrass, rooibos, rosehip.
  • Hibiscus tea:
    • Drink water afterwards to remove acidic content.

Salt with iodine = ~4g of overall daily salt:

  • If u exercise enough to sweat a lot, you'll need to calculate/guess amount of additional salt needed.

Supplements:

  • 250mg/d omega 3 from algae.
  • Vitamin B12, Cyanocobalamin, 100mcg/d, dosage depends on age.
  • Vitamin D, 1000IU/d, because u should always wear sunscreen or cover yourself or any glass with plastic.

The random "bad food" agenda:

Basically anything processed is bad.

  • Trans-fat / saturated = optimally 0
    • All oils have different spectrum of those.
  • Basically everything animals = meat, eggs, fish.
  • Heating any oil
    • Refined oil = was already heated up in the process.
  • Any non-fruit sweeters:
    • No need for any of it, but if present should be capped at 50g daily.
  • Basmati rice > other rice = but they're still bad due to arsenic.
  • Milk
    • USA = growth hormone passing down issues.
    • Something, something, bad to mix when consuming any more critical nutrition like broccoli..
  • Flour = just pick whole-wheat ones instead.