Vitamin

September 14, 2017

Forget invisibility or the power of flight. You want to talk secret super-power? Here’s what Chip can do – and you will wish YOU had this ability:

Chip, who is not just a ballet dancer and a personal trainer but also the nutritionist at Body Dynamics in Falls Church, Virginia, can munch on tortilla chips in front of other people who KNOW he’s a nutritionist, and he has the power to put up his hand at them and say “Don’t even.”

And he means it.

Chip can reject guilt.

I know – right??

Chip says it’s not wrong to eat chips, or whatever else it is that calls out to you in weak moments, because you’re only striving to be pure and healthy 80% of the time. To maintain your sanity, you have to have something that just plain tastes good about 20% of the time.

So really, what he says when he holds up that imperious, arrestingly graceful hand is “Don’t even with me – eighty-twenty,” and the people who have gathered to mockingly watch the nutritionist nibble some empty calories have to skulk away disappointed. There will be no public ridicule today.

So straight off the bat, you have to love Chip, right?

He gave me two great new phrases yesterday, and they both equip me to respond to some very helpful people in my life.

I blog a lot about pumpkin seeds because I have the fanaticism of the new convert – and I talk about them a lot too (to the real, sincere, eternal joy of all the people around me, no, tell me MORE about zinc and pumpkin seeds because I didn’t get enough LAST time). And loving people say to me, “Why don’t you just take a vitamin? That’s what I do.”

So I looked worshipfully to my messiah and said “Chip, why don’t I just take a vitamin?”

Ooh – new words! “Bio-availability,” said Chip, the phrase rolling forth easily but with power – a grand jeté from the master.

“Tell me more.”

“You can pack many times the amount your body needs into a vitamin,” he explained, “but that doesn’t mean your body can absorb what’s in the vitamin. Zinc will only do you good if it’s bio-available.”

“And it’s not bio-available in a pill?”

“Some of it is, but if you think you’re getting all of what’s listed on the box, you’re assuming something that isn’t true. If you get your zinc from pumpkin seeds, your body can absorb it more readily. You won’t just – ” and here he made a gesture of discretion in case I was too nice to consider the concept of peeing away all the vitamins I’d dutifully swallowed. He’s a very kind man.

“And that’s why I want a variety of foods that aren’t too processed.”

“Exactly. That’s why the pizza box nutritional content confused you. The percentage of macronutrients – that’s fat, protein, and sugars in the form of carbs – was good, but it was lacking [and here came delicious phrase number two] NUTRIENT-DENSE opportunities to give your body what it needs.”

So there I sat, already dazzled by the power of the 80/20 hand and made further drunk by “bio-available” and “nutrient-dense,” and I thought “Thank God I have a blog because I’ll never remember these excellent details if I don’t write them down somewhere I won’t lose them.”

I’m going to work on that guilt-deflecting hand. That would be a great superpower to achieve.