What is a good diet for builders and construction workers?

On the construction site, builders and other tradies want quick fast meals, which sometimes is detrimental to long-term and short-term body and gut health. 

The biggest problems made on the construction site are caused by eating cheese, baked beans, and processed carbohydrates like bread, noodles, and pasta. 

But in all seriousness, a clean, healthy building site consists of rice-based meals and plenty of BBQs.

If you want to know what a good diet is for construction workers then keep reading.

Why do builders have to be careful with their diet?

During the day, builders and tradies do hard work and can have a stronger urge to eat and snack to keep up with the mental and physical energy needs required for the tasks at hand.

When you’re doing repetitive tasks such as cutting rebar or carrying heavy objects or working with heavy power tools, this extra hunger can lead to excessive eating of foods that are not ideal or natural.

Such as processed carbohydrates and sugar that fill 90% of modern-day western markets.

What are the fundamentals of any healthy diet?

The most healthy diet for anyone without debate on the details is to live as close as possible to a paleo diet.

A strictly paleo diet consists of only eating food that would be found and consumed in hunter-gather times. This means today to avoid eating any processed foods at least 80% of the time but better 95% of the time.

Seems very simple and obvious, but you might recognize that 80% of your diet might be processed foods (Not really food.) Just stuff clogging you up, making you fart, burb, and have brain fog.

1. Avoid what your body doesn’t need.

All food is food; sure, we need to make sure that we’re getting enough nutrition and that we are not deficient in anything.

But with the abundance of all the options and foods available now, nutrition isn’t an issue like it was for captain James Cook sailing around the world without a lemon tree on board.

A healthy diet only really comes down to removing processed foods [1] for a more natural alternative and removing what we don’t need.

Foods to avoid eating too much

1. Processed carbohydrates (As it can account for 80% of a builders diet if you’re not careful.
2. Processed sugars.
3. Too much natural sugars from over-eating fruits.

Why processed foods are bad?

Maybe processed foods aren’t adequately recognized by our bodies, making our bodies think that we are in desperate times and need to store as much energy (FAT) as possible, putting us into fat hoarding mode.

Heavily processed foods give the illusion that they are foods, but they are not really food but they can be turned into fat. 

These processed foods might make real nutrition harder to absorb within the food, meaning that a higher amount of nutrition might be required to be absorbed when mixed with heavily processed foods that can just be passed through our system.

Examples of heavily processed foods to avoid

• Noodles.
• Bread.
• Pasta.
• Most milk drinks.
• Cereals.
• Excessive amounts of white flour.
• Anything small and wrapped in plastic from a factory.

Snacks to avoid at the construction site

• Excessive natural sugars (In fruits)
• Alcohol, including beer (Mostly just sugar and the worst type)
• Cigarettes
• Energy drinks
• Exessive coffee drinking

What carbs to eat instead?

Natural carbs that haven’t been heavily processed are:

• Rice
• Potatoes
• Kurmura
• Carbohydrates contained in both meat and eggs

Surprising truths to everyday foods

1. All bread is heavily processed and more of a sweet than a meal; bread is bad for digestion, making it not really a food.
2. Milk purchased from a supermarket is heavily processed and the most unnatural food sold as a health supplement. The entire start-to-end process is weird, and so is our standard official daily recommended calcium intake. The next best alternative for calcium is orange juice (That you squeeze yourself, make sure to add 50% ICE) 
3. Milk seems to make people sicker if they have a cold already (You can only assume then that milk might actually make you ill as well that might be why some people just pass it right out. Because your drinking straight from those dosed-up animals.

2. Avoid overeating.

Overeating happens because eating feels good. And our body drives us to eat any food when available.

When food is available, 24/7 humans overeat just like our favorite Jobsite dog by default.

Logically, we only need 1 or 2 meals per day though. And our stomach is only the size of our hand/fist, and the portion we eat per meal only needs to be that size. After that, our stomach stretches.

If you keep these things in mind, when you have food anxiety, you can remind yourself that you are totally ok, and you’re not going to die.

Some doctors even suggest not eating for an entire week as a healthy thing to do from time to time [2] to time as it can, clear your system out from a build-up of toxins/ and burn fat that’s been in storage for too long.

What do you need to know about fat?

Fat is made for a reason, and that is to burn when we are busy doing other things and not eating, it’s like an 18v Makita battery ready to go when we need to get a job done. 

Fat is like a battery and should be depleted and recharged from time to time and not just left to idle and build up or overcharge to explosion! You need to disconnect the power when charged.

If you see noticeable chubbiness, guess what you have plenty of energy on tap ready to go in its ultimate form, you will be fine if you miss a meal or a day from eating from time to time.

We have been made to believe and feel that we need to eat when our body is just switching to running on its battery pack (FAT).

3. Breakfast isn’t always needed.

As a builder, construction worker, or even a DIY’er it’s best to consume some carbs in the morning before doing any highly active physical work like digging and carrying heavy materials.

But most days, when you’re doing light work like installing plasterboard on the walls or doing a mental task, like calculating the materials or tools that you need.

The best thing is just a fruit or a smoothie. This is enough to put your mind in the next gear.

But not enough to make you tired from eating a solid meal and converting it to fat right now.

When you eat heavy meals, it makes you tired as your body process it.

That’s why it’s better to use body fat in the mornings and eat heavy meals at the end of the day when you have less to do.

Nothing beats:

1. Banana smoothies (Potassium in bananas combined with water is needed for hydration) Add some organic cacao powder too.
2. Berry smoothies (Plenty of vitamins, tastes good but costs more to make)

4. Intermittent fasting.

Our bodies can be in either a feeding state or a fasting state.

For your body to start burning body fat naturally, you need 6-12 hours after eating for your body to switch over from feeding to a fasting fat-burning state.

The fundamental idea behind intermittent fasting. Is that you don’t eat within a time bracket that is enough to allow your body to switch over into fat-burning mode at some point during the day.

It takes up to 12 hours of not consuming any food for your body to start using/ burning body fat as your energy source while you’re doing your daily things. This is why breakfast isn’t always a good idea or even necessary.

By not eating breakfast, you can burn body fat instead at the beginning of the day like our hunter-gather ancestors. Body fat is made for this reason.

By not eating breakfast, it allows our body to burn and run on our stored energy.

For example, you ate dinner the night before at 6 pm.

At 6 am in the next morning, you are going to be now burning fat in a fasting state. As it has been a good 12 hours since you last consumed any food.

5. When to eat?

If you don’t break the fast literally, and your first meal is now at 1 pm then you have had 6 hours to naturally burn body fat or, in other words, operate on stored energy instead.

You can have a small lunch on the Jobsite to keep you going and then a bigger meal for dinner. And any snacking is done in between meals or directly after dinner.

This keeps all your meals within a 5-6 hour timeframe. Your body’s going to store the fat as it thinks it needs later, regardless of whether you snacked or not in this time frame, but you will also burn it when you fast the next morning.

This makes for a healthy cycle that will get you to your healthy natural body weight. For men, it seems a healthy natural body weight by avoiding most processed foods and being active is between 13-16%. 

And for women, healthy body weight could be considered between 15-18% by avoiding processed foods and being moderately active.

More on losing weight with intermittent fasting

Another idea for people that want to lose weight is that diet alone will only lose a certain amount of weight.

At the end of the day, your body wants fat/ Energy stored for later.

If you diet too much, your body will start to store today’s energy into storage as body fat, at the expense of your daily energy requirements right now. The body can sacrifice today’s energy for fat storage if it thinks you will need it later. 

So if you want to improve your body fat avoid under consuming, but reduce the number of meals you eat. And make sure you stay active on the Jobsite.

The idea of intermittent fasting is that: 

1. You want to have good energy levels.
2. You store body fat on the weekends.
3. You have a healthy cycle of storing new body fat and then using it during the week.
4. You burn stored energy in the mornings.
5. You let your body decide your body weight by giving it all the food you need in a specific time frame and then letting your body burn it by having a big enough break from eating later.

What can you eat during your fasting state?

Drinking teas without sugar can help when you start out as teas won’t break, or offset the time it takes to reach the fasting state. 

There are many types of teas, with different health benefits as well. Most contain a small amount of caffeine and L-Themine for extra energy and focus.

But when your body is in fat-burning mode, you can drink as much hot or ice tea as you like.

What you really want to know is what is a healthy drink builders can make instead of going to the shop?

What are some great-tasting Jobsite healthy meals that are not processed?

• Sushi
• Chicken salads
• BBQ or roast chicken on rice
• BBQ or roast lamb with rice
• BBQ or roast steak with rice
• BBQ or roast Duck with rice

• Fried or smoked Fish or eel.
• Any vegetable or meat with rice.
• Roast or boiled vegetables
• Fruit bowls
• Eggs any style

Tips for cooking

1. Cooking oils.

Avoid all cooking oils. If you fry your food, use a small amount of butter.

Butter is good for your skin and will make your cooking taste much better even if you can’t cook.

Cooking oil ruins a BBQ or any food except french fries, but they sure are not good for you. Why? Don’t let the label “vegetable” oil fool you.

2. Soy

Don’t consume foods that contain soy, like vegetable oils, soy protein powders, etc.

3. Fat

Don’t be scared of eating butter and animal fat in moderation, be scared of ‘healthy” cooking oils.

3. Pans

Don’t use a non-stick frying pan for cooking meat. Use a cast-iron pan only! 

4. Cooking elements

Only use real fire to cook, not an electric cooker. It’s not hot enough and ruins your meal. Light a real fire or use gas.

Exercise more than just what you do at work.

You get a little bit of exercise on the building site, it is a good staple mixed with cutting out bad foods. But you need to be pushed to your physical limit at least once per week.

No problems with the weather when you have a few walks or a jog with your heated socks on.

But the best idea for exercise is a type of martial art like Boxing, or better, Muay Thai, Taekwondo, or anything along these lines. It doesn’t really matter what one.

Any martial art is a fun way to keep the stamina, and you get a lot more out of it than a standard gym membership.

When you take up any style, you have a trainer in a way pushing you in each class. Plus, you get the other benefits as well.

Do yoga from time to time.

Yoga is one of those things that make me think that the people that do it every day just have way too much time on their hands. 

At first, you might think why should I pay someone to tell me how to stretch how hard is it to stretch right?

The reality is men don’t need to do yoga every day, and doing so might be bad for your knees.

But getting someone that does it every day to teach you the basics is worth it, especially for tradies.

Yoga is a tradition that has been practiced for 1000’s of years and has been optimized more than your hammer swing.

You want someone to watch you make sure you’re doing it right, a yoga teacher will also be able to tell you what’s up with your body posture and how to improve it over time.

Like me, I don’t have enough time to go to yoga every day or every week for a dedicated session. But it can be done brefily with my Jobsite radio  in the mornings to warm up for the day ahead.

Doing yoga once every now and then or once every 2 weeks I think can give you great general benefits for your back and posture.

Plus you get a bit of insight into what these “hot” girls do for fun and you can relate somewhat on at least something other than your pristine toolkit!

There are many types of yoga, don’t get confused if you want to get as much done in the shortest amount of time the more challenging one I hear is called – Ashtanga yoga.

What to only eat for fast fat loss

If you are wanting to lose a lot of weight fast before balanced healthy eating. Consider what professional fighters do before they compete. Fighters want to lose body fat fast before a fight because they want to be in a lower weight division so that they are not fighting against someone physically a lot strong than them because of their body fat.

The diet used for fast weight loss is strictly eating only chicken, eggs, vitamin supplements (To avoid fructose sugar in fruits), and tea (nothing else). The people I have seen do this have lost significant weight in a short period of time.

Conclusion

When it comes to both taste and health, the most simple meals make the best diet for tradies, builders, and construction workers, and of course anyone. 

You might not want to be a diet person, but at least putting in the effort to be aware of what you eat to make sure 80-90% of your diet is real, unprocessed foods makes a lot of sense.

• Regular fasting (The number one thing anyone can do to increase their life by 10+ years.)
• Avoid anything processed, especially carbohydrates and sugars.
• Cook using real fire.
• Eat animal fat.
• Avoid cooking oils, smoking and, alcohol.
• Eat some light fruit in the morning if you need to think early on.

Doing mostly the right thing will make the most significant difference. In this case, 80% of your diet is when you are at work. And you have to plan this meal, so why not plan the right food. And maybe go fishing for it yourself later! So that you have the food and diet you need for your building and DIY.