Health and fitness Info, on an information security website?

Yes indeed! As someone who’s long been interested in health, nutrition, and exercise, and as a certified nutrition coach, I thought it only natural to dedicate at least one page to giving out some key info. With a healthy community of infosec folks out there representing #BlueTeamFit, #DFIRfit, #RedTeamFit, #HackerFit and more, there’s clearly interest within the infosec community on peeling ourselves away from packets and code to maintain our most precious resources – our mind and body.

No matter which hashtag you use. Whether you’re a lifelong exerciser and healthy eater, or just getting started, hopefully the resources on this page help you along on your journey. It’s never too late to get going, any improvement no matter how small adds up over time!

Jump to the infographics below

Being Healthy – In The Real World

Being healthy is not about eating highly restrictive diets, having a 6-pack and 1% body fat, or creating the perfect workout schedule that you follow every day like a robot. No one does that, and in fact, in many cases, chasing those “ideals” can be detrimental to your health.

What fitness and nutrition is about to me is simple. It’s about finding a sustainable way to live the healthiest life that you actually enjoy. Getting to that position involves gaining some basic knowledge on nutrition and the importance of movement and exercise. With just small improvements and a minimum time investment, you can drastically alter the course of your health in the future. As one of my favorite quotes says:

“The journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step.“ – Lao Tzu

So What To Do?

At this point you may be thinking, is John about to try to sell me something? Nope, I’m not, I’m purely a previous Precision Nutrition coaching customer who saw results and I wanted to become certified myself so that I could better share with others what worked for me, and help others improve their lives too! Step 1 in me being able to do that was becoming a Certified Nutrition Coach. So that is one of the (many) things I decided to undertake while staying at home during the pandemic!

Now that I'm Certified, I'm happy to be able to endorse, spread the word, and share the links to the numerous guides below. Do these guides work? All I can say is, they did for me! One of the reasons I liked Precision Nutrition’s approach, and decided to become a Certified Nutrition Coach is that I’ve experienced their coaching and curriculum myself. Through all of 2019, I worked with a PN coach associated with my gym and saw how PN’s simple, real-world suggestions helped me build sustainable, and life changing nutrition habits. If I didn’t see success from PN’s highly practical approach, I never would’ve stuck with it for a year, let alone signed up and went through training to become a coach myself.

While you should be skeptical of any health advice you find online, here's what I can say about PN, and what brought me to them. Precision Nutrition takes a purely science-based approach to their guides, and they are not a company that sells any health products, no magic pills or shakes, so there's no push to eat or buy any specific thing. They don't get into confusing, overly complex science either. They just take the basic approach of "here's how the body works, therefore, eat these easy to find nutritious foods, and here's why." Simple advice that can be followed by anyone with the ambition to follow through. This was super important for me, as soon as I get a whiff of pseudo-science, I’m immediately out.

Considering PN's no-nonsense approach, I can in good conscience recommend the free guides they provide below (guides that you likely wouldn't normally run into unless you were working with a paid coach). Though I am a certified nutrition coach, I do not offer coaching, I took the certification just so I could get a deeper understanding for my own health, and gain access to PNs full list of guides and help spread the word to everyone I know. While the health industry is full of crappy advice, questionable motivations, and all sorts of whacky nonsense, I 100% won’t have any of it, so you won’t find any magical cures here. Only reasonable, evidence-backed advice.

TL;DR

Health and nutrition is at the core of our everyday experience. It determines our energy, longevity, mobility, ability to focus, and much much more. For me, trying to keep healthy is a “keystone habit” as Charles Duhigg would put it – something that snowballs into all other aspects of your life and makes everything else easier (exercise for example, has been shown to have this effect in studies). And for that reason, I have placed health and nutrition as one of the core habits I try to pay attention to every day, and am offering the aggregated links below to hopefully help you do the same.

Guides To Get You Started

Infographics