Sorry but no matter how cool you are, you just can’t have it both ways.

I read an article recently by surfing legend Laird Hamilton called Laird’s Laws where he gave us some badass new rules, or as he called them, “17 commandments.”

So much of what Laird laid out was intuitive and practical. For example, his first rule is “I base everything on how I feel.” Laird’s not much for pre-packaged routines and exercise plans based on age, weight, hair color, etc. He wakes up and feels good, he hits it hard. He feels sleepy, he rests.

Cool.

“It’s really about keeping in shape for life.” Again, I agree. Laird’s analogy is that your body is like a car, keep driving it and it will keep running, but park it for a long period of time and it may not start when you need it.

Makes sense.

Then, there was commandment number 4, which is always nice for me to hear. “You eat garbage, you’re probably going to perform like garbage.” There’s never been any doubt in my mind this is true. I can think of countless times I’ve fueled wrong, or not at all, and suffered the consequences. It follows logically that the car Laird refers to needs to run on the best gasoline available. As he says, “if it’s potato chips in, it’s potato chips out.”

So far, so good.

This brings me to commandment number 10, which I will recount in its entirety:

“I have friends who eat healthier than anybody, but it takes them all day. And if they don’t have their sprouted bread, they go into a seizure. I can eat a Big Mac. I’m not going to love it, but it won’t put me into toxic shock. It’s like if a car is too high-performance, then it’s sensitive to any kind of fuel. I like being more like a truck. If a little diesel gets in there, maybe a little water, it’ll cough and burp a bit, but it’s gonna get through it and keep running.”

Hold on, now, I thought we established the ‘junk in, junk out’ premise.

This vehicle we keep talking about, whether it’s a car, truck, hybrid, or SUV, performs based on how it’s treated. Crap in, crap out sums it up perfectly. While I’ve never had a seizure over a lack of sprouted bread, I certainly have been dismayed and frustrated by the lack of healthy food choices in restaurants, especially when I’m traveling.

When I eat too much processed food, I simply feel bad.

Had Laird promoted a cheat day, fine. I get the value of comfort food. But our engines should be as ‘high-performance’ as possible, and our quest for real, healthy food should have a permanent place in our lives, overshadowing the temptation to pull into a fast food restaurant and chow down.

Recently, my friend Kristen spoke with someone whose level of nutritional understanding was most likely based on some clever company’s marketing strategy. She recounted her conversation on Facebook, saying that this person’s nutritional day consisted of a meal replacement shake for breakfast, a Lean Pocket for lunch, then a gorging at dinner because they were starving. In the end, Kristen implored that we all “just eat real food.” I agree, wholeheartedly.

We can justify all we want, but this is simply not a gray area. Eating right is just like training, it takes effort, knowledge, and discipline. And, please don’t justify bad nutrition by pretending it’s some reasonable response to a zombie apocalypse of crazed health nuts.

If you’re going to defiantly eat a Big Mac, leave me out of it. I think it’s time to put the sprouted grain freak stereotype to bed. I seek real food for the same reasons I seek physical challenges, personal fulfillment in my career, and anything else that means something to me. It’s a lifestyle.

It’s either ‘junk in, junk out’ or it’s not.

As has been said by wiser men than I, ‘yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run there’s still time to change the road you’re on.’

Eat well, my friends.