The Only Diet That Ever Worked on Me Is a Roofing Job

What are your best healthy eating habits?

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My best healthy eating habit is that I climb roofs for a living.

I mean that literally. Nobody who sweats through a shirt by nine in the morning in a Georgia August stays fat for long, no matter what he eats. That was my diet plan for my first ten years in this business: eat whatever’s closest, sweat it off by four, repeat.

That’s not a habit, though. That’s luck with a long fuse.

So here’s the honest answer to the prompt, the boring version.

I eat breakfast. A real one. Four eggs, bacon, toast, at the counter at 6:15 while the house is still quiet. My dad Kirk, a contractor himself, used to say a man who skips breakfast borrows energy from later and pays interest. He also drank Dr Pepper with every meal, so I filter his wisdom, but on this one he was right. The days I skip it are the days I’m in the RaceTrac at 8:45 buying a sausage biscuit and lying to myself about it.

I drink water like it’s my job. The giant Stanley tumbler lives in my truck’s cupholder and I refill it three, four times a day. In July and August on a roof you either hydrate or you end up sitting on a curb with your head between your knees, and I have done the curb thing. Never again. I barely touch soda now, mostly because nothing teaches you about hydration like a kidney stone. That was two summers ago. I’d rather talk about anything else.

I eat dinner when it’s cooked and I don’t snack after. My wife, daughter of Vietnamese immigrants, puts rice and some kind of meat and a pile of greens on the table around six. With three kids under seven homeschooling at that same table all day, dinner is the first quiet hour we get, and I’m not ruining it with a bag of chips at nine. This one’s barely my habit at all. I married a woman who cooks real food and doesn’t keep junk in the house. That’s not discipline. That’s outsourcing.

And the one I’m proudest of: I eat the same lunch almost every day. Turkey on wheat, an apple, done. It’s boring on purpose. When you’re choosing lunch at 11:45 in a truck parked outside a Chick-fil-A, the Chick-fil-A wins. So I decide at 6:30 in the morning, pack it, and the decision is already made. Most healthy eating isn’t willpower. It’s removing the moment of choice.

I don’t meal-prep. I don’t count macros. I couldn’t tell you what a superfood is. But I’m up on roofs in the Georgia sun, and I feel fine, and I’ve never been on a diet in my life. The diet is the job. The habits just keep the job from killing me.