5 Things to Understand for Improving Eating Habits

Obviously what we eat plays a huge role in our health.  But I think the thing that confuses most people is what and how we should eat. 

When I was growing up in the 90’s there was a huge trend towards fat-free foods.  It didn’t matter if it was packaged and had all sorts of hard to pronounce ingredients that you may not recognize as food, as long as it was low-fat it was good.  There was also the daily ritual of waking up and going to the kitchen for a bowl of cereal.  Sugar frosted, powdered, sprinkled, covered, and coated flakes, crispies, and nuggets… low in appetite-suppressing protein, high in carbohydrate, and doused in 2%/skim milk to keep all that nasty fat away.  On mornings I didn’t want cereal, it was usually pop tarts or some other quick pastry as an alternative.  What the hell were we thinking promoting this crap as part of a balanced breakfast to kids?! 

I get it, I still love pop tarts but I only have them once in a blue moon (they’re delicious).  When I think back on this time in my life it’s very clear to me why I was eating this way:  I was depressed, food made me feel better, and I didn’t know anything about a healthy diet.  Being bullied, dealing with abuse at home, navigating parents who were perpetually arguing, and trying to stay focused on being academically successful was incredibly stressful.  I don’t have any real fond memories of childhood.  It sucked.  Food was a part of how I detached from reality.  

I’m willing to bet that if you asked most people enough questions they could tell you about situations where food becomes a method of self-soothing.  This is important because along with emotional food choices, culture and environment tend to drive many of our eating decisions.  We celebrate with food and we build relationships around food.  This brings me to my first point:  

1 – Being attentive to the messaging and patterns that our environments create about food is incredibly important when trying to change eating habits.

For instance, the last job I had, many of my coworkers were teenagers and the food that was available mirrored that in a way.  If I didn’t prepare my lunch for the day, there were absolutely zero healthy options available.  You could get a soda from the vending machine.  You could get a bag of chips and a candy bar from the convenience store onsight.  You could get a cheese burger, french fries, fried chicken fingers, or a fried corn dog at the restaurant.  Damn.  If I didn’t bring my lunch I was screwed.  If I was frustrated with something and looking to self-medicate with food, I had plenty of vices to choose from.  The options I just named resemble the options I had when I was a teenager going to school and eating cafeteria lunches.  Many of my coworkers, being teenagers, were still used to eating this way on a daily basis. This job could be very frustrating at times for all of us.  I had to work extra hard not to give in to the tempting comfort food that was everywhere in the environment.  

Remember a few articles ago when I talked about being aware of your environment as you work to change health habits.  

Remember, understand your story being one of the principles of ownership.  

Remember how our stories about how the world works can originate in the media? Take a look at this video of 90’s cereal commercials:

When I got deployed to Afghanistan in early 2011, a friend of mine began introducing me to what is known as The Paleolithic Diet.  For simplicity’s sake let’s just say that there are no processed foods or grains in The Paleo Diet.  Foods containing processed sugar and flour are the primary things that I would need to eliminate to comply with the diet.  The idea is to consume food in a way somewhat similar to the way in which prehistoric humans consumed it.  This implies that food is eaten in a more whole form with minimal processing.  I’ll point out that even cooking with fire is actually a form of processing.  

At this point in time I had spent almost a year in Afghanistan and we had been eating a lot of processed and packaged food:  MRE’s (Meal-Ready-to-Eat), Clif Bars, and Otis Spunkmeyer Cookies.  Needless to say, in spite of working out a lot, I was carrying some extra weight when I reached the end of that deployment.

In 2000 I had lost an initial 70-80 pounds (down from 305 pounds) when I was 18 years old, but the next 20-30 pounds had always been challenging.  When I came home from Afghanistan I ended up getting a hernia that I had to have surgery to repair.  It was during the recovery from the surgery that I decided to change my diet to The Paleo Diet.  One of the things I struggled with was the idea of not eating cereal, toast, a bagel, or some sort of grain for breakfast.  “What am I going to eat for breakfast?!”, I would say to myself periodically.  Well, I ate food. Real food:  eggs, meat, fruit, nuts, and vegetables usually.  I felt great.  I lost about 30 pounds easily.  This brings me to my second and third points:

2 – Focus on eating minimaly-processed real food.  Simple idea but often hard to execute in the modern world.  Which is why we need the other points in this article.

3 – Learn to mitigate unnecessary stress. I’ve mentioned this in a previous article but it’s particularly relevant to food habits.  Changing dietary habits is a challenge and a stressor on its own.  If you can plan these changes during a low stress point of life, do so, but don’t wait for it to come.  Get better at identifying and eliminating unnecessary stress.

The weight began to melt off even though I wasn’t exercising beyond walking daily.  When I look back on this time I realize that a major part of the change can be attributed to the fact that I wasn’t having to deal with any stress at the time:  I was getting out of the Army, I had plenty of cash in the bank,  I had 4 months of paid vacation coming,  and I had just gotten home safely from a war-zone.  I was happy and I didn’t need food to mitigate stress or sadness which was a typical response to difficult emotions up until that point. 

I was having success but about 6 months after fully recovering from the surgery and leaving the military, I started to struggle with loneliness.  That old vice of sugar as a form of self-medication came storming back.  

There’s this weird thing that happens in my mind when I’m sad or depressed.  I want to eat sugar, I know it’s not going to make me feel better long term, but if I resist there is a little voice in my head that tells me I’m missing out on something.   In these moments, I know it’s not true but it feels true.  This is the part of my relationship to food that I’ve been trying to change for years.  I grew up using sugar as a salve to make myself feel better.  I’m not going to say that’s the wrong way to think about food but I will tell you that if it’s not checked, it will impede progress if you have goals of losing weight and feeling better generally.

The emotional connection that we can often have with food means we need to have both a mental and practical strategy for changing food habits.

Mental Strategy

Remember, I define stories as facts weaved together by assumptions into a coherent narrative.  This narrative tells the individual how the world works.  Everyone has a story about the essential parts of life that we all have to navigate.  We’ve already talked about many of the narratives I grew up with around food.  Cereal and bread were such ingrained parts of my diet (pun intended) that I was a bit perplexed at not having them at all when I encountered The Paleo Diet.  Most recently I’ve experimented with a Vegan Diet and intermittent fasting.  I regularly do hard physical training in martial arts and strength training on an empty stomach.  All of these recent situations have presented challenges to common notions I grew up with:

• Not eating meat for a long period of time seemed like it might be really challenging.  As a very active person all my life I’ve assumed I needed animal proteins in my diet.  I was totally fine on a vegan/vegetarian diet.  (It’s interesting how heavily meat was promoted when I was a kid, yet the ‘most important meal of the day’ , breakfast, was constantly advertised as being satisfied with a bowl of sugary cereal with no meat)
• The idea of working out hard midday after being awake for 5-6 hours without having had a meal was totally foreign to me growing up but it’s something that I do on a weekly basis now.  I tend to feel and perform better in workouts on an empty stomach.

Fact – We need food to survive.

Assumptions –

• We need breakfast everyday and a bowl of cereal is a fantastic way to kick off the day
• We need 3 meals a day
• You shouldn’t workout on an empty stomach
• You need to eat a bunch of small meals throughout the day to lose weight
• You have to have meat at every meal

Think about your understanding of food and how much of it is driven by social cues and narratives adopted from your environment.  How do we begin to shift these beliefs and upend these narratives?  We learn.

I’ve read and reread several books on nutrition.  The two I always recommend are The Primal Blueprint by Mark Sisson and Practical Paleo by Dianne San Filippo.  Part of the way we challenge long held beliefs is by introducing new ideas to our mind.  I am not one for researching scientific journals and I can’t say that every claim made in these books is 100 % true.  What I did was explore the information, talk with a few other people who had implemented the strategies, and then I experimented.  This is something I will say many times in this article:  diet is all about experimentation.  Most of us aren’t dietitians and even if we were there’s probably way too much information out there to come to some definitive conclusion about what precisely is the best diet.  This is something that I realized I had to avoid.  There is a big temptation to believe that there is one particular diet that is best for all people at all times. There’s far too much diversity on the planet to seek out such a thing.  It’s better to read a few books that resonate and then do personal experiments.  

I still struggle with turning to sugar when I’m struggling emotionally but it’s nowhere near as bad as it used to be and I don’t have that feeling of missing out any more.  Part of this evolution in thinking has come about because I know better.  I’ve read so much and done so many experiments where I’ve removed sugar and flour from my diet that I now have a deeper emotional connection to a cleaner style of eating.  The learning and experimenting has rewired my mind and emotions to an extent.  Which leads to my fourth point:

4 – A large part of challenging long held beliefs about food is reading and learning.  It’s been my experience that the more you learn about diets you want to implement, the more mentally and emotionally resonant those dietary habits become.

Practical Approach

Practically, we need to set up our environments to funnel us toward real food choices.  Over the years I’ve found that one of the biggest things I can do to help myself eat the way I want to eat, is creating barriers to accessing certain processed foods.  I love sweets.  For a long time, I didn’t keep any in my house.  None.  Now, someone’s response to this will be, “Well, I don’t want to restrict myself in that way!”  That’s fine.  You understand yourself better than I do.  What I know is that I’m going to be far more tempted to overindulge in sugar if I keep lots of it easily accessible.  As of late, I’m becoming better at this (meaning I can keep small quantities of treats on hand without losing my mind) but it’s taken many years of staying away from it to get to this point.  Said another way, I had to get to a place where I had the humility to admit to myself and others that I am weak when it comes to this habit.  Yes, the goal is to be able to see the cookie, or the pizza, or whatever it is and be able to walk away from it, but in the beginning, it’s nice to never have to make that choice.

While we restrict access to what we want to stay away from, we must also create pathways to the food we want to consume.  We’re going to the grocery store, buying pots, pans, and food containers.  Maybe we’re getting a crock pot.  We’re buying a few cook books that are themed in the diet we are trying to follow.  We are finding 2-3 snack options that fit within the guidelines we are trying to follow.  We’re learning to cook and we’re looking for times during the day and week where we have enough time to prepare meals.  We’re structuring our environment in every way possible to set us up for success.

In doing both of these things you will have to experiment to find your rhythms.  Change may be gradual and you may not be able to overhaul all of your meals at one time.  You may have to start with one meal a day that you’re trying to change.  You may spend 6-12 months mastering that one meal and then moving to the next.  Generally, small steps are more long term sustainable and you won’t have to deal with the disappointment that comes from taking too large a step and then falling off the wagon.  Failing repeatedly with large habit changes in food can make change feel like it’s impossible.  It is possible.  You just have to manage your expectations.  Slow is smooth.  Smooth is fast.

At various times in my journey, I have had to focus on small dietary changes in order to get myself on track.  Focusing on one small change at a time is much more manageable than doing a complete overall of your diet.  Going back to the third point, I was able to change over to The Paleo Diet after coming home from Afghanistan because my life was very small and I only had to think about myself.  I couldn’t workout hard.  I wasn’t in the midst of a demanding work environment.  I didn’t have a family to take care of.  I wasn’t dating anybody at the time.  I had all the freedom and latitude to experiment, fail, learn, and try again.  

Even as a single man those kinds of opportunities to go through dietary change have been rare in my life.  Usually I have to attack one small thing at a time and gradually build momentum into the next goal.  I’ve sat with multiple people over the last 10-15 years to discuss their dietary habits and things they want to change.  Often the challenge centers around getting people to understand that making big sweeping changes usually doesn’t last long even if you’re successful in the beginning.  Start working on doing better with the snacks you eat at work.  Start with eating out 3 nights a week instead of 5.  Start with getting grains and sugar out of your first meal of the day as opposed to every meal.  Start with having a goal to not eat after 7 pm and don’t worry about what you’re eating just yet. Start with one small change and master it.  

We have to be mindful that food is an immediate pleasure.  When we change how we eat there is great potential that we disrupt that feedback loop in our minds.  We’re changing for the sake of our long term health which is beneficial and rewarding, but not immediate.  Be patient.  Go slower in the short term to ultimately go faster in the long term.  My fifth point:

5 – When changing eating habits, set small practical goals and focus on gaining small wins.  However, you will fail.  Think of each failure as an experiment, learn from the outcome, and go again.

Final Thoughts

To review:

1. Be aware of the messaging your environment is sending you about food.
2. Eat Real Food.
3. Learn to mitigate stress in your environment.
4. Read/learn and challenge your long held beliefs about food.
5. Set small practical goals, experiment, update, and iterate.

Ancel Keys was an American Physiologist best known for his advocacy to reduce saturated fat in the diet in order to prevent cardiovascular disease.  John Yudkin was a British Physiologist who focused on the reduction of sugar and carbohydrates in diets to promote weight loss and prevention of metabolic disease.  If you study either, there is controversy surrounding their ideas.  This highlights the big challenge with nutrition: it’s not an exact science. It’s more like medicine in the sense that it’s a practice that evolves with time.  

But people can become religious about nutrition. One camp says fat is killing us.  Another camp says sugar and carbs are killing us.  This camp says meat is the enemy.  This camp says plants are actually bad for us.  Who’s right and why?  My short answer to you is that I don’t know.  What I know is how I feel and perform when I eat a certain way.  I have experimented and tried things and I will continue to do so.  Do I think you should try to consume a real food diet?  Yes.  Am I a dietitian?  No.  As with everything I write about, my goal is to give you some practical ideas that you must take ownership of and go out and test.  Diet is all about experimentation.  You have to experiment with the type of food itself and you have to experiment with implementation strategies.

Don’t be overwhelmed by how much information is out there about diet.  Pick a diet that seems to resonate with you and begin learning.  The benefit of so much information being on the internet is that you can probably start learning about whatever dietary protocols you’re interested in without spending any money.  Do that.  For something as important as how we fuel our bodies, it’s worth the time and effort.