{"id":30343,"date":"2018-04-05T09:00:07","date_gmt":"2018-04-05T13:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nomeatathlete.com\/?p=30343"},"modified":"2019-10-29T16:25:58","modified_gmt":"2019-10-29T20:25:58","slug":"eating-hard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nomeatathlete.com\/eating-hard\/","title":{"rendered":"Why is Eating Right so Hard?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few weeks ago I sent out a survey, asking you to share your biggest frustrations, fears<\/a>, and challenges when it comes to being healthy.<\/p>\n

Over 1000 people responded, and what came back…<\/p>\n

…was shocking. Honestly, it was depressing. For the whole day after setting up camp at a coffee shop and reading every single response, I walked around in a funk that I just couldn\u2019t shake.<\/p>\n

So many people think they\u2019re doing it wrong.<\/em><\/p>\n

They\u2019re eating plant-based, whole foods, maybe 85 or 90 percent of time (some much more than that)… and they can\u2019t get over how much they\u2019re screwing up, what nutrients they\u2019re surely missing out on, and how hard it all is.<\/p>\n

They’re beating themselves up, citing self-sabotage, indecision, lack of confidence, lack of commitment, and even FOMO.<\/p>\n

I’ve got news for you: when you’re stressed out like this, wound this tightly around the topic of something so fundamental as food… the healthiest diet in the world isn’t going to make you healthy (or happy).<\/p>\n

So where is it all coming from?<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what I think.<\/p>\n

When it comes to eating a healthy diet, there are two things going on:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. There\u2019s the \u201cknowing what to eat\u201d part \u2014 essentially the focus of every diet book in the world.<\/li>\n
  2. Then there\u2019s the \u201cgetting yourself to do it\u201d part.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    That second one is really important. The entire diet industry revolves around the fact that \u201cgetting yourself to do it\u201d is extremely hard. (It\u2019s not supposed to be, but the preponderance of addictive junk food on store shelves and at restaurants, available just about any time you want it, makes it so.)<\/p>\n

    There are ways to \u201cget yourself to do it,\u201d of course. But they require either a tremendous amount of willpower or a lot of patience, and both are in short supply these days.<\/p>\n

    So instead, the diet book industry preys on people who aren\u2019t getting the results they want, by suggesting that oh, actually we were wrong all along: it turns out you don\u2019t need to eat those bland, healthy foods. Instead, a revolutionary new (science-backed!) method lets you eat all the foods you\u2019ve always loved \u2014 or follow just one hyper-specific rule about the way you eat them \u2014 and you\u2019ll be healthy, strong, sexy, and energetic.<\/p>\n

    In other words, they promise us a shortcut.<\/p>\n

    And the more we take these shortcuts, the less natural our eating becomes.<\/p>\n

    We precisely time meals. We obsess over food combinations. We consult GI charts. We measure the pH of our pee. We meticulously count calories.<\/p>\n

    Eating becomes more stressful, not less.<\/p>\n

    Worse: when we buy into a new magic bullet diet, we convince ourselves (with the author\u2019s help, of course) that something as simple as \u201cjust eat whole foods\u201d must be wrong. That it must certainly deprive us of key nutrients. And each time we do this, attacking the simple, natural diet from a new angle, we stray further from a healthy way of eating, and the more we beat ourselves up and create warped stories about our relationship with food.<\/p>\n

    Until the whole thing causes so much stress that you give up… or, just as bad, you tough it out, but the stress itself prevents you from experiencing anything resembling health.<\/p>\n

    So what do we do instead?<\/h3>\n

    <\/p>\n

    First, we\u2019ve got to get over the belief that we don\u2019t know how to eat, or that eating healthily is complicated. It\u2019s not.<\/p>\n

    Sure, there\u2019s always new research about nutrition we can try to apply to improve our diets. But do we really need that to achieve a basic level of health?<\/p>\n

    I don\u2019t think so. Look at The Blue Zones<\/em><\/a>, by Dan Buettner, probably my favorite health book of the past decade. It\u2019s about five pockets of people around the globe whose lifestyles produce disproportionally high numbers of people who live to be 100 years old. Certainly genes play a role in longevity, too, but when you look at the lifestyle factors these pockets have in common, the patterns are clear.<\/p>\n