Foodist Read online

  This book is divided into three parts. In Part I, I aim to convince you once and for all that dieting is a fool’s mission that in the long run does more harm than good. This is not bad news, though, because I then present a more effective (and vastly more enjoyable) alternative: building rewarding habits. Habits make eating healthy even easier than eating unhealthy, since they are automatic behaviors that do not require willpower. Built into this approach are joy and pleasure, since it is impossible for new habits to form without an associated reward. If healthy eating isn’t fun, it isn’t going to work.

  Focusing on real food instead of those specialty, highly processed diet foods is the secret to making healthy food enjoyable. My recipe for how to make cauliflower taste as good as french fries has convinced hundreds of skeptics that vegetables aren’t just palatable, but can be insanely delicious. There will always be excuses to eat unhealthy foods (and these are never off-limits), but as a foodist you’ll have just as many delicious reasons to eat real, healthy foods. Not only do they make your taste buds happy, but unlike processed foods they’ll make you feel great and fit into your clothes after eating them. For dieters and nondieters alike, this is a game changer.

  Yet as simple as it sounds, eating real food is not always straightforward. After writing multiple books and hundreds of pages explaining what it means to eat healthy, Michael Pollan still has readers clamoring for more details on how to do it. When I asked him why he thinks people continue to struggle with this, he offered two reasons. “The message ‘Eat real food’ is all but drowned out by $30-plus billion in marketing messages from the food industry. Think about the supermarket: the fresh produce is silent while the cereal aisle is full of screamers. The message gets lost,” Pollan told me. We grew up learning to pay attention to nutrients, not foods, and in the process humble whole foods were virtually eliminated from our regular eating habits.

  A second issue is that eating real food requires a skill set few of us ever acquired. As a result, finding, preparing, and even identifying real food can be a challenge. “Real food is not as convenient as the other stuff, which has been engineered for ease of use, not to mention addictiveness and a long shelf life,” says Pollan. “This puts real food at a real disadvantage.”

  Part II confronts these issues head-on by giving you a blueprint to get started. This includes analyzing your own diet to understand which of your habits you should target to make the biggest impact on your health and body weight. These will be different for everyone, and I’ll take you through the process of identifying and modifying your habits in a way that is best for your lifestyle. Part II teaches you how to set up your kitchen, living, and work environments as well, so that you’re never lacking in healthy, delicious options. This section also goes beyond food choices, highlighting the peripheral but equally important habits that impact your health and weight, including eating slowly and mindfully and being active instead of sedentary.

  Last, Part II contains a detailed troubleshooting section and explores the most fundamental difference between a foodist and a chronic dieter: lifelong weight control. There is an art and science to being a foodist that includes having an intimate understanding of what it takes for your life to be awesome and also adjusting to life’s inevitable changes. Maintaining your weight requires ongoing self-experimentation as you shape and adjust your core habits to the evolving demands of your life. Part II teaches you these skills and also offers a recalibration plan in case you get stuck along the way.

  Part III walks you through the nitty-gritty of daily living, showing you how to make the best food decisions at home, at work, in restaurants, and while traveling. It includes tips for taming a family of picky eaters and how to subtly deflect attention from your healthier choices in situations where virtuous behavior isn’t welcome. These can be as straightforward as changing the language you use to describe and think about food (e.g., kale is “tasty,” not “healthy”) or dimming the lights to help you and your dining partners eat slower. Tricks like these are invaluable, because each one removes a barrier that keeps you from your goals and sets you up for long-term success. The book closes on a philosophical note, explaining why food matters and why you’ll be happier and have greater success if you care about yours.

  If you picked up this book, there’s a good chance this is not the first time you hoped a new eating plan would help you lose weight. But even if you’ve never tried to diet in the past, Foodist can help you achieve your goals. I will give you the tools you need to manage all aspects of your health for the long haul. Not only will you permanently build better habits into your daily life; you’ll also enjoy the food you eat more than you ever thought possible.

  Food shouldn’t be about sacrifice. It should enrich your life by satisfying your palate, making you fit and healthy, and bringing you closer to your family, friends, and community. For most of human existence this was the case, but in the last hundred years or so we’ve shifted to viewing food as more of a vehicle to achieve our goals rather than an end in itself. We treat food as a weight-loss tool, a source of nutrients, a sinful indulgence, or an excuse to procrastinate rather than something that has value for its own sake. I wrote Foodist to turn our attention back to real food as something essential to our happiness, as something that makes life awesome.

  TWO

  THE MYTH OF WILLPOWER

  YOU DON’T FAIL DIETS—THEY FAIL YOU

  “It is a hard matter, my fellow citizens, to argue with the belly, since it has no ears.”

  —CATO THE ELDER

  “To promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.”

  —MARK TWAIN

  I know how difficult it can be for a dieter to stop looking for a quick fix, even when our better judgment tells us that restriction diets will only help us keep weight off for a limited period of time. It’s still incredibly tempting to put on your superhero outfit with the big S for Self-Control on the chest. You’ve conquered your hunger in the past and lost that twenty-plus pounds. Why not just do it again for a couple of months? Once you hit your goal weight, then you can start with this whole healthy eating thing for maintenance.

  I know it’s tempting. But I hope this chapter will convince you that the belief that you can will yourself thin actually does you more harm than good, that instead of getting you closer to where you want to be, it just causes you to waste time that could be used to develop the habits needed to achieve your goals and stay there. Restrictive dieting and excessive workouts won’t get you ahead faster. They actually do the opposite, holding you back both physically and mentally from better health and happiness.

  THE WEAKNESS OF WILLPOWER

  Does stronger willpower lead to greater and longer-lasting weight loss? Let’s tackle this question head-on, because the answer will help us find a better path. My own story suggests that there is more to weight loss than willpower, since it wasn’t until I stopped trying to eat less that my weight came down easily. But the science shows that even the “successes”* I had on restriction diets are not typical.

  Self-control has always been easy for me, but this isn’t the case for most people, particularly when it comes to food. In their excellent book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, Roy Baumeister and John Tierney argue that humans can invoke incredible acts of will in certain circumstances,1 but concede that dieting is a special case. Baumeister calls it “the Oprah Paradox,” named for the popular TV personality and one of the most successful human beings on the planet, Oprah Winfrey. “Even people with excellent self-control can have a hard time consistently controlling their weight.”2

  Despite Winfrey’s obvious personal capabilities and limitless resources, her weight struggles have been notoriously rocky. Anyone who has repeatedly tried and failed to maintain significant weight loss can sympathize with her plight. If you are accustomed to being successful in other parts of your life, this dose of reality is particularly hard to swallow. We’v
e been able to excel in so many different endeavors—why can’t we just suck it up and get our weight under control? Indeed, Baumeister’s research shows that people with more willpower typically have better success at school, in business, and in their personal lives than people with less self-control, but the difference is much less pronounced in controlling body weight, at least in the long term. Although more willpower does help people stick to their diets and therefore lose more weight temporarily, over the course of their lives the strong-willed only weigh slightly less than the weak-willed.

  One reason for this is that willpower is dependent on blood sugar.3 Like a muscle, willpower has limited capacity, and when exercised extensively it can become depleted. Also like a muscle, the primary fuel your brain uses to exert willpower is sugar from your blood. So when your blood sugar is low (i.e., when you’re hungry, which when you’re dieting is pretty much all the time), your willpower is weaker than ever, and the only way to fix it is to eat. You can see the difficulty this can cause when you’re making food decisions. Throwing exercise into the equation—something dieters use to intentionally burn more calories (i.e., use more blood sugar)—only makes things more problematic. Baumeister and Tierney call it a nutritional catch-22: the less you eat and the more you exercise, the less likely you will be to make good food decisions down the stretch and maintain your weight loss.

  The blood-sugar issue also makes it more difficult for people who are already metabolically compromised. If you are overweight or have a history of poor eating habits, then there’s an excellent chance you have developed or are on your way to developing metabolic syndrome. Metabolic syndrome is a series of health problems that stem from poor blood-sugar control and lead to increased risk for heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes. The main symptoms are increased body fat around the midsection and insulin resistance. When people lose sensitivity to insulin, they have difficulty maintaining stable blood-sugar (glucose) levels and are subject to large blood-glucose swings in response to food intake. Since willpower is sensitive to these shifting glucose levels, metabolic syndrome makes it even harder to maintain your willpower and control your eating throughout the course of the day.

  To make matters worse, hunger and exercise are not the only ways to deplete willpower. Research by Baumeister and other scientists has shown that we only have a single stock of willpower for everything we do, and any task that requires self-control will deplete your resolve in challenges that seem otherwise unrelated. For instance, if you spend a good portion of your afternoon trying to restrain yourself from decapitating a particularly obnoxious client, you’re more likely to give in to temptation and order from your favorite pizza joint rather than stop at Whole Foods to pick up organic vegetables and fish for dinner, as you had planned. Inadequate sleep is another factor that diminishes willpower by depleting blood-sugar reserves, and sleep-deprived people are more likely to be impulsive and make bad decisions than their well-rested peers. Women experiencing PMS, as you might expect, are also depleted in the self-control department, as are most parents of small children.

  Food and eating are often the first places we slip when our wills are weakened. We tend to put our professional and family responsibilities ahead of our personal health when prioritizing our daily actions, so when our mental resources are being taxed, our food choices feel like a trivial sacrifice. One reason for this is that the consequences are not immediately apparent; they accumulate over weeks, months, and years—too slow for us to notice in our daily lives. Another reason we give in to food temptations more readily than to other desires is that subconsciously our brains are craving that hit of glucose, and we know that a handful of cookies or a bag of chips is the fastest way to make that happen. So unless you’re confident you’ll never again have to wake up a little earlier than you’d prefer or need to control yourself in any other part of your life, you probably shouldn’t rely on willpower to see you through your long-term diet goals.

  DIETING MAKES IT WORSE

  The biological reasons I just described explaining why willpower is unreliable for controlling your weight are depressing enough. But for chronic dieters, the story gets even sadder. Although all of us are subject to willpower lapses as a result of blood-sugar depletion, dieters are a special group whose restrictive goals make them more likely than nondieters to dramatically overdo it in the face of culinary temptations. To put it bluntly, dieting makes it worse.

  Unlike normal eaters, dieters give themselves a daily allowance for calories (or carbs, or fat—pick your poison), below which they are virtuous and above which they have failed (at least for the day). The problem is that this self-imposed boundary gives rise to a phenomenon that scientists refer to as counterregulatory eating, also known as the “what-the-hell effect.” Researchers have shown that once dieters cross the allowance they have set for themselves, they chock up the day as a failure and rationalize any additional overindulgence with, “Oh what the hell. I’ve already screwed up the day. I might as well enjoy it now.” The problem is that once dieters reach this point, they stop paying attention and ultimately eat far more than nondieters would in the same situation. Even more dangerous is the fact that, although dieters know they didn’t stick to their goals for the day, most are completely clueless about how much they actually consumed during the lapse. They don’t realize that these episodes can undo days and even weeks of restricted eating, ultimately causing weight gain rather than loss.

  The reason dieters are prone to this behavior is that restricted eating teaches you to ignore your internal satiety cues, the biological signals that tell us if we are hungry or full. For example, if you are hungry, but the diet you are following says you can’t eat for another two hours, you force yourself to ignore the pangs and power through. Not only does this deplete your willpower and make it more likely you’ll break your diet later in the day; it also teaches your brain not to listen to your body. This is a double-edged sword, however, because it doesn’t just train you to ignore hunger. Not paying attention to satiety signals also means you can’t tell when you’re full, which can cause you to eat far more than your body actually desires.

  Without internal guidance cues, dieters depend more on external signals for when to start and stop eating. Relying on external eating cues means you are more likely to eat just because food is available and finish everything on your plate regardless of its size or your hunger level. You’re also more likely to eat until you’ve polished off an entire bag of chips, the episode of Breaking Bad you’re watching ends, or it is physically impossible to shove another bite down your throat without exploding. Needless to say, this sort of behavior is not a recipe for long-term weight control.

  Ignoring internal satiety cues has other implications as well. With today’s information overload and the disintegration of traditional food cultures that have historically dictated when, where, and how much is appropriate to eat, we are bombarded with cues that trigger us to want to consume more food more often. Food packages have been transformed into easily transportable containers meant for eating on the go. Supersizing and buffets are considered good deals, not unbridled gluttony. TV commercials encourage us to embrace a “fourth meal,” hoping we won’t notice the hundreds of extra calories per day. Snacking at your desk or in front of the TV isn’t just normal; it’s expected. This environment is hard for even nondieters to navigate without experiencing significant weight gain. But for dieters, who have trouble telling when they’re hungry and when they’re full, all these eating triggers add an extra level of difficulty.

  Resisting “eat now” and “eat more” triggers all day long creates more opportunities for our willpower to break down and increases the likelihood that we’ll overeat. Moreover, even if we could rely on our internal satiety cues, since we’re dieting our bodies would likely be telling us that we are in fact hungry and that popcorn is sounding pretty darn good about now. When every food choice you confront becomes a difficult decision, your willpower is constantly being depleted, eve
n during choices that nondieters wouldn’t think twice about. As a result, dieting makes weight loss even harder than it needs to be.

  IF YOU’VE GOT IT, DON’T USE IT

  You might be wondering at this point if weight loss is even possible. If we need to eat less to lose weight, but eating less makes weight loss impossible, how in the name of skinny jeans are we supposed to drop those extra pounds?

  The answer may at first seem counterintuitive. Since willpower cannot be relied upon to help us make the right food choices, our best bet is to not use it. At least not constantly, the way dieters try to. Baumeister and Tierney explain: “We’ve said that willpower is humans’ greatest strength, but the best strategy is not to rely on it in all situations. Save it for emergencies.”4 This is their conclusion after Baumeister and others completed a study that combined the results of many experiments (a meta-analysis) that measured willpower. The surprising finding was that people who had the highest measures of self-control seemed to use it the least. Instead, they focused their efforts on establishing automatic behaviors, or habits, ultimately reducing their need for effortful self-control.5

  9 Surefire Ways to Sabotage Your Weight Loss

  1. Rely on willpower

  Even if you’re one of those people with an iron will, no one can hold out forever. Willpower is notoriously unreliable, and if you’re ever sleepy, hungry, tipsy, grumpy, sad, happy, lazy, or all of the above, your weakness will eventually win.

  2. Forget the difference between temporary and permanent

  Is your goal to fit into a size 4? Almost anyone can get there by following a strict enough diet and workout regimen for a set amount of time. The question is, how long do you want to stay there? If your goals are intended to be permanent, your dietary and fitness modifications need to be as well.