Food – Opening Update

I’m writing this on the first day of the fourth month in my year-long foundations project.¹ The focus for this month is on food. See here for my previous months focusing on fitness, productivity and money.

What we eat is a central foundation in life. Food provides the energy we use to live. It is a bond with our friends and family. It’s a connection to our culture. And it’s a source of enjoyment and pleasure.

Still, for many of us, our foundation of food is problematic. Untethered from good health and communal traditions, our eating behaviors are making us sick and lonely. We don’t have time to cook and sit together for meals, and at the same time, obesity rates have skyrocketed.

Fixing this problem, even in one’s own life, isn’t easy. Just as it is evident we don’t eat healthy on the whole, it is just as evident that the failure to eat healthy isn’t any individual’s “fault.” Our food environment has changed dramatically, and unconscious hormonal and neural signals that served our ancestors well now makes us sick.

My Food History

My own relationship with food is atypical. I had severe allergies to nuts and dairy as a child. Fortunately, I outgrew the dairy allergy, but it meant that my childhood was always centered around caution and avoidance of foods that were utterly normal to other people. I rarely had candy at Halloween, for instance, because few treats were safe. I was often the kid who brought a separate snack to a party because I didn’t want to get sick.

As a teenager, I was persuaded that eating a vegetarian diet was the path to health. I read a few books, notably, The China Study, which made the argument that dropping animal products was a reliable path to healthy eating. Perhaps because of my early childhood experiences with food avoidance, I didn’t find it difficult to stick to long-term.

I’m more doubtful of the health benefits of veganism than I was as a teenager, but I still think they have a valid argument for both ethical and environmental reasons. Today, I eat fish, eggs and dairy, and I try not to be overly paranoid about other animal products in my food, consumed in small amounts—the way I see it, some degree of vegetarianism is probably better on the whole, but it’s easy go overboard and be annoying to others regarding dietary restrictions.

I wouldn’t advocate for anyone to start eating as I do unless they are already interested in it. Most people fail to sustain extreme dietary restrictions, and it’s not at all clear that meat ought to be the first thing to drop if you are simply trying to improve the health quality of your diet. Still, I tend to think a whole-food pescatarian diet is pretty healthy, so given that this is already the status quo for me, I don’t feel compelled to make a shift to start eating more meat.

Food Falters

Despite what may seem to many to be an already fairly restrictive diet, I can’t say in all honesty that my eating patterns are maximally healthy. It’s still possible to overeat, and plenty of junk food is totally vegan.

When I was in my early twenties, I could eat whatever I wanted without gaining any weight. Indeed, since I was often lifting weights, trying to gain weight was more frequently my challenge—I had to set an intention to try to put on pounds.

But, as I reached my late twenties, this was no longer true. Absent any special effort, I started to gain weight. At my peak, I weighed at least 20 lbs. above my typical college-aged weight and probably 15 lbs. above my ideal weight.

The reasons I gained weight were probably the same as everyone: I ate too much. I ate out frequently. Work and parenting pressures meant less sleep and more stress. I didn’t exercise with the same vigor as my twenty-year-old self.

Refocusing on Health

When I began working on my fitness foundation three months ago, I was naturally drawn to getting a head start on the reading for nutrition, too.

Owing to the confusion surrounding nutritional advice, and my own history of being overly swayed by a somewhat ideological author’s advice for eating, I wanted to stick more to the science—keeping my focus on higher quality books as rated by independent reviewers, as well as following sources that scrutinize a lot of the scientific details behind dietary guidance.

This background reading, in combination with my renewed exercise habits, has led to a general improvement in my eating patterns. I’ve now lost about 10 lbs. from my peak weight, even though restricting my food intake wasn’t a priority.

Some of the things I strived for in the past few months that helped with this goal include:

• Eating more fruits and vegetables.
• Switching refined carbohydrates for whole grains when possible.
• Packing a lunch for work rather than eating out.
• Eating a big breakfast.
• Controlling portions when healthy options aren’t available.
• Not snacking after dinner has finished.

These recommendations, which came up in my readings, seem to have worked well without any explicit aim to restrict calories. My case is probably atypical, but I was pleased to see that simply trying to eat healthier foods and managing my appetite seemed to be enough to lose some weight, along with the significant increase in my physical activity since the first month of this project.

Plans for the Month Ahead

Since I’ve already made many of the shifts I had initially planned to eat healthier, my focus for this month is largely trying to formalize the changes I am already doing informally.

In particular, I think the habits I want to sustain long-term are less like my earlier forays into highly restrictive eating patterns, but more about planning and preparation. The things I want to ensure I do this month include:

• Buy enough healthy food at the grocery store, so it’s always available.
• Make sure I have healthy options for packing lunches.
• Have healthy options for snacking/desserts.

My breakfasts, lunches and snacks tend to be fairly independent, so I have the most control over those. But I eat dinners with my family, and I usually have a lunch or two per week with people I work with. Similarly, there are often events, family gatherings, vacations and other situations where having complete control over what I eat is unrealistic.

Therefore, for those situations less under my control, the behaviors I want to cultivate are:

• Choose healthier options when possible.
• Opt for reasonable portion sizes when healthy options aren’t available.
• Plan ahead to eat healthy food before going to a place where only unhealthy options are available, so portion control becomes easier to attain.

These are guidelines, not hard rules. I think if I can be 80-90% successful with them, the moments where I indulge won’t matter so much. My goal isn’t to restrict myself from enjoying food I really do want, but to make it so such indulgences don’t detract from an overall healthy eating pattern.

Additionally, I am taking the step of tracking what I eat for the month. This step is a bit a tedious, especially given that I’m not really concerned about my dietary quality at the moment. However, since I have this month to focus on food, I figured it would give me some insight into my eating patterns that might be useful when I’m no longer focusing on food, specifically.

Non-Nutritional Goals for Eating Better

At this point, it may sound like I’m trying to become a health-obsessed dieting weirdo. And I admit, this is a real concern. While it’s pretty clear the standard Western diet is incredibly unhealthy, it’s also pretty clear that an obsession with healthy eating is probably not great for your mental health.

My ultimate goal for the month is to establish enough strong habits and default options that thinking about healthy eating isn’t an issue—it’s just what I do unthinkingly in most situations. But I also want to recognize those situations where health isn’t my primary goal when eating. Noticing how my plans interfere with these non-nutritional goals is also important, because I want to make my habits sustainable, and I want to eat delicious food, too.

I want to be able to enjoy family gatherings, eat at restaurants and on vacation, enjoy a wide variety of delicious foods and not feel hungry throughout the day. I’ll be keeping an eye on these factors as well, because a maximally healthy diet that means eating monotonous, bland meals in isolation is something I neither want nor can sustain.

Want to Improve Your Foundation for This Month?

I’m going into a lot more detail on the lessons I’m gathering from my research in the Foundations course. But anyone who wants to improve how they eat is welcome to join me, informally, for this month’s project.

The habit we’re cultivating this month is flexible food planning. This simply means taking steps to shape your food environment, from buying healthier food at the grocery store to planning healthier meals. If you’re really serious about changing your diet, you’re also welcome to go all the way to fully planning your meals a week in advance and tracking your calories, but this additional step is not necessary for most people to make improvements. Even little things like dropping sugary drinks or adding more vegetables to your plate are still worth doing.

At the end of the month, I’ll share notes from the books I read, as well as provide an update of how my month focused on food went.

1. This post was written October 1st, 2024. As a reminder, for my own foundations project, I am working three months ahead of these articles and the Foundations course.