Why is Eating Right so Hard?
A few weeks ago I sent out a survey, asking you to share your biggest frustrations, fears, and challenges when it comes to being healthy.
Over 1000 people responded, and what came back…
…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’t shake.
So many people think they’re doing it wrong.
They’re eating plant-based, whole foods, maybe 85 or 90 percent of time (some much more than that)… and they can’t get over how much they’re screwing up, what nutrients they’re surely missing out on, and how hard it all is.
They’re beating themselves up, citing self-sabotage, indecision, lack of confidence, lack of commitment, and even FOMO.
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).
So where is it all coming from?
Here’s what I think.
When it comes to eating a healthy diet, there are two things going on:
- There’s the “knowing what to eat” part — essentially the focus of every diet book in the world.
- Then there’s the “getting yourself to do it” part.
That second one is really important. The entire diet industry revolves around the fact that “getting yourself to do it” is extremely hard. (It’s 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.)
There are ways to “get yourself to do it,” of course. But they require either a tremendous amount of willpower or a lot of patience, and both are in short supply these days.
So instead, the diet book industry preys on people who aren’t getting the results they want, by suggesting that oh, actually we were wrong all along: it turns out you don’t need to eat those bland, healthy foods. Instead, a revolutionary new (science-backed!) method lets you eat all the foods you’ve always loved — or follow just one hyper-specific rule about the way you eat them — and you’ll be healthy, strong, sexy, and energetic.
In other words, they promise us a shortcut.
And the more we take these shortcuts, the less natural our eating becomes.
We precisely time meals. We obsess over food combinations. We consult GI charts. We measure the pH of our pee. We meticulously count calories.
Eating becomes more stressful, not less.
Worse: when we buy into a new magic bullet diet, we convince ourselves (with the author’s help, of course) that something as simple as “just eat whole foods” 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.
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.