The “Right Way” to Eat
I used to be a very black and white thinker. I think most humans tend to be black and white thinkers. We like to define, organize, and label everything from how to load the dishwasher to our belief in a higher power. We like answers and we like to have the “right” answers. This is certainly true when it comes to what, when, and how to eat. I titled this post The Right Way to Eat to draw you in because you likely want to know, what is the right way to eat?? Please someone just tell me! While you may have a solid argument about the right way to organize the dishwasher (keyword-organize!), the right way to eat–and most of life’s other big questions–are still up for debate, despite there being 1,500,000,000 answers when you do a Google search! In terms of the right way to eat, I would say–It depends.
Every person’s body, mind, genetics, cultural traditions, family dynamics, current circumstances, and past life experiences are different. For a complex combination of these factors, what works for one person may not work for another. So approach it with curiosity instead of desperation or rigid, black and white diet culture thinking. Change is not linear. It is often a two steps forward, one step back process. Making improvements in ourselves requires patience and self forgiveness. You will not be perfect. Accepting that you will not be perfect is a great place to start.
If you try something and it isn’t working for you mentally, emotionally, or physically then regroup. Do some research. Read a book. Talk to a doctor, a specialist, or a therapist. Try something else. Maybe you didn’t fail. Maybe that way just wasn’t the best fit for you. Also, if you are going through a major life stressor (moving, changing jobs, divorce, new baby, death of a loved one, etc) it may not be a realistic time to make a change. Once things settle down, you can revisit evaluating your life and deciding how you want to improve.
1—Open Your Mind
It is important to have an honest conversation with yourself. Take stock, identify the elephant in the room and figure out where you are right now in terms of your emotional/mental relationship with food, your weight, your health, your life circumstances. Have a doctor run your lab work and take an honest look at how your lifestyle is affecting your health (weight, heart health, aches and pains, immune health, mental health, glucose levels/HbA1c, fitness level). Try to do this objectively, like a scientist looking over all the research data. Don’t berate yourself or ruminate on regrets. It is what it is. You are where you are. If you’ve ever interacted with a child, you may have learned that yelling at them and putting them down for a mistake or failure usually just creates more discouragement and puts a wedge in your relationship with them. They may withdraw, shut down, act out, rebel, give up trying. No matter how old you are, you will probably react the same way. If you shame yourself, you will probably withdraw, shut down, act out, rebel, give up trying. This is why diets don’t work. They are fueled by shame and shame does not usually create positive change.
If you are overweight and/or dealing with health issues, determine why. Are you using food to cope? Or do you just enjoy food and overeat on the regular? Are your food choices poor? It is a good idea to deep dive into answering these questions. Discuss them with a therapist, support person, or journal your answers. Whatever the root cause, be open to miracles. Simple shifts can lead to massive improvements. Open your mind to new ideas. Knowledge is power and your mind, your desires, your motivations can change as you feed your brain high quality information that resonates with you. It is less about will power and more about changing your perspective. Over the years, I have found that sometimes one little tidbit that hits me in just the right way, at just the right moment, can create a shift that changes my desires, cravings, goals, the trajectory of my path. We tend to feel easily overwhelmed when it comes to making changes, especially with our eating. But take a deeeeep breath. Sometimes a little shift in your thinking can change your life.
On a recent trip, I was standing on a corner in 100 degree heat waiting for several members of our group to take turns at the ATM. The air was stagnant and stifling. We had been walking for some time with little relief and a river of sweat was winding a path down my back. It dawned on me to step a few feet to the right, a little further around the corner where an alleyway cut to the left. Those three steps shifted me into a breeze that swept and curved around my body, instantly turning the air from suffocating to relieving and taking the edge off the heat.
Again, we often assume that a change will require massive shifts in our thinking, habits, personalities. While we consciously want these changes, I think there is an immediate gut response to this belief that keeps us from changing because we know, at a deep level, that such a massive shift in who we are is impossible. But what if who you are is alright and the changes you wish for only require a slight shift in the way you are seeing and processing things? What if you don’t have to undergo a personality-ectomy to go from where you are now to where you want to be? What if you just need to shift a few feet around the corner and you can go from anguish to ease?
Once you figure out where you are starting, you can make some decisions about where you want to go. Once you decide what changes you want to make, you can decide how to go about it. Along the way, if what you decided to do isn’t working, change direction. One of my favorite quotes is by Neale Donald Walsh:
“Observe what works and do what works.”
But before you dive into making any changes in your diet—
2—Determine if you are an emotional eater or have disordered eating
Food is fuel for our bodies. It provides us with energy and the nutrients our bodies need to grow new cells, repair, reproduce, and fight infections. Food gives us the energy and nutrients we need to work, play, laugh, cry, think. In terms of weight and physical health, that is the end of the story. That said, food is also an integral part of our emotional life experience. Eating something sweet and fatty is one of our very first sensory experiences after we are born and it is usually coupled with being cuddled and comforted. Beyond that, food is used throughout our lives as a reward and it accompanies most emotionally charged, major life events, whether they be celebrations or moments of grieving (birthdays, holidays, weddings, funerals). Family dinners can be enough to cause disordered eating, whether it’s because a parent guilted you about what/how much you were eating, made you eat more than your body needed, you had five siblings you were competing with for food, or because you observed disordered eating in a family member.
It’s only been 100-ish years that we’ve had easy access to plentiful food. Before that, for thousands of years, food was hard earned and often scarce. This is new territory for humanity, knowing how to deal with more food than we need. This is a first world problem in a world where there are still many third world countries! On top of that, food manufactures have created foods that are meant to be so irresistible that they are guaranteed we will come back for more, ensuring their success with little or no regard for our well-being. In fact, they are literally counting on us to be gluttons and make poor choices.
No wonder food is a complicated issue. Considering all these circumstances, it’s a miracle that not everyone has disordered eating. If you have any question as to whether or not you have disordered eating, it is vital that you figure it out. If you eat emotionally or have an eating disorder, prioritize dealing with it. Trying to lose weight before you deal with disordered eating is “putting the cart before the horse” and will, most likely, just lead to more emotional/disordered eating, turmoil, and ultimately will frustrate efforts to lose weight and get physically healthy. I can not emphasize this enough. Do the work. You may discover that if you do the emotional/mental work, the weight loss will evolve naturally in the process. Consult with your doctor and/or a therapist to determine if you have an eating disorder and read my blog post about what helped me break free from disordered eating.
3—The Tips
First, what is working for us is evolving day by day, so the blog posts will continue to evolve accordingly. Second, I started to attempt to describe, in this blog post, detailed observations about what is working for us. I quickly realized that would not be possible. So, below I will summarize what has been working for us and provide links to other posts, as I write them, that will go into detail on each point. I will write a blog post about each point to explain what I mean, cite the sources we’re studying, and illustrate what this looks like in our daily life. Third, there is an overabundance of conflicting information about the “right way” to eat. Take it all with a (pun intended) grain of salt. If you find yourself getting obsessive about anything, see that as a red flag and take a step back. Obsessive diet practices often lead to wide pendulum swings in the opposite direction. That said, here are some general tips for success with healthy eating—
Reduce Refined Sugar
Eliminate Processed Foods and Soda
Increase Healthy Fats
Eat Clean
Eat Intuitively (which for me includes eating a clean dessert everyday and not focusing on weight loss)
Improve Gut Health
Meditate
Reduce Cortisol/Stress
Balance Hormones
Improve Sleep
Exercise Moderately
Find a Support Person and a Coach
Include high quality supplements with advice from a health minded practitioner, based on your individualized needs
4—Balancing Act
We currently live in a bipolar culture. On one hand, there is the culture of acceptance. Do what you want, accept how you are, accept others the way they are–it’s all good. When it comes to weight, it’s a tricky balance. I agree that body shaming ourselves or others is counterproductive and that hinging your happiness on being a certain weight is an exercise in frustration. Delaying your inner contentedness until your body looks the way you want it to or the scale displays a certain number may end up meaning that you spend your life feeling indefinitely discontent. I agree that part of the answer to losing weight is accepting where we are now and finding ways to be at peace in the present moment. For some people, that is the whole answer! Simply ending the struggle, can end the struggle, whether that means being content with the way things are or naturally evolving into what you are seeking because you are content.
On the other hand, there is the reality that if you are overweight, life is harder. It is harder to find clothes that fit, harder to squeeze into an airplane seat, harder to move through the world with ease, harder to exercise, participate in sports, chase your children, run up the stairs, give birth, have sex, sleep, breathe. The reality is that if you are overweight, you will likely have to deal with some health conditions that would otherwise have been avoidable. The reality is that if you want these things to be easier, you may need to lose some weight.
This is the balance: being kind to yourself and working to improve; accepting where you are and moving in the direction you want to go; listening to your innate wisdom and understanding that you will not be perfect; leaning into eating healthy and understanding that “eating right” is not black and white. This is a journey. The balance is in heading the direction you want to go and being content along the way. Ideally we are balancing both, but you may find that in some moments you need to focus on one or the other. If you are very unbalanced at the present, you may feel some growing pains as you evolve towards balance. And what feels balanced today may be different than what feels balanced as you move towards better and better habits and perspectives. One of the keys to this balance is gratitude. Focusing on what is good in your life right now, even if it just that you are able to breathe, see, smell, smile will bring you into the present moment and cultivate contentment. Contentment is like a seed. It can start with the smallest, seemingly insignificant thing. But if you pay attention to it and nurture it every single day, it can grow into a massive shade tree that can provide you with relief from the elements, protection from life’s harsh realities.
5—Get on the EAC
There is a special feeling that can be experienced when skills, knowledge, awareness, and practice click. Athletes call it being in the zone, artists call it flow, Austin Powers calls it mojo (Stephen’s example), and Crush (from Finding Nemo) called it getting on the EAC (the East Australian Current). It’s a feeling of things coming together in a way that feels easy, natural, accelerated, inspired, balanced. Even people who are very skilled—elite athletes, professional musicians, expert surfing turtles—don’t constantly live in this state. And when they do, it is because they have spent hours, years, decades practicing their skill. The same goes for learning to eat in a healthy, balanced way. Sure, some people seem to be naturally gifted with the ability to eat in a healthy, balanced way just like some people are naturally gifted at sports or music. But we are not all such naturals and it doesn’t help that the modern world has made it harder to listen to our intuition or make good choices even when we know better.
If you want to learn to play a sport or a musical instrument, it requires study and practice. With practice, even if you are not a natural, you can become proficient and you might even experience being in the zone or feeling the flow. The same goes for eating. Through acquiring the skills, knowledge, and awareness and then practicing them in your daily life, it will get easier and more natural. Your progress will accelerate, you will feel inspiring moments of balance. It is not a black and white, right or wrong, linear process. You will not feel inspired or balanced at first. Have you ever started exercising after getting out of shape? Painful. Have you ever listened to a beginner play the violin? Excruciating, for both the player and the listener! But give it time, patience, and persistence. Before you know it, you’re riding the EAC.
6—Catalysts
In a chemical reaction, you can add an ingredient that makes the reaction go faster. It is called a catalyst. Just so, there are ways to accelerate progress when you are learning a skill. Athletes and musicians have drills and warm ups. They have coaches and teachers to help accelerate their progress. Learning to eat healthy is a skill. We hope this blog will be a catalyst to accelerate your ability to eat in a way that clicks for you and elevates your quality of life, so subscribe to stay in the loop as we continue to share what is working for us. There are many other drills, warm-ups, coaches, and teachers that can be catalysts to accelerate your progress. Check out our links and A Few of our Favorite Things for more suggestions. And remember—
If there is one thing the last several years have taught me, it’s that life is about second chances. Every day, every moment, every interaction, every breath is an opportunity to begin again.