Before I leave the topic of nutrition (for now) and move on to exercise, I’d like to expand on something I said in Nutrition and Health: Why knowledge is not enough. I talked there about how we sometimes manage our moods with food. Why does this even work?
Well, it seems we are wired to experience the consumption of sweet and fatty things as a positive. Mothers’ milk is sweet and fatty, and any human who doesn’t like its taste is unlikely to survive to have descendants. As a very small child, we repeat a process over and over: we are hungry. We get distressed. We cry out. Our distress is relieved when something sweet and fatty goes in our mouths. So in our formative years, when we are laying the foundations of our emotional life, we make a powerful association: Sweet and fatty things in our mouths relieve distress.
photo credit: Marcus Vegas
The problem is, unlike our ancestors, we don’t have to work hard in order to obtain sweet and fatty things. We can walk into any of thousands of shops in a moderate-sized city and get them quickly and with a minimum of effort. Not only that, but our energy output in our daily lives is much lower than that of our ancestors (as I’ll discuss again when I talk about exercise).
The result is, we take in more energy than we need, and when we do that, it gets stored as fat. Now, fat is great when you’re living in a situation where you may need to run away from something dangerous for an extended period, or walk for days to get to new hunting grounds, or keep warm without much shelter, or survive periods when little food is available, but in the postindustrial west we don’t often encounter those situations any more. All body fat does now is increase our risk of heart disease and stroke.
We also have a contradiction at the heart of our culture. On the one hand, fattening foods are widely and cheaply available and heavily marketed as desirable. On the other hand, the body image portrayed as an ideal – often in that very same marketing – is unrealistically (even unhealthily) thin, especially for women. (There was controversy in New Zealand last year when a burger chain used bikini-clad models in its advertisements. Most of it centred around the perceived sexism, exploitation and objectification, and rightly so, but what struck me was that these women looked like they had never eaten a burger in their lives, and in fact hadn’t had a square meal in some time.)
Because we’re social creatures who are influenced by group norms, what this sets up is an inner contradiction between a desire to eat the sweet and fatty foods and a desire to look like people who aren’t doing that. Hence, guilt. Hence, liposuction.
Hence, also, the startling figure that in the US, people are spending more billions of dollars on diet products than the US Government spends on health, education and welfare combined, despite the fact that 95% of people who use these products regain any weight they lose and in fact often end up heavier.
O Noes! photo credit: Janet 59
There’s a better way. (I mean, come on, there has to be a better way.) Basically, it boils down to changing your relationship with food, resolving the internal contradiction, and choosing your day-by-day, moment-by-moment behaviour out of a strong positive sense of self rather than under the pressure of marketing, social expectations and your own transitory moods.
I have plans to produce a CD specifically for food issues, which I’ll announce here in the blog when it’s ready (so make sure you subscribe if you don’t want to miss it). In the meantime, if you’re in the situation that so many people are in – wanting to have a healthy body but struggling with your food habits – what you can do to get started is this:
- Think about your eating and recognize that a pattern of guilt, yo-yo dieting, and more guilt isn’t working so well. Never has in the past, never will in the future.
- Cultivate alternative ways to manage your moods.
- Learn about healthy ways of eating, if you don’t already know. Knowledge by itself isn’t enough – just having a map won’t get you to the other side of town (or even the other side of the street). But to go where you haven’t been before, a map is very helpful.
- Make a plan and set some realistic goals for moving your eating in a healthy direction.
- Use my free Attain Your Goals recording to help you move towards those goals.
That doesn’t directly address the internal contradiction or the strong sense of self, which is why I’ll be producing the CD. But it’s a start in the right direction, and will introduce you to some important resources to help you begin a journey to long-term healthy eating.
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