2.3 Sort out your diet

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

I (Euan) have a problem with eating crisps.

Potato chips if you come from the other side of the Atlantic. I’m a bit of a crispaholic. I’m always wanting to eat more. Even though I am slim I always feel like my weight is wanting to balloon upwards and my natural tendency is for it to go north. It is a daily effort to balance my eating with my exercise and maintain a steady weight but it has become easier as I’ve adjusted my lifestyle.

Only when I recognized the problems of living in a world that is trying to get me to eat did I wrestle it under control. That doesn’t make it easy but if you can build good habits and strategies then it is possible to enjoy your food without the problems of weight gain.

Calories: the long view

Homo sapiens, what we think of as modern humans, have been around for 150,000 years but earlier species that have recognizable human traits stretch back hundreds of thousands of years before that. For almost our entire history we have struggled to feed ourselves. Approximately 11,000 years ago we moved away from being foragers, hunter-gatherers, and turned to methods of agriculture for our food. We have been wildly successful.

We now produce enough food to feed over 7 billion people.

Unfortunately, as you know, it is not equally distributed and some parts of the world die through starvation and malnutrition while others eat themselves to obesity. Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens, noted that "modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history."

That’s clearly hyperbole, and Harari is commenting more on issues around climate change, food safety and other big topics, but there is an important underlying point for us as well.

For a significant number of people, cheap, industrialized food has given us access to calories in a way that was unimaginable to previous generations. The modern food industry has made us calorie-rich beyond the dreams of avarice. And it has given us access to refined food that has profound implications for our health.

It is only in the past 100 years, from the start of the twentieth century, that obesity has become a widespread problem in the population. In our history as humans it is just the merest blink of an eye, but it has quickly established itself as the single biggest risk to our health and well-being.

“It is easier to change a man's religion than to change his diet.”

Margaret Mead

Habits and making the changes

Again, like so many things, much of your diet is born of habit.

You sit in front of a computer and it is highly likely that you already have a routine that involves snacking. If you are the type of writer who likes to frequent cafés, then it is entirely possible that you are consuming considerable quantities of refined sugar through your latte or the pastry goodies on offer. Most of the time, in most people, I would be willing to wager that you order the same thing time in and time out.

One of the concerns of people who are thinking about reducing sugary treats, takeaway meals, and alcohol in their life is that somehow this will result in a paler version of their existence. That these indulgences are what gives life depth and richness.

Somehow, they worry that life isn't worth living without these, often acknowledged, vices. I hear that from smokers a lot.

In the cases of most people who do cut down, who might become abstinent from some or all of these, my experience is that isn't the case. In fact, it is often quite the contrary.

The well-being boost that you get from leveling out your eating habits, from losing a few pounds and feeling lighter on your toes, and from cutting back on an obvious mood depressant, very rarely results in people feeling worse. They always feel better.

Yes, the initial change of habit is hard. It is disruptive. The neural pathways we all have that drive our habits do not like change. That initial period of breaking down a habit, of making lasting changes to our lifestyle, often feels extraordinarily uncomfortable. But, no matter how hard it is, you don't meet many people who make these kind of changes and regret it.

“By attending Overeaters Anonymous for over 5 years, weighing and measuring my food, and giving up added sugars and refined flour, I have maintained a weight loss of 130 pounds.”

Anon, The Healthy Writer survey

Weight-loss diets in general

There are problems with weight-loss diets. They can be helpful to shift significant amounts of weight, but the evidence for them does not make particularly pretty reading.

If you are the type of person who has spent their life going on and off diets of various types, then you need to be aware of some of the evidence around ‘yo-yo’ dieting. The biggest worry is that they don’t help people keep the weight off and at some point the pounds go back on again.

The problem is that yo-yo dieting can make you fatter in the long term.

There is fairly good evidence that the effect of restricting calories in intense bursts and then returning to a normal diet results in some metabolic shifts. Our body reacts to this state of semi-starvation by slowing down our metabolism and then layering on as much fat as possible to give us a reserve for the bad times ahead. It is a perfectly logical survival reaction that has worked brilliantly for almost our whole evolution except for the last 100 years for those of us living in calorie-rich environments. There are systematic reviews and many studies that show similar findings.

If you want to lose weight you should not lose hope. But you do need a different strategy.

Rather than adopting a time-limited change you need to make changes that you can sustain. Most people can’t stick to extreme weight-loss diets. If you want control of your weight in the long term, your actions need to reflect that. It’s not reasonable to go on a faddy diet for a few weeks and expect instant results.

"Cakes are healthy too, you just eat a small slice."

Mary Berry, British baker

A healthy approach to your diet

This is where it gets more controversial.

At present the received wisdom is that fats are bad and you should do everything in your power to cut back on them. Amongst other things it has fueled a drive to put just about everyone onto statins to reduce the risk of heart attacks and strokes. People get very hung up on their cholesterol levels which are, at best, a proxy marker for whether you have a heart attack or stroke, and whether you live or die.

There has been some pushback on this whole approach, particularly when low fat foods are marketed aggressively and people end up substituting sugar into their diet. Sugar has found its way into a staggering amount of our food, including ready meals and savory snacks.

One thing is agreed by just about everyone. There is far too much sugar in our diet. And that has led some people back to diets that are high in fat.

The Mediterranean diet has had quite a bit of attention, as it seems to be cardio-protective. It has found its most recent advocates in a book, The Pioppi Diet, by Aseem Malhotra and Donal O’Neill. Pioppi is a small village in southern Italy lying on the Mediterranean coast. If you think of Italy’s boot shape, Pioppi lies on the lower shin area. The people there are particularly long-lived and healthy. The Mediterranean diet stems from the agricultural roots of these communities. These are places where fruit accompanies every meal. Lunch and the evening meal consist mostly of vegetables. That’s the bit that most people forget and instead focus on the fats.

The Mediterranean diet is high in unsaturated fats but this comes from olive oil (generally raw and not cooked) and fish. The health benefits of fish oils are established and fish makes an ideal replacement for red meat, which is almost completely absent from the diet.

There may be important other factors in the Mediterranean diet that are not all directly about the food such as modest portion sizes, socializing at mealtimes, and the seasonality of the food. It is complicated but the evidence is good: the results of the PREDIMED (Prevención con Dieta Mediterránea) trial showed remarkable reductions in heart attacks and strokes.

If you wanted to make a long-term shift in your eating, the Mediterranean diet is an attractive target.

"Part of being healthy means determining the diet that actually helps you be healthy. Not the diet that fits with your ideology, or your personal causes, or even your partner's diet

Think about what foods you're feeding your body. What makes your body feel good? I am not talking about the foods that your mouth finds tasty … I'm talking about the foods that your body feels nurtured by."

Leah Cutter, The Healthy Professional Writer

Some strategies to control your diet and manage snacking

This will vary enormously from person to person. There is no one answer, no single solution.

One of the most important initial steps is to realize what you are doing and analyze the daily actions of eating to establish what you do and often why you do it.

Work out how your habits are constructed. What are your triggers?

Do you reward yourself with a sugary treat when you hit 1000 words? Do you snack because you get to a sticky bit of the story and you're thinking?

Are you getting bored and losing concentration? Do you habitually reach for a biscuit when you make a cup of tea or coffee, or grab another can of diet soda every writing break? Are thoughts of food just another form of procrastination or, as Steven Pressfield might suggest, Resistance.

Look at your meals

Did you have enough breakfast? Did you have any for that matter? Do you avoid breakfast and then turn up at your favorite coffee shop for a writing session and immediately eat a fatty sugary pastry? There’s an easy win there, I’d suggest.

Are you hungry or are you actually thirsty?

Prepare in advance, especially if you are about to hit deadlines

Most people have freezers and you can batch cook days or weeks ahead of time so that you’ll always have a healthy option to eat readily available.

Slow cookers can allow food to be prepared on the day (or the previous night) but without dragging you away from your writing desk at fixed times.

Watch your portion control

Using an app that monitors calories, even just for a few days, can be a useful way to reset your understanding of what a normal portion size should look like. Spoiler: it is disappointingly small.

Avoid sugary treats as writing rewards

Try to stick to nuts, seeds, fruit and vegetables. They might need some pre-preparation but you can make that part of your pre-flight writing routine.

Try chewing gum (sugar-free, of course)

Sometimes I clean my teeth in the afternoon when I am really craving something sweet and sugary.

Try not to eat on automatic pilot

Any time you catch yourself eating, you need to ask yourself whether you are having this because you are genuinely hungry and it is time to eat or whether you are doing it purely because that is what you always do. Put a sign on your fridge (or even inside) that will make you think before eating.

Don’t drink calories

Sodas and fizzy drinks are a terrible idea but you may need to watch the vanilla lattes. Fruit juices and smoothies can be extraordinarily calorie-dense. Eat the fruit and veg instead and get the fiber too.

Learn to cook some basic dishes

Learn to cook a few simple meals and use them in rotation. If it keeps you out of the takeaway or stops you throwing a ready meal in the microwave, it can make a huge difference to your diet.

Retrain your palate

One of the most challenging things about sugar is that it tastes fabulous. Add in a decent amount of fat, preferably some salt as well, and you have the most scrumptious treats available.

There is nothing wrong with indulging, enjoying our food, luxuriating in fabulously rich and sumptuous food on an occasional basis. Do it every day, do it on automatic pilot, do it without really thinking and you will almost certainly end up over-consuming.

"Make the meal the occasion, don't eat at your desk or writing place. Set the table, turn off or mute tech, no TV dinners. Don't wolf down your food, eat mindfully."

Lesley Galston, The Healthy Writer survey

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