What I told the directors

After ages and ages of agonizing about the 10 minute talk I had to give to the directors at work on healthy eating (and even blogging about it here), I finally wrote it and gave it. Please understand that while public speaking ain't exactly my favorite thing in the world, I'm not afraid of it, and I'm actually pretty good at it. So the fact that I stressed about this so much really throws into stark relief how important this topic is to me, as well as how ridiculous it was to try and cover it in 10 minutes.

The talk got lots of good reviews, and I'm hoping I actually helped some folks with it. I figured I'd share it with y'all here, since I wrote it & all.  Here you go.

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I want to give you some useful information in a very short amount of time—something that might actually help people make real changes in their lifestyle. If you want to find the latest hot diet, or some new fruit or vegetable that will singlehandedly lower your cholesterol (apparently, this is the avocado now), there's plenty of options out there. Most of us don't need to be told what foods are healthy to eat, we already know. We know that the typical western American diet does not confer good health, but what does? Honestly, just about every other way of eating that we've studied (other than the typically western diet) will work. So what should you do?

In the past year, my family has made some fairly radical changes in the way we eat, and we are all much healthier for it. I'm not going to list the specific changes we made in our diet, because those are things that worked for my family, for our goals; you may be in a totally different situation. So here is what I've learned for how to start this process for yourself, if you wish:

1. Let go of the idea that you need “willpower” and “dedication” in order to make these changes. No, you need a plan, and some self-compassion. Changing dietary habits is really really hard. Willpower alone won't get you there, and without self-compassion you'll just beat yourself up whenever you don't meet your expectations. We're fond of saying things like “eat less, move more”, but this is an oversimplification that invites self-destructive behaviors (not to mention some nasty judgmentalism towards others). It just isn't that simple—if it were, I wouldn't be standing here talking to you about this topic. Again, dietary changes are hard. Think about it, eating habits get built up over the course of years—you can't just undo that by reading a few nutrition books. If you want to change your diet, acknowledge that this is a difficult, slow process that is certain to involve backslides. Commit to being compassionate with yourself about the process. If you backslide, try to engage in some “Buddhist detachment”, and see if you can observe what happened without judgment. Try to figure out what your triggers and behaviors are for backsliding so that you can better derail them in the future.


2. If you want to change something, track it! If you diligently track what you eat for two weeks, most people are pretty stunned at the results. It's hard to change what you don't know, so spend some time actually learning about how you eat now, and then work on making changes.


3. Figure out what your goals are before you go trying to upend everything you eat. Do you want to lose weight, or gain muscle? Lower your cholesterol? Dedicate yourself to healthily raised foods or local foods? Have more sit-down or home-cooked meals? What? Figure out what is most important to you, and then start to shape your diet to fit those goals. In order to change eating habits, you have to understand what you're trying to do, and make sure that this thing is motivating for you. And even once you determine your goals, there is no “one size fits all” diet, some things will work well for one person and be a disaster for others. Low-carb might be just the ticket for fat-loss for one person, and make another person so sluggish and low energy that they gain weight instead. Embrace experimentalism, and see what works for you.


4. In the spirit of experimentalism, I encourage people to use a Return On Investment attitude towards diet. What is the ROI of various behaviors? I love bread. I've said in print that you can have my bread when you pry it from my cold, dead hands. If you want me to give up bread, that is a HUGE investment on my part, so there'd better be one heck of a return on it. And for me, that investment is too high. I've found that I do not need to go to that level of investment in order to achieve my goals, so why would I? I analyze my diet in terms like the following: can I live this way for the rest of my life, or will it make me crazy? Can my family accept this change? Does this change actually seem to be helping me towards my goals? Do I feel better making this change? Do I have the time or money to change my eating habits this way? Changes that have a positive ROI are far more likely to stick that those with a negative ROI.


5. DO THE ABSOLUTE MINIMUM NEEDED TO ACHIEVE YOUR GOALS. It's tempting to have the attitude of “go big or go home!” and just upend everything, but that strategy is nearly guaranteed to fail. Once you know what your goals are, and have some specific strategies in mind that have passed the ROI test, slooooooooowly start incorporating changes. Make the least amount of changes needed for you to start seeing results, and then feel super-happy and proud of yourself for your successes before making more slow, incremental changes. Be open to the idea that some of the changes just won't work for you—they might have unintended consequences, or maybe the ROI is just much worse than you'd imagined. And always, always celebrate success (just maybe not with full-calorie cheesecake).


6. Finally, I strongly encourage you to use what I've said to help you develop a healthy relationship with food, because really, healthy eating in its simplest form is having this healthy relationship. If you can sort that part out, the rest of it will fall into place. Most Americans have at best a troubled relationship with food, and at worst an adversarial relationship with it. Think about that. Functionally doing battle with yourself and with food at least three times a day, being full of guilt or shame, in order to stay alive? That's a terrible place to be in. The more nutrition scientists learn about food and diet, the more obvious it is that there really aren't “good foods” and “bad foods”, there is just food and how you incorporate it into your life and how well it works for you. Eating is a really important part of staying alive, so making it an enjoyable activity that helps you feel good physically and mentally can improve your entire life.

I hope the ideas I've given out today can help some folks make positive changes in their diets. One thing I can say with certainty is that if you want to make these changes, and if you go slowly, and have plenty of self-compassion (and maybe a good support system if needed), then it really does get easier as time goes on. Things that have to be conscious decisions every. Single. Time. You do them slowly become second-nature habits, but good ones this time. Those good habits free up your willpower to move on to more good changes, and so on. It snowballs. It's great. But it takes time, and going easy on yourself, and being proud of every success, no matter how small, to keep you going in the right direction.