Healthy Eating - Themes

Probably the most discussed topic in the office is diet.  So much of our health revolves around what we put into our body.  It's well known that healthy eating and maintaining an optimal body weight are imperative to prevent and treat diseases like diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol and heart disease.   What is less appreciated is the impact nutrition has on day-to-day well-being, encompassing all aspects of wellness.   In my opinion, what we eat has dramatic ramifications for the entire body, and remains the cornerstone of intestinal, psychiatric, hormonal, and musculo-skeletal health.   While we've all heard the idiom, “you are what you eat,” we often don't live this motto; that leaves us vulnerable to illness and poor quality of life.   My goals in medicine are prevention of disease and maintenance of a high quality-of-life.  What you eat is the foundation to achieve those goals.

Below are general themes that I believe should be the guide on our dietary journey.   While our knowledge changes with ongoing research, I believe these themes will remain intact.   My beliefs and recommendations are pulled from many areas including personal experience, my formal education, reading of experts, and some plain common sense.   I'll attempt to reference specific people should I use direct quotes or copyrighted material.   However, much of what I believe is in common with others so general themes may be familiar from your own reading on the subject.  Below is a brief summary of the key themes in which I believe.

• Desire to be healthy!  Maintaining a healthy diet, foremost involves being aware of and caring about what you eat. You need to want to eat healthy food because our society has made it so easy to do the opposite.

• Be aware!  When you know what you are eating and the ingredients involved, it is much easier to do things positively.

• Take control!  Self-preparation is the simplest way to ensure good stuff is going in.

• Routine is good!  It's a lot easier to maintain healthy routines that continually trying to develop them.   Once you've developed good patterns, you don't have to think as much and can focus your energy to other areas of your life.

• Remember 90-10! Focus on what you do day-in and day-out as part of your normal routines (90% of the time) and make your changes and commitment there.   If your doing positive things most of the time, what happens during that final 10% isn't nearly as important.  Put simpler, you can still have Doritos once in a while.

• Quality counts! There's more to the dietary world than just carbs, fat and protein.  The quality of ingredients goes a long way towards keeping your body functioning at a high level.  This is especially true for animal products.

• Healthy diet is not only for weight loss!  Most people attribute making changes in what they eat to attempts at weight loss.   However, the true goal is to eat healthfully and this is important to those at any weight (or age).

• Have fun!  Eating healthy doesn't have to be painful.  Preparing and eating food is a great way to relax, spend time with family, and learn about places & people around the world.

Desire

There is no way to make and maintain healthy lifestyle choices without desire.  If you don't truly want to do something, you might hang on for a while, but eventually you're going to fall off.  Additionally, our society has made unhealthy eating so available that it's always going to be easy to take that path.  Thus, if the desire isn't there, that is where we need to put our efforts prior to attempting changes.   For some people, they don't “want” to make changes because they are afraid of failure.   This is especially common if there have been prior failures at attempts to lose weight and eat healthfully.   Many people don't want to change their diet patterns because they simply enjoy traditionally unhealthy foods.   First, remember complete avoidance of specific items is rarely necessary (remember 90/10).  Second, once you clear your body of processed food intake, you'll actually develop taste for real food and spices and being to enjoy them more.   Finally, desire to make dietary changes goes hand-in-hand with desire for overall healthy living.   Always go back to what our goals are: prevention of disease and maintenance of a high quality-of-life. This remains pertinent for those of any age or current medical condition.

Awareness

Quite simply, if you don't know what you are eating, it's impossible to ensure your eating positively.  Thus, education and awareness is imperative.   First off, the general food industry has no interest in our health and use deceptive marketing to make their products sound healthy.  If you're buying packaged foods and not reading ingredients, you're likely putting junk in your body.   Secondly, many restaurants not only serve portions that are twice the ideal size, but also use the lowest quality ingredients.  The more you learn about what is in the food you eat, the easier it is to do things healthfully.  Ingredient labels are a great first step.   When you consistently read labels, you'll learn patterns of positive ingredients to look for as well as learning frequent used additives you want to avoid.   Asking questions at the restaurants you visit frequently can also give insight and help you make more positive choices.  In addition to knowing what you are eating, knowing how much is also valuable.   Spending time to educate yourself on appropriate portion sizes can go a long way towards limiting unnecessary calories.

Control

The simplest way to ensure your eating the right way is to make the food yourself.  In the long-term, preparing one's own foods in almost imperative to maintain a healthy diet and weight.   Due to the challenges presented to us from the food and restaurant industry, one needs to figure out a way to self-prepare the bulk of their meals.   This is one of the most challenging steps for many people.   Lack of skill and lack of time are two biggest excuses for not self-preparing one's own food that I come across.   Both of these are real issues but can be mitigated.  You don't have to be a gourmet chef or spend hours in the kitchen.   However, a commitment to self-preparation is necessary.   Additionally, taking time to plan and organize your meals will make this much easier.   While this may seem daunting at the beginning, you need to look months and years down the road, and realize that if you stick with it, preparing you own meals becomes easier and more fun.   It's a great way to spend time with family and educate children early on about healthy eating.

Routine

Let's be realistic, making dietary changes and maintaining healthy intake is difficult.  It takes a lot of brain power and energy to stay on top of things.   Setting up routines can make this much easier.  Once you've educated yourself and have found choices that are both enjoyable and healthful, keep those part of a regular regimen.   As you add more and more things to that regimen, you need to spend less time thinking about what your going to eat.   Additionally, when you have regular patterns, it's easier to keep ingredients and items available to stay consistent with self-preparation.   This doesn't mean you have to eat the exact same thing every day.   You can also add variety to your regular base pattern, or change things up as you educate yourself more.   However, you don't want to spend your every waking hour worrying about what your going to eat (and whether it's healthy or not); thus developing routines can make healthful eating less of an intrusion into your already busy day.

90/10

For most people, a large percentage of their week is quite predictable and dictated by regular work and family responsibilities.  When making dietary changes, it's your typical routine where you want to put your efforts.   Focus on the breakfast you eat every day before work, rather than worrying about what your going to eat when you go out for Mother's Day brunch.  When you make changes to your day-to-day patterns, your affecting what you do for the bulk of your meals and thus have much greater effect.   Also, as noted above, keeping routine makes healthy eating easier, so starting with you day-to-day patterns makes the most sense.   For some, their daily routine is more fluid and thus it's a bit harder.   However, the concept is still important: make changes to what you do most of the time and don't worry as much about unique exceptions (parties, vacations, holidays, special occasions).   This doesn't mean you should gorge and lose all sense of self-control when your out, but you can treat yourself to things that aren't part of your daily routine.   This is especially true for those who are not trying to lose weight but rather just maintain healthy patterns.   When you're actively trying to lose weight, the more indiscretion you have the harder it becomes.   It's still OK to lighten up a bit when your outside of your routine but you want to be much more restrictive on portions and content than those in a maintenance phase.

Quality

One of the most overlooked areas in nutrition, in my opinion, is the quality of food.  I look at this in two aspects.   First is considering additives to what would otherwise be healthy food.   You can take something like applesauce, yogurt, peanut butter, or nearly any common and healthy item and ruin it by a series of additives that affect its quality.  Unfortunately, we do not have and will likely never have definitive research on the effects of individual additives.  However, it's common sense to me, that if you put chemicals not natural to humans in your body every day, the body is more likely to break.   Also, there just simply isn't the need for these low quality items filled with additives.   There are plenty of unadulterated options that are not significantly more expensive than their low quality counterparts.   You don't have to shop at Whole Foods and break the bank, you just need to pay attention.   The second component of quality I focus on is in regards to animal products.   If “you are what you eat,” then you are also, “what your eating has eaten.”   The meat and dairy industries have gotten very good at doing everything possible to maximize production for the lowest cost, which in my opinion has come at the expense of the products we consume.   I don't have any problem with consumption of animal products, but consuming them in as close to their natural state as possible is ideal.   The chicken your eating that has been kept in a box and gorge feed highly processed grain with various chemical additives is quite a bit different than eating the chicken that has been meandering outside and doing what chickens do and eating what chickens eat.  We are continually gaining more insight into the improved nutritional content of higher quality animal products and I think those studies will grow.   Additionally, we seem to have ever more food recalls and disease outbreaks due to poor quality-control in the mass-produced food industry.  This risk can be avoided by eating higher quality foods.  With animal products, high-quality frequently does involve some higher cost.   However, it's a cost I feel worthwhile and one that can be mitigated by eating animal products in moderation and following proper portion recommendations.

Do It for Life

I don't even like to use the term diet because people associate it with weight loss attempts and giving up things they like.  In reality, a diet is just an eating pattern.   One can have a healthy and restorative diet or they can have a destructive one.   While weight loss should be a goal for many people, a healthy diet should be a goal for everyone.   Even for those trying to lose weight, I try to stress that the focus should be on the diet, not the weight.  For most, if you are doing the right thing with your diet, the weight loss will take care of itself.   A good diet simply makes the body work better, prevents development of chronic disease, and allows you to have a higher quality of life day-in and day-out.  We want to set up patterns that are maintained indefinitely.  Nothing about healthy eating is short-term.   All the recommendations above are things I want people to do always.   Your body is your life, why not give it what it needs to survive and avoid the things that destroy it.

Have Fun

There is so much anxiety and fear in our society about eating.   Dietary patterns that we find so difficult are commonplace in other parts of the world.   Try to look at eating in a different way than you might have previously done.   Appreciate and enjoy the different flavors and textures that are available in real food.   Learn about different cultures and places in the world through their cuisines.   Use food preparation and mealtimes to spend time with family, have conversations, and release the stress that builds up throughout our crazy days.   As you learn more, develop routines, and feel better, eating healthfully becomes a positively-spiraling process that becomes easier and more enjoyable.