I Has Foodz Issues

I've changed my diet. In fact, I've really only decided to eat healthy foods, i.e. mainly vegetables, but also some fish. The idea of a 'diet' as a special new understanding of what's healthy seems like the result of so many fad diets being on the market, like the one saying you should eat mainly meat and fat. Ugh.

Science pretty well knows what a good diet is. We may not have a perfect picture of the nutrients required for optimal health, but the picture is still pretty clear by now, and we know which foods will give us those nutrients, and which foods will include too much of various things like salt and sugar.

The problem isn't identifying the good stuff to eat anymore. The problem is that people have all kind of crazy ideas about the ways we need to eat; and people have all kinds of crazy issues like cravings and an inability to control hunger.

The cornerstone of my new diet is essentially the idea that if I can't find anything to eat that fits my diet, I'm going to go without. That doesn't sound very radical to me; it just means that I'll wait until I find healthy food somewhere, rather than just eat the unhealthy food that's put in front of me.

This has provoked universal consternation from everyone I talk to. Immediately they're conjuring images of a hunger strike. Zack has gone insane! He's not eating! Is this a syndrome? How could this happen???

All I'm saying is, if a big plate of pasta and mashed potatoes comes my way, I'm not going to eat it, but instead wait until I can find some nice vegetables.

It seems perfectly sensible to me, but it really has produced a huge uproar whenever I tell someone new about my dietary changes.

Another thing that seems almost universal is this idea that "breakfast is the most important meal of the day." When I tell people that I don't eat breakfast, they completely wig out. But not one of them can actually justify this idea. The argument in favor of breakfast basically is, it jumpstarts your metabolism.

Why would I want my metabolism jumpstarted? Well, they answer, it will cause you to burn calories.

But does my metabolism really burn so many calories that the whole breakfast I've just eaten will be burned off before lunch?

No one really has an answer to this. I think it's because people mainly just accept that theory without question because they then have an excuse to eat a big breakfast. They don't want to lose the whole "most important meal" theory, because they wouldn't be able to have their flap jacks and bacon.

As far as I can see, the difference in the number of calories my metabolism burns just on its own, versus the number of calories I burn on an empty stomach in the morning, can't be such a large number. Maybe in the double digits? A breakfast with a double digit number of calories might be a container of yogurt or a glass of orange juice. That's the kind of breakfast that must be advocated if someone insists on the whole "most important meal" concept. But that's not the breakfast I hear people advocating.

Getting back to my specific approach though; I'm attempting to deal with the cravings and other eating urges that have been overwhelming me. If I'll just eat whatever's in front of me, I'll never be eating healthy. I'm surrounded almost all day by very unhealthy choices. And my job serves free, very tasty, yet also largely unhealthy, breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. If I try to make a small change, as I've tried in the past, it might proceed for awhile, but eventually I just drift right back to eating too much of the wrong stuff again.

Another problem is, if I go a little further, and make a larger change, like cutting out the bad foods, and trying to set up some kind of regimen where I always eat well, then I start getting cravings. Hoo boy will I start getting cravings. After a few weeks, it can become intolerable. And then, if anything happens to disrupt my carefully planned regimen, I can become completely overwhelmed and just pig out, and fall totally off the wagon.

Hence my current diet plan, which I chose specifically to deal with those hard cases. It does me no good to set up a very fragile, brittle approach to eating, if that approach is just going to break at the first shock. What I need is an approach that can withstand the exceptional circumstances as well as my daily life.

So, by design, my intention to "do without" if I can't get what I want, is an attempt to address cravings, and situations where my routine has been disrupted. My focus is on those inevitable events, because those are the events that always beat me. My plan has to address the real problem.

So, some people have said I should carry healthy snacks around with me, so I never run into a situation where I have to "do without".

Bad idea. First of all, I'd eat all the snacks right away, and then what? I'm stuck with no snacks again, facing cravings and temptation.

But the main thing is, if I try to rely on keeping snacks with me, and creating an environment where I never experience being deprived of food, then I'll be all the more likely to fail when I am one day confronted with that situation. I wouldn't be solving anything, just making myself weaker and more vulnerable.

So, my experience with my current new diet so far has been very difficult. I'm eating well. I have a large, vegetable-heavy salad for lunch every day, which gives me a lot of everything except a few vitamins that I can pick up elsewhere. For dinner I have a larger meal, typically with fish, or at least a larger quantity of stuff than what I had for lunch. And I'm losing weight at a healthy and not too aggressive rate. I'm not starving myself, I'm doing OK.

BUT.

The cravings are so powerful, it's a nightmare. Each time I try to control my eating, the cravings and temptations get worse. If I'm with someone who's eating something, I crave whatever they're eating.

The cool thing is, because of my simple protocol of "doing without", I don't feel any actual compulsion to act on these cravings. I experience them merely as a symptom, something that triggers my "do without" protocol.

Still though, it's extremely distracting. I really hope that the cravings start to subside in the next couple months.

Also, if the diet follows the same path as quitting smoking (which it really does seem to), the cravings will subside, and then will come back somewhere down the road in a sudden massive attack that will be extremely difficult to resist.

So that's my plan. Weather the current cravings, keep my guard up even as those cravings subside, and be prepared to resist the larger wave of cravings that will hit me once I do finally start to relax my guard.

I'm kind of hoping it's like cigarettes. I quit those, and got a lot of practice trying and failing, before I managed it. Now I have a lot of practice trying and failing to get my eating under control. If the addiction is similar, I may be able to use my cigarette experience to advantage here.

Anyway, wish me luck.