Sunday Sessions #50
Diet optimisation sends the wrong message
Why does diet optimisation send the wrong message?
It’s based on perfection over enjoyment.
Most people get caught up on achieving optimal health and strive for perfection over enjoyment. This is not only true for those who are “dieting” but also true of the professionals.
I had a client this week discuss how a previous nutritionist they went to described cheesecake as the devil’s food. While I could only laugh, it also reminded me of how annoyed I typically get during most health podcasts. Every title being “this will kill you”, “the one thing you’re missing”, “expert says”. Each selling their own form of perfectionism or optimisation - How to perfect the one thing you are not doing, that will solve your problems.
With all these solutions, why haven’t we solved the problem?
The solutions we are sold miss the mark. If it were as simple as fix this one thing, or 5 steps towards problem solved we would already have hit our mark by now. We have created a dieting system that replicates that of medicine (take this diet, dosed at this amount, for this period of time). There’s an underlying issue to the medicine model of dieting. We haven’t yet found how to bottle up health into a single diet pill that can override or negate our underlying behaviours and desires (I’ll leave Ozempic out of the discussion for now). The problem is seldomly getting to the goal we want to achieve. Almost every “diet” can be a pathway to this outcome. The problem is sustaining the outcome, because we do things we inherently don’t want to in order to achieve it. We “tough it out”, forgetting that we can’t tough it out forever.
The questions implicit to diet optimisation are the wrong ones.
The question isn’t how do we optimise our diets, or what is the best way to lose weight, this sends the wrong message. It distracts us from the things that are actually important - what got us to the point of needing to lose weight in the first place and what are we optimising (if optimisation is required) for? Once we begin to unpack these questions, for ourselves, we begin to unwind the behaviours that got us to where we are and what needs addressing.
Cultivate enjoyment over perfection.
If we want to sustain the health we achieve from any dieting strategy, then we need to stop “toughing it out” and begin bridging the gap between outcomes and behaviours. Health is a journey and we are just a long for the ride - enjoy it. When we think of enjoyment (in relation to food) we think of the devil’s food. When toughing it out we long for the time when we can have the bite of that cake once again. Enjoyment isn’t about running on the hedonic treadmill, it’s a process of continually finding the positive elements, what you like, in the things that you are doing (behaviours that relate to the outcomes you are trying to achieve not the outcomes themselves). If all you are doing is toughing out the process because your enjoyment is tied in a knot around the results you achieve, then as soon as you stop getting results you cease to enjoy what you are doing.
We don’t need to demonise or rarely even need to optimise our foods or eating behaviours. We just need to make a commitment to enjoying the things that we know to be good for us.
Nurturing a healthy lifestyle is where the real work begins…