Abstract
Our modern prosperity requires us to look deeper into dieting and what it means to us; there is more than meets the eye.
Connection to website’s theme
Food, even if not for survival, is a major part of human life. So it’s crucial we understand how to make that part be a fulfilling part.
Introduction
Dieting Fun!
I have a lot of experience with dieting. Or more positively, eating crazy things in order to achieve various body shape and fitness goals. I started out quite skinny for most of my life, struggling to be more than puny. Or should I say “less puny”? I eventually ballooned into a too-large-for-my-frame weightlifter who had good squat, bench and power clean numbers; and yet couldn’t walk up a hill comfortably. But I had wanted to experience that to know what I most wanted. I’ve done a variety of end-states in between and since.
But dieting is more than just what you do to achieve a specific goal; much as sleeping is about more than feeling rested in the morning. There is a whole human-meaning perspective that can be lost when we equate meaning with the results of an activity.
What is dieting anyway?
Dieting, when I was exploring it, was very much about fat loss. It was called weight loss then, and too often still is. And while nowadays that is still a major goal of most, it has been tempered and tailored for the pursuit of health.
Most diet books now are addressing the idea of optimal diets, diets for longevity, for more energy and so on. I believe this is a turn for the good, but it still leads to more confusion than ever.
In my city library, I randomly picked up three different diet books. They each say the best diet for longevity is something that the other two books say are the worst! Carnivore! Vegan! Extreme food variety! I could throw my own approach into the mix for more confusion (and I may at some point). But for now, I’m going to instead attempt to cut through all the specifics and get to the heart of the reason behind all these books and their quest for health through dieting.
Abundance as a clarifying perspective
Abundance in the modern world
We live in a world of abundance. Anyone reading a diet book now is in a place no one in history – a place no king, emperor or warlord at their mightiest – has ever attained. What is available to us in terms of transportation, shelter, medicine, and comfort is simply magical in comparison to historical options. And food is definitely one of those on the magical availability lists. When in history has one had the opportunity to choose whatever one eats, at any time of the year?
Want to eat only bison steaks all year long? We can do that. Want to eat mushrooms only? Check. Leafy greens? Check. Cupcakes? Check. And you don’t have to give up much else to do that, either, including Netflix or video games (another set of previously unavailable joys).
A diet book is part of a genre of advice books, and such a subject can only arise when we have the choice of what to eat. In the past, and we’re talking only a few hundred years ago at most, most people were living in scarcity. They ate what they could to survive, not what was best for thriving – if they even knew much about what that was.
The optimal diet in an abundant world
We are obviously working hard to answer that question of what is best for thriving. There are solutions drawn on a variety of areas covering such as the latest scientific studies in nutrition, evolutionary justification, and anthropological justification. Likely the final answer will draw upon these and more evidence, and ultimately even then there will need to be a whole lot of tailoring to each person for their specifics and preferences.
My personal view is that we are way too early to be providing recommendations on optimal approaches, as we know too little. We have jumped onto the train of quick solutions and don’t know the wider picture. We also have discarded solutions of the past because they don’t seem to fit anymore. Take multi-day fasting. It was historically a common occurrence for health, religion, and often just because food wasn’t available. Latest studies on longevity point to calorie restriction as a major longevity contributor. But how much of that would be obtained just by fasting? And yet we don’t know how much, how often or anything else.
We need a re-orienting question to step away from the desired solution of optimal eating and it is one that is at that base of it all, yet that has not surfaced as needed: why are we eating at all?
Why are we eating at all?!
Survival
We have accepted a prior answer, namely, to survive, and have continued on directly to the details and science of what to eat, when to eat, how much to eat, how to prepare the food, who to obtain food from and who should be involved in making the food. But this approach is stuck in the very early abundance stages of the past, when we were just able to start asking some of these questions because we had some option in what we did. We could eat more corn or feed more chickens, we could grow more asparagus or more berries, we could buy pre-packaged foods or more fresh foods.
But we were still as a whole on the same diet we had been on in the past due to an affordability and availability requirement – grain/bread, bit of meat, bit of dairy, some root vegetables and fruits. So while we couldn’t change much, we could change a little. And we could see the future where more change is possible. Since as humans we want to improve, we wanted to know the answer of what is better to eat, from among these limited choices? Now that we have no limit, should that change our perspective? I say, Yes.
So: Why eat at all?
Is it survival?
On the surface this seems to be a silly question with an obvious answer. Animals (and all living things in some form) must eat or they die. But that’s seeing the question from a broad scientific perspective. If instead, I make it more personal – why do you eat? Or rephrase to get yet more detail – what are the reasons you (and humans generally) eat?
You will see that there are areas of curiosity here. For those living in abundance, it should be very clear that none of us eat just because otherwise we would die. We may feel that way after a long day of chasing our children around. But if you’ve ever fasted, as crappy as you may have felt, you were in no danger of dying. When we sit down to a meal or grab a snack, it’s not because we feel death is around the corner, like a man dying of thirst in a desert finds a dropped canteen of water. We are eating for other reasons than survival.
We need to understand those reasons before we can apply the latest knowledge in nutrition and longevity. Otherwise we will be fighting against ourselves trying to change what we eat. We will be gaining an edge in optimality but losing out on other benefits – with likely a net loss due to the stress and strain.
Other reasons
We have a plethora of other reasons for eating. Some related to health, like exercise or sport optimization (like I started a diet focus for), or disease or allergy mitigation or curing. Some are related to having a life of positive experiences like enhancing social enjoyment or exploring our senses. And some reasons we don’t even know, like when we binge eat or have a sudden distaste for a prior, healthy favorite.
To the extent that our reasons cover other than biological health, we must accept the latest details cannot help us. Because we haven’t sufficiently answered the question – why exactly are we eating?
Keep perspective
Since you are reading this article, I can guarantee that you will all continue by any means to keep working to get better. But I don’t want you to get stuck following a process that isn’t what YOU need. Get the resources to answer YOUR questions so you can achieve both health and your other goals.
The testimonials in the diet books that show those who have done this provide the hope that we can do so for ourselves. But let’s not assume we can just do what they did and achieve the same results. They are not us and have found their own answers. We can use these books as a starting point, recognizing that they provide the continually maturing view of a nascent science that itself only answers a small part of our reasons for food.
Why you should read diet books
The real questions you want a diet book to cover are not just what to eat to be healthy. You want it to help you identify why you eat, including all the reasons that have nothing to do with being healthy. Then you want a method that helps you stop any eating that contradicts other life goals, including those for health, while enhancing the eating approach for those other goals. After all that, only then do you want to know what to eat for optimal or better health and how to do so. And then you will actually be able to do so.
Now this is a tall order for a diet book, or any book, even nowadays. But rather than dismiss all current diet books as premature or ineffective, I would encourage you to read as many as possible and draw out your own questions and answers. Just don’t limit yourselves to what each single book offers. Do not simply follow one plan after another. Use each as a tool to pick out the pieces that make progress towards a better you.
Truth can lay in any or all of these books, but it won’t come as a single package tailored for each of us. But that’s fine, as we benefit the most by exploring for ourselves what we truly need. Optimal health is not the only value to be gained.
For comments or questions on this article, please email jeremy@tobeandwhattobe.com
