2634: It’s Time for a New Relationship With Food by Leo Babauta of Zen Habits on Nutrition Advice

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[00:01:38] It's time for a new relationship with food by Leo Babauta of zenhabits.net and I'm Dr. Neil. Hey there, happy middle of the week Wednesday and welcome back to Optimal Health Daily where I read some of the best health and fitness blogs to you

[00:01:53] and always with a little bit of my commentary at the end. Now, like I do every Wednesday, I like to share an inspirational quote with you. So with that, here we go. Quote, It is your life. Choose consciously. Choose wisely. Choose honestly. Choose happiness. Bronnie Ware

[00:02:14] Alright, and with that, let's get right to it and start optimizing your life. It's time for a new relationship with food by Leo Babauta of zenhabits.net Have you ever stopped to consider what relationship you have with food?

[00:02:32] We don't often think we even have a relationship with food and yet we do, and it's pretty intimate. Think about this. If you're like me, you spend as much or more time with food than you do with many of the loved ones in your life,

[00:02:46] several hours a day or more. And consider this. Technically, food is just fuel for living. That's all. Nothing else. And yet, it has become so much more to most of us. We use food for pleasure. We use it for comfort.

[00:03:04] We turn to food when we're sad, depressed or hurt. We use food to socialize. We use it as a reward. We turn to it when we're bored. Food can also be a chore. We use food as gifts. We turn to food when we're lonely.

[00:03:19] Food can be associated with intimacy. Food is equated to health. Sometimes, food becomes an obsession. And it definitely can feel like an addiction. Food can make us hate ourselves. And food is the center of many billion-dollar industries.

[00:03:35] In fact, the huge food-related industries are at the center of much of our relationship with food. Restaurants, fast food chains, convenience foods, agribusinesses, distributors, grocery chains, snack foods, bakeries, coffee shops, dessert chains, health food, diet foods, supplements, bodybuilding food and many others.

[00:03:56] They spend billions upon billions every year trying to get us to eat more and more food, their food in particular. And the horrifying thing is that all this advertising really, really works. We have been convinced that the answer to almost any problem is food. You truly love someone?

[00:04:15] Buy them chocolates or take them to a restaurant or bake them cookies. Want to lose weight? Eat diet food. Want to get fit? Take our supplements, eat our meat, drink our milk. Want to be healthy? Eat our health products. Want to reward yourself?

[00:04:31] There are too many options to name here. Having a bad day? We've got the food for you. Don't have time? Our food will save time. Want to save money? Buy super-size and save. Food is the answer to everything apparently. And yet, we forget that food is just fuel.

[00:04:48] We need to eat a certain amount to live and maintain our weight. If we eat more than that, we will store some of that fuel as fat or build muscle if we're exercising. And how do we lose weight? By eating, apparently.

[00:05:00] Eat diet food, drink diet shakes, eat zone bars, eat vegetarian products, eat meat and other protein sources, eat low-fat products, eat our cereal and drink our diet soda. But what if we just ate less? Despite what the food industries have convinced us of,

[00:05:16] we don't need to eat as much as we do to survive. Sure, maybe eating that much is fun and pleasurable and will stave off boredom and is fun to do with friends and family and so on. But we don't need to eat that much.

[00:05:28] Actually, we need to eat less. The problem isn't that it's so difficult to eat less. The problem is that we have a complicated relationship with food that started when we were toddlers and has become more and more complicated throughout the years through endless amounts of advertising,

[00:05:44] of eating when we're sad and lonely and happy and bored and at parties and going out and on dates and watching TV and dieting and so on. Our complicated relationship with food makes it hard to cut back on how much we eat.

[00:05:57] So, let's start building a new relationship with food. Start recognizing exactly why we eat. Is it just for sustenance? Or is our hunger often triggered by other things like boredom, socializing, pleasure and so on? Start realizing the effects that advertising and the food industries

[00:06:16] have on how we think about food and how we eat. Stop eating when we're bored or out of habit or as a reward or for pleasure or for comfort and so on. Only eat what and how much we need. Find other ways to entertain ourselves, comfort ourselves,

[00:06:32] find pleasure and so on. Find other ways to socialize rather than eating large amounts of food. Stop obsessing so much about food. And, end our addiction with certain foods, sugar for example or starches. We can still eat them but we don't need to eat them as much.

[00:06:50] Think about it. How much simpler would life be if you could end this complicated relationship with food? Some changes that might happen as a result? You'd spend less time thinking about food. You'd spend less time preparing food. You'd spend less money on food.

[00:07:07] You'd eat less and you'd get healthier. Fasting I have to give credit to Brad Pilon and his excellent e-book Eat, Stop, Eat for inspiring this post. Brad shook up a few of my notions about eating, my assumptions about standard beliefs in the health industry

[00:07:25] and about why we are conditioned to eat so much. While I haven't yet decided to try Brad's method for losing weight, fast 1-2 days a week and eat normally on other days, plus strength training, I definitely recommend his book as a way to challenge the ideas

[00:07:39] you might have read in magazines or fitness blogs. But what's most interesting is how he recommends 24-hour fasts as a way to transform your relationship with food. By fasting, you learn to give up your need to eat for reasons other than fuel.

[00:07:54] You learn that hunger is often conditioned by other things. And you end that conditioning. You learn that hunger is okay, and after a while the fasts don't bother you at all. At least that's what Brad claims and it sounds reasonable to me.

[00:08:08] I might try fasting for this reason alone. Now, some of you will object to fasting on the usual grounds. It's unhealthy, your body goes into starvation mode, it'll slow down your metabolism, your body will start using muscle as fuel, your blood sugar levels will drop too low,

[00:08:23] and you won't have energy. These are the same reasons I objected, and I won't try to refute these ideas. Anyway, you don't need a fast to transform your relationship with food. It's one way, and I thought it was an interesting idea.

[00:08:36] In the end, let's teach ourselves some simple things. Food is just fuel. Most of us need to eat less. Food isn't love or entertainment or anything else like that. It's just fuel. You just listened to the post titled

[00:08:55] A New Relationship with Food by Leo Babauta of zenhabits.net, and I'll be right back with my commentary. Dr. Neil here for my commentary. In today's article, Leo gave us a nice even-handed look at the potential benefits of intermittent fasting. Leo mentioned it's something he's considering trying.

[00:09:13] He also said it may be that intermittent fasting doesn't suit your lifestyle. I wanted to dig a bit deeper into this idea of intermittent fasting and found a meta-analysis published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The authors of this meta-analysis found that

[00:09:28] intermittent fasting can help those with obesity lose weight, but there were a couple of caveats to this. First, the authors found that different types of fasting led to better results. One type that led to a better result was alternate-day fasting. With alternate-day fasting, participants switched back and forth

[00:09:48] between days of eating as much as they wanted with fasting days. On these fasting days, they consumed anywhere from 0 to 600 calories per day for 3 to 5 days per week. The other type of fast that led to promising results was the 5-2 diet.

[00:10:06] Here, participants fasted for 1 to 2 days per week, either consecutively or non-consecutively, with total calories on these fasting days ranging again from 0 to 600 per day and 5 days of eating as many calories as they wanted. So, again, that was the first caveat

[00:10:25] that these two patterns of intermittent fasting led to better results. The second caveat was that these results lasted for 1 to 6 months. Then, after the 6-month period, participants stopped losing weight. The researchers weren't sure exactly why participants stopped losing weight

[00:10:43] but said that sticking to a prescribed diet like this may have been the issue. So, again, to repeat what Leo said, intermittent fasting is something you may want to try. It may or may not be for you. No matter what you choose,

[00:10:58] the goal is to find a nutritious and balanced eating pattern that we can follow for a lifetime. Alright, that'll do it for today. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for listening all the way through to the end.

[00:11:11] I hope you have a great rest of your day and I'll see you back here on tomorrow's show where your optimal life awaits.