3417: [Part 1] Trigger Foods, “Clean” Eating, and Leveling the Moral High Ground by Rachel Trotta on Balanced Eating Mindset

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[00:00:54] This is Optimal Health Daily. Trigger Foods, Clean Eating, and Leveling the Moral High Ground. Part 1 by Rachel Trotta of RachelTrotta.com. And I'm Dr. Neal Malik, your host and narrator. Hey there, welcome to another edition of Optimal Health Daily, where I read some of the best blogs covering health and fitness, just like an audiobook. Now, we have a bunch of shows where we do this very same thing. Just search for Optimal Living Daily to find all of them.

[00:01:22] Now, today's post is a bit longer than what I typically narrate. So whenever that happens, I'll read the first half today and then finish up the post for you tomorrow. So, with that, let's get right to it as we optimize your life. Trigger Foods, Clean Eating, and Leveling the Moral High Ground. Part 1 by Rachel Trotta of RachelTrotta.com. Overeating and Shame

[00:01:51] You know the feeling. You've started a new diet, and Monday feels amazing. You're a little hungry, but you're eating clean, so you know your body's happy and functioning better. You've cut carbs, salt, caffeine, dairy, and sugar, and you're bursting with energy and dieting righteousness. You even lose two pounds by Wednesday. But on Thursday night, you have a work event, and there's no food that you can eat. You suffer through the evening, and towards the end of the night, you're completely starving,

[00:02:21] and you sneak a brownie just to stop the feeling of your gnawing stomach. On the way home, when your resolve finally completely breaks down, you grab takeout from your old favorite spot and end the night in a pint of ice cream. The next morning, you do an extra 30 minutes on the bike to burn off the calories. You vow to do better. Tomorrow. Next Monday. Next week. Next time. These shame spirals, huge spikes of virtuous eating,

[00:02:49] followed by equally devastating crashes into old habits, are toxic for progress, but even more toxic for your mind and emotions. When I work with clients, the goal is not just eating healthier and exercising more. It's also about building a healthy relationship with food and exercise. Health is more than physical. It encompasses the mental, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of life as well, and it's hard to untangle these components.

[00:03:17] Building that healthy relationship with food and exercise is essential, so that you know what to do, not only while you're working towards your goals, but also what to do once you reach your goals. Black and white lines separating good foods from bad foods creates a very difficult and bumpy road to success. Even if you can reach your goals using a modality like this, you have likely developed a dysfunctional relationship with food along the way.

[00:03:44] But the higher likelihood is that these epic ups and downs will stall you out before you can see any real progress. But mostly, it's not a happy headspace in which to live. The power of language. In this post, before I talk about trigger foods and what they really are, I want to tackle one important idea first. Clean eating. I truly believe that clean eating is simply a new and more enlightened-sounding euphemism for dieting.

[00:04:14] It's new. It's trendy. But time will not be any more forgiving to clean eating than what it has been to Atkins or SlimFast. It sounds like it's based on better principles than something as restrictive as the grapefruit diet, but in reality, it's just another metric by which to divide foods into good foods and bad foods. And as long as we keep doing that, we stay stuck in the rut. We feel emotionally great as long as we're eating clean, but we fall off the wagon Thursday through Sunday

[00:04:43] and promise ourselves that we'll do better next week. It's a negative cycle that builds powerful associations with foods and shame about the self and the physical body. So let's reframe it. Instead of just shifting the language, let's totally change the paradigm. Instead of focusing on good foods or bad foods, let's focus on a new metric for success, one that's morally neutral. There are three questions you can ask yourself about the way you're eating and exercising,

[00:05:13] which will give you incredible clarity about what path you should be on. One, how do you feel on this plan? Two, is this plan working with your lifestyle? And three, what are the results of this plan? When you can erase the lines of good and bad, we're just left with practicalities. Does the way you're eating and exercising add to the quality of your life, or does it detract from it? Is the way you're eating and exercising

[00:05:42] realistic and livable? Are you getting good results on a month-by-month basis? Note, not a day-by-day basis. And are you consistently moving toward your goals? If you can reduce your decision-making about your eating and exercising down to these three simple questions, you will have a stable ground from which to make more nuanced decisions, like which foods should make up the majority of your diet, which foods should be sprinkled through your diet,

[00:06:10] and which foods should probably be eliminated or avoided. What is a trigger food? Let's get to that last part. Which foods should probably be eliminated or avoided? To be clear, a trigger food is not a bad food to be avoided at all costs. We're not there yet. Instead, it's a food that tends to elicit overeating. It's that simple. There are two primary reasons that a food can trigger overeating.

[00:06:39] Chemical Composition Foods tend to be powerfully seductive when they contain two or more of the following components or qualities. High caloric content, fat, starch, and salt. Think about the foods that, once your hand is in the container, is difficult to stop eating. Pizza checks all the boxes, as do brownies and donuts. Ice cream, pretzels, french fries, potato chips, flavored or candied nuts, chocolate, and most fried foods

[00:07:09] also fit the profile. On the other hand, you've probably never lost yourself in a bag of spinach. You may have taste preferences, but in general, these foods exercise the same attractive effect on everyone. To be continued. You just listened to part one of the post titled, Trigger Foods, Clean Eating, and Leveling the Moral High Ground by Rachel Trotta of racheltrotta.com,

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[00:09:05] from okay to very high. Know your sleep score with Apple Watch. iPhone 11 or later required. Dr. Neal Malik here with my commentary. I once met with a client that wanted nutrition counseling. He was already in great shape and was eating mostly nutritious foods. But he met with me because he was interested in clean eating. I gave him some recommendations. Unfortunately, he didn't like any of my suggestions. Why not?

[00:09:35] Because they didn't quite match the foods he'd seen on social media. But are the foods and recipes marketed as clean actually more nutritious? A group of researchers tried to answer this very question. They analyzed 86 different recipes from food blogs that were labeled as clean and compared them to the World Health Organization's dietary recommendations. And what they found was fascinating. Less than 10% of the clean eating recipes met the World Health Organization's guidelines.

[00:10:05] In fact, they often found that the clean eating recipes were moderate to high in saturated fat, salt, and sugar. So what were the researchers' conclusions? Clean eating claims may be misleading since they don't seem to be any healthier based on their nutrient profiles. So just as today's author Rachel Trotta said, even though clean eating sounds like it's based on solid principles, the reality is it may end up being just another way to divide what we eat into good foods

[00:10:34] and bad foods, which is really not ideal. All right, that'll do it for today. Thank you so much for listening today and every day. Of course, I'll be back here tomorrow to finish up this post, so I'll see you there where your optimal life awaits. I'll see you there in the next one. Thank you.