Chapter 31 Health
This is a good time to remind you that nothing in this book should be seen as advice. It's never a good idea to take advice from cartoonists, and that's a hundred times more important if the topic is health-related. I don't know how many people have died from following the health advice of cartoonists, but the number probably isn't zero.
So don't view this chapter or anything else I write as advice. In the coming pages, I'll make reference to some interesting and useful studies about diet. And I'll describe my own experiences. That will address two dimensions of your bullshit filter—scientific studies and the experience of a smart friend—but just to be on the safe side, talk to your doctor before embracing any ideas in this book.
My value on the topic of diet, if any, is in simplification. The simple diet plan that works for me is this: I eat as much as I want, of anything I want, whenever I want. I weigh a trim 155 pounds and have never felt better. My healthy weight is not a genetic gift. In years past, I have weighed as much as 168 pounds, which looks portly on my 5'8" frame.
Obviously, there are some tricks involved with my too-easy-to-be-true diet plan. The tricks are simple, but they will take some explaining. Let's start with the part about eating "anything I want." The trick there is to change what you want. Yes, that's possible, and it's probably easier than you imagine. Once you want to eat the right kinds of food for enjoyment, and you don't crave the wrong kind of food, everything else comes somewhat easily.
You probably need some convincing that people can reprogram their food preferences. But consider how differently food tastes when you are famished versus when you have a full stomach. It's the same food, but your enjoyment level is radically different. The best meal I've ever tasted was a week after dental surgery because I hadn't had solid food for days. An ordinary dish of angel hair pasta tasted as if it had been delivered by a deity and carefully paired to my DNA. A month later, the same meal was boring.
I'm sure you've had similar experiences in which bland or even bad food tastes great when you're hungry. Your taste preferences are more like a suggestion from your brain than a result of hard-wiring.
You have also observed that your tastes in food evolve as you age. A kid who can tolerate nothing but mac and cheese matures into an adult who can't get enough sushi. And I imagine you've had the experience of getting sick soon after eating a specific type of food and finding that the coincidental association completely alters your preference for the food later.
You also might have discovered that some foods you thought were awful-tasting can be delightful if prepared and seasoned to your liking. Technique must be factored into your taste preferences as well.
Your food preferences change continuously throughout your life, but you probably never put much effort into deliberately changing your preferences. I'll describe some tricks for doing just that. If the tricks work, you, too, can eat "whatever you want" because eventually you'll only want food that is good for you.
I used to crave ice cream in a big way. At one point in my life, I consumed up to two heaping bowls of vanilla bean ice cream per day. During those years, broccoli seemed like the sort of thing that jailers forced prisoners to eat as punishment. Over time, I trained myself to reverse my cravings. Now ice cream is easy to resist, but I'm not comfortable going two days without a hit of broccoli. This transformation in cravings was the result of a deliberate effort to change my preferences. I set out to hack my brain like a computer and rewire the cravings circuitry.
If the thought of no longer craving your favorite food sounds like a sacrifice, it isn't. That's an illusion caused by the fact that it's nearly impossible to imagine losing a craving of any kind. Cravings feel like they grow directly from our core. They feel a part of us. My experience is that cravings can be manipulated. I've successfully erased cravings for a wide variety of less-healthy foods. I do them one at a time, and it's a lot easier than you might think.
It also works the other way; I can instill cravings for healthy foods where I previously had no such desires. There's a limit to this trick in the sense that you probably can't get past a truly nasty taste. But most healthy food is closer to bland than obnoxious.
Healthy food has a bad reputation with most normal eaters because we associate healthy food with the worst tastes and textures in the category. If healthy food makes you think of tofu, rice cakes, or anything that tastes like soap, you're probably not too keen on developing a craving for healthy eating. Think instead of delicious, salted nuts, a buttery ear of corn, or a banana, and you're closer to the mark. (I'll talk later about the tradeoffs of consuming salt and butter.)
Changing your food preferences is a straightforward process, and it starts the way all change starts: by looking at things differently. It's my job to do the hard part and show you a different way to look at the familiar topic of diet. Your part will happen naturally as your own thought process gently nudges your behavior along a predictable and controlled pathway of cause and effect.
My experience, as odd as it sounds, is that I can change my food preferences by thinking of my body as a programmable robot as opposed to a fleshy bag full of magic. This minor change in perspective is more powerful than it seems. Most people believe there is no strong connection between what they eat and how they feel. I call that perception the Fleshy Bag of Magic worldview. When you think of yourself as a fleshy bag of magic, you assume there is either no direct connection between what you eat and how you feel, or you think your diet has some impact, but it's unpredictable because life is complicated and there are too many factors in play.
Most adults understand the basic cause-and-effect of their diet choices. They know that overeating makes them feel bloated, beans make them gassy, and spicy food might make their noses run. Those causes and effects are so obvious that they're hard to miss. But have you ever tracked your mood, problem-solving ability, and energy level in relation to what you recently ate? For most people, the answer is no. You probably think your mood is caused by what's happening in your life, not the starchy food you ate for lunch.
If you look at your life from some distance, you can see that today is a lot like yesterday Tomorrow won't be that different either. Our lives stay roughly the same while our moods can swing wildly. My proposition, which I invite you to be skeptical about, is that one of the primary factors in determining your energy level and therefore your mood is what you've eaten recently.¶¶
Look for the Pattern
Don't take my word for it. The food is mood hypothesis probably doesn't pass your common sense filter. It's the sort of thing you need to experience for yourself. You're wired to believe that your mood is determined by whatever good or bad events have happened in your life recently plus your genetic makeup. My observation, backed by the science, is that the person who eats right won't be bothered as much by the little bumps in life's road. They will have greater optimism, too.
When bad luck comes around, your reaction to it is a combination of how bad the luck is plus how prepared your body is for the stress. You can't prevent all bad luck from finding you, but you can fortify yourself to the point where the smaller stuff bounces off. Your mood is a function of chemistry in your body, and food may be a far more dominant contribution to your chemistry than what is happening around you, at least during a normal day.
Remember the first time someone told you it would be hard to rub your stomach and pat your head at the same time? You probably didn't believe it until you tried it yourself. Some types of knowledge can only be acquired by experience. The diet connection to mood is one of those categories of knowledge that must be experienced. Nothing I can tell you in a book will convince you that food is the dominant determinant of mood if you've lived your entire life without noticing that some types of food make you sleepy and probably cranky as a result. The only way you'll believe that food drives your mood is by testing it in your daily life. By that I mean simply asking yourself how you feel at any given moment and then making a mental note of what you ate recently. Look for the pattern.
You might wonder why, if food controls mood, you haven't noticed it already. The biggest reason is that you probably eat meals that are a combination of lots of different ingredients. You rarely isolate one kind of food just to see how it feels. You probably believe the reason you're sleepy after a big meal is simply because you ate a lot and so your body is diverting its energy from your brain and muscles to your digestive system. You think you're sleepy in the afternoon because someone told you that's what lunch does to people. You're not a scientist who isolates one kind of food and does rigorous analysis. You eat when you're hungry and try to sleep when you're tired. The deeper truths about diet do a good job of hiding.
The best way to test the food-is-mood hypothesis is to enjoy a hearty lunch at a Mexican restaurant—a virtual paradise of carbs—and monitor how you feel in a few hours. Check your energy level at about 2:00 PM. Do you feel as if you would prefer exercising or napping? I'll tell you the answer in advance: You'll want the nap.
Do you think your sleepiness in the afternoon might be a simple function of the time of day? That's easy to test. Wait a few days and try the same experiment with breakfast instead of lunch. Order pancakes and hashbrown potatoes. See if you can stay awake until lunchtime. It won't be easy. That experiment will tell you whether the time of day is more important than what you eat.
If you're thinking the "heaviness" of the meal or the quantity is the cause of your sleepiness, try your Mexican food experiment again another day but only eat half as much. You'll discover that quantity doesn't matter as much as you thought.
For the sake of comparison, experiment for a few days by skipping bread, potatoes, white rice, and other simple carbs. Eat veggies, nuts, salad, fish, or chicken. Now see how you feel a few hours after eating. I'll bet the idea of exercising sounds more appealing after eating those types of foods compared to the day of your Mexican food experiment.
Don't take my word for anything on the topic of diet. People are different, and it seems we learn something new about nutrition every week. You should also have a healthy skepticism about diet studies because they're notoriously bad at sorting out correlation from causation. People who eat caviar probably live longer, but it's not the caviar keeping them alive; there's a known correlation between income and life expectancy. Diet studies are hard to trust because there are so many contradictory ones, and often they look at specific populations, not the average person.
Whenever it's practical and safe, consider your body a laboratory in which you can test different approaches to health. Eat something specific, such as a bowl of white rice, and see how you feel later. Or eat lots of carbs and weigh yourself at the end of the week. Look for the patterns. Which foods make you energetic, and which make you sleepy? Which ones can you eat without gaining weight, and which ones make you expand like a Macy's parade balloon? When you get a handle on your own diet cause-and-effect patterns, you might discover they differ from my experience. For example, you might have wheat or gluten sensitivity or a lactose intolerance, or maybe you never get tired in the afternoon no matter what you eat. It's important to figure out what works for you. And that will require experimenting.
In my case, eating simple carbs depletes my energy so thoroughly that a few hours after consuming them I can fall asleep within thirty seconds of closing my eyes. I literally use white rice like a sleeping pill on evenings I've had too much coffee. But your body might respond differently or less dramatically to both coffee and white rice. You need to experiment to know for sure. Just remember that it is chemistry, not magic, controlling your energy.
I haven't mentioned pasta in my list of simple carbs to avoid, and that's intentional. In my experience, pasta doesn't make me sleepy and cranky like other simple carbs. I first discovered that pasta was mood-neutral by eating a lot of it over the years and paying attention to how I felt later. While potatoes send me straight to my napping chair, pasta is a perfect pre-workout snack. When studies later confirmed that pasta isn't especially high on the glycemic index, it matched my own experience and passed my personal bullshit filter. When it comes to diet, you want to stay consistent with science but also look for confirmation in your personal experience.
Peanuts are another example in which science and my own experience lined up. The science says that because peanuts have a high concentration of fat, they satisfy your appetite efficiently and provide fuel.12-18 The unpredicted outcome of adding fat-laden peanuts to your diet is that they improve your ability to lose weight. My experience matches the science exactly. Peanuts do satisfy my appetite, and the pattern I notice is that I eat smaller meals on days I eat peanuts.
Likewise, I find I can eat as much cheese as I want—I eat a lot of it on most days—and it does a great job of satisfying my hunger without making me tired. And if I do a good job with the rest of my diet, I don't gain weight. I don't believe science backs me up on the benefits of cheese, and if my cholesterol were high, I would steer clear. I have some doubts about cheese, but for now I enjoy the taste and appreciate the hunger-squashing utility of it. I'll keep looking at the science as it evolves. Ask your doctor before you follow my lead on cheese. I only mention cheese because it illustrates my approach to choosing foods, not because I necessarily choose right. I'm trying to provide a rational template for diet choices, not a specific prescription for everyone.
Prior to reading this book, the way you probably looked at food was in terms of good versus bad, fattening versus low-calorie, carbs versus protein, or some combination of those. All those ways of looking at food have power to help you steer away from bad diet choices. The problem with the common view of food is that it will always make you feel as if you're in a battle with yourself. You crave bad foods because they are so darned tasty. You struggle to resist.