I’ve often found I navigate the realm of food and meals with ever-changing habits and behavior. Looking online there are various diets coming from “doctors” that contradict each other. In a space as saturated as health content, creators feel the need to reinvent the wheel and differentiate themselves from the masses by proclaiming the importance of fiber, or meat, or plants. This in mind, below are a few principles for eating that I try to follow.
- Eat healthy
- There is no sensible reason to eat unhealthy, so make healthy eating a priority. What does this mean? This means low ingredient, or single ingredient, foods like meats, plants, fruits, etc. We all know what to do, it’s just a matter of trading Snickers for steak
- Never say never
- There are too many tasty desserts that exist in the world to write them off completely. Saying “I’ll never eat sugar” and other synonymous phrases are slippery slopes towards bad habits. These kinds of binary judgments become apart of your ego and are bound to be broken; it’s ok to have a cookie, it’s just a matter of frequency.
- Don’t wait
- There are too many restaurants, many which have only marginal differences in quality, to wait such long periods for food. When you go to a restaurant, you are participating in a totally transactional relationship: you give money, they provide food. Anything beyond that is a distraction and often a nuisance. Time is too precious, progressively increasing in value, to sit idly for food when you can go down the street to a different restaurant or make your own food
- Eat less, not more
- When you eat pizza, the first slice is great, the second slice similarly good, but it doesn’t take long before you regret eating so much. When you eat less, you feel more. One slice of pizza captures all the flavor and taste as does seven
- Three meals, two meals, one meal
- Breakfast is not the most important meal of the day, and neither is lunch or dinner. Humans have evolved without the conception of three meals a day consistently at set times. Eat what makes sense for your activity level and your life.