In no other discipline will you find more disagreement than that which exists between dietitians. But the one point upon which they will almost all agree is that each individual is unique and has unique dietary needs.
Perhaps you haven’t had the benefit of a very healthy friend or relative to influence you towards conscious eating. If you had, the first thing they would tell you is that the only reason diets fail is because people stop doing them.
“Dieting” is not “fasting.” “Fasting” is a temporary, hardcore nutritional routine to reach a certain goal, usually weight loss. “Diet” refers to your nutritional choices. The more permanent they are, the more they will benefit you.
Is a vegetarian on a diet, or do they dedicate themselves to a nutritional choice? Is a vegan on a diet, or do they dedicate themselves to being dissatisfied and judgmental? Diets are part of your lifestyle and a critical part of your self-care routine. If you eat like crap, you will feel like crap.
If something you eat has calories or a label describing nutrition facts, it is part of your diet. That label is put there by law, and that law prevents food corporations from feeding you whatever they want. Nutritional labels contain some of the most valuable, free information in the world. You have no reason not to take advantage of this. It is your right to know what you eat, so you should exercise that right. If you do not, that right will go away.
Over the last decade, Americans have consumed over 50% more sodium per day than the recommended value, and the number continues to climb. This trend continues despite calls 15 years ago from the American Medical Association about the urgent need to cut sodium consumption. The overconsumption of sodium leads to higher rates of cardiovascular disease and hypertension, the latter of which affects over a quarter of the global population.
Humans are built with a “salt taste threshold”, which refers to the amount of salt a person needs in their food to recognize that it has been properly salted. This amount is habitual, which means that a person will get used to the level of salt in their food and require more for salt taste recognition.
Restaurants often heavily salt their food to ensure that the experience of eating it is impressive, and no restaurants do this more than fast food. A high salt threshold is associated with hypertension and associated coronary heart disease. Therefore, lowering your sodium intake is an immediate, measurable dietary goal you can employ from now until the end of your long, happy life.
Eliminating salt takes some work, but after an initial adjustment period, regulating salt intake becomes second nature.
First, don’t ever eat canned beans. Canned beans are mostly water, which is heavy, so you end up paying an absurd markup on the value of the actual beans. Canned beans also contain a monstrous amount of sodium, are overcooked, and generally taste like crap. You can cook your own beans in a pressure cooker in about an hour. For the price of a single can of beans, you can make enough to last you a week, and they will only contain the salt that you add yourself.
Canned vegetables are in a similar category. You mostly pay for water, they could taste better, and have more sodium than you can justify for the small amount of food that it flavors. Fresh vegetables are the optimal choice, but if you simply don’t have the time or the drive, frozen vegetables are usually just that. Frozen vegetables. No salt, no nitrates, no garbage.
Sugar is another culprit to modern unhealth that will sadly remain a staple of human consumption well past my lifetime. In the 1960s, the sugar industry fabricated studies to show that consuming saturated fat was the primary cause of heart disease.
This created our current trend of low fat, high carb, sugary diets. More recently, Coca-Cola has paid scientists to shift the focus of their investigations into obesity away from calories and towards inactivity, thus taking the blame away from their flagship product.
If you consume a non-diet soft drink, you are adding hundreds of unnecessary, totally useless calories to your diet. Sugar-sweetened drinks are directly linked to heart disease and diabetes and are a primary contributor to obesity in children. We have known this for over 20 years, yet schools around the country continue to provide soft drink vending machines to their children.
Once you begin looking for sugar on nutritional labels, it will blow your mind. It is in ketchup, peanut butter, most crackers, most cookies, most “health” bars, most protein powders, most powdered milk, flavor packets, spaghetti sauce, most kid’s breakfast cereal, yogurt, all fruit juice (natural sugar is also sugar), sports drinks, canned soup, some canned beans, preserved fruit, beef jerky, and chewing gum. It is a dense wood, but patience and perseverance will reduce your sugar intake and the health concerns that go along with it.
Alcohol is the most commonly overlooked garbage that people consume. If you want to screw up your life in every way, drinking more alcohol will speed you towards that goal. Pursuing sobriety does not mean you should abstain forever, but you deserve to be aware that the risks of drinking far outweigh any benefits, and if you add up the calories from a night of drinking, you might be horrified.
Hopefully, this has introduced you to the value of researching your diet and how awareness of what you eat can affect the way you function. Only a healthy body can house a healthy mind, and they both start with what you feed them.