Better Than The Rest?

It was as close to Dwight Schrute’s world that I’d ever been. I wove my way through office cubicles downstairs into the break room. It was my first workplace wellness talk and the whole time I was wishing Michael Scott would walk through the door. 

I talked about ways to stay sane during 70-80 hour work weeks during tax season. Hours long mid-day trips to the gym were out of the question, so I started with your favorite topic and mine….dieting. 

I reminded the office crew how hard dieting makes it to stay focused and how much it stresses the body. If you’re looking to be productive, dieting would be a last resort choice. Dieting is about as far from productive as you can get seeing as it boasts a 97% failure rate, costs an enormous amount of time and money and leaves you feeling like a bonafide crazy person around food.

In my experience, people can get behind the idea of foods not being good or bad, but the same question always lingers. 

“But, tell us, aren’t some foods just plain healthier and better than others and shouldn’t we be eating more of those foods?” 

If you’ve been living and breathing and adulting for any number of years, you’ve been trained into this healthy and unhealthy mindset. Even the Super Bowl commercial for Poppi advertised the soda as having none of the “bad” stuff. MILLIONS of Americans are groomed to believe this good/bad, healthy/unhealthy paradigm.  

It takes some unlearning about diet culture and the truth about dieting, but you can learn to view foods neutrally again. 

Once you give up hope that diets work, you can genuinely experiment with food.. You’ll find some  foods give you more energy, some foods feel good in your body, some foods make you feel fuller longer, and sometimes your body craves certain foods.

Once we allow full permission and drop the healthy and unhealthy labels, we can actually DECIDE what we feel like eating. Fat activist, Deb Burgard, PhD, says that once we stop dieting, we can go from dieting (restricting anything and everything that you deem bad or unhealthy), to donuts (give me all the things now that I finally have access to them after days, weeks, months or years), to discernment (the ability to be able to think about and know intuitively what I actually want at any particular moment in time). Sometimes licking cheesy Doritos fingers hits the spot and sometimes it’s a crunchy carrot and hummus.

Neither option is good or bad, healthy or unhealthy or better than the rest. 

I guess we can all agree, though, that Mahomes is better than the rest, but I digress…