Something that took me far, far too long to learn :

Give you stomach veto power over what you eat. Assuming you are healthy. you really should listen when your stomach says not to eat something. The taste buds are idiots who have no idea what the consequences of eating something will be. Neither do they care. They just want the flavour NOW.

Listen to your stomach, kids. Sure, it could be wrong. It could be that you can eat that flaming hot tamale and not suffer one bit.

But the consequences of a false positive are way less severe and lasting than that of a false positive, don’t you think?

This goes for our bodies in general. Lately I have been listening to my body^[1] and, in a sense, asking it what it wants.

Turns out that if you ask the body, what it wants are nutrients. Big surprise there. It’s your idiot taste buds that have led people to “crave” unhealthy foods because said foods are supranatural stimuli that produce an unusually (and unhealthily) reward response in out brains, essentially into dopamine addicts. We become dependent on the artificially high dopamine levels we get from junk food, and when those levels drop, it can feel a lot like depression.

Solution? More junk food! And unlike other addictive substances, this one is available literally everywhere you can buy food.

And if you think I am excluding myself from this, well, here’s Larry Groce from all the way back in the 70’s with my rebuttal :

I won’t get into why people are walking around feeling empty inside in the first place. That’s for another day.

Short answer : spiritual starvation.

So junk food makes addicts of us all, with all that implies.

But if we start listening to our bodies and eating what it craves. we can end up eating a perfectly healthy diet without really feeling like we are giving anything up.

That’s because the countintuitivre thing is that if we are paying attention, our bodies will reward us for giving it what it wants. It won’t be the heady rush of junk food, granted. Instead it will the feeling of all the cells in your body shouting “Hooray! Nutrients!”.

And I am not saying give up junk food. That’s a recipe for failure. Deprival doesn’t extinguish desires, and putting people in a position where their junk food addiction leaves them “craving” the unhealthy stuff is insane.

You’re basically saying, “You can be healthy! All you need is infinite willpower forever. ”

Nuh uh. Fuck that noise. If you are craving those M&Ms, go for it.

Just make sure you also eat healthy foods.

Despite what nutritionists and austerity addicts will tell you, eating the bad stuff does not negate having eaten the good stuff. This isn’t a merit system, with merits and demerits. The most important thing is that your body gets everything it needs in order to maintain itself and its health.

Getting more than that of some things (like carbs) is still bad but less bad than it was before because now your body has all the nutrients it needs to handle it.

That big piece of pie is way less likely to go straight to your thighs if it comes after a healthy, delicious balanced meal.

I haven’t come up with a name for this diet philosophy of mine. My first thought was “The Additive Diet”, because it adds foods without subtracting any.

But that name is bad on so many levels, not the least of which is that it sounds like a diet consisting entirely of food additives, like beef tallow or carageenen.

The other name is “the Eat More Weight Less Diet”, which is boffo in terms of sales appeal but sadly has already been done.

Maybe I should call it the “Eat Junk Food And Lose Weight Diet”. or the Junk Food Diet for short. That would grab people’s attention

Or maybe the “Eat What You Want Diet”.

Hmmm. Perhaps it could be structured like Deal-A-Meal or other such plans. You start every day with an empty copy of the food pyramid and a lot of little cards representing the various nutrients you need.

The idea would be to use the enclosed booklet (or the website, or whatevs) to look up how much of what nutrients are in various things and then use the little nutrient cards to fill up your food pyramid.

That would not only teach people what their bodies need. it would also illustrate whatever they are getting too much of without actually saying not to have it.

It’s up to you whether knowing a Cinnabon contains like 14 million times your daily requirement of carbs influences your decision to eat it.

I like this idea of mine. I think it could work. It’s fairly simple and easy to use – you don’t even have to do math if you don’t want to, you can just look at your little pyramid and do what it tells you.

Of course, it’s especially good for us system builder types because it gives us a fun and colorful system to play with and attempt to maximize.

Even if you are not that type of weirdo, the system would still inherently incentivise (sp?) eating highly nutritious food so that you get as many of your nutrients at once as possible, knowing that once that pyramid is covered, you can eat whatever the fuck you want and the system does not care.

And yes, it is entirely possible that if you eat all the healthy stuff, you won’t have any appetite left for the bad stuff.

And that will definitely make the addiction unhappy.

But at least you will be full, and it is way easier to resist those bad impulses when you are full and replete with nutrition.

You know, I might actually be on to something. I should look up some publishers of diet books with my idea.

There’s a lot of money to be made in diet books and I am pretty sure this one could be big. Not exactly the field I was hoping to break into, but money.

I wants it.

I have a lot to think about now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.