How (and why) To Change How You Think About Food

Food is a lot of things. It can be thought of as fuel. Further down, it’s a big pile of carb and fat and protein molecules. Even further down, it’s the resonating energy of its atomic bonds. None of these are wrong, but none of these descriptions are helpful either.

Thinking about your food as fuel leads people to feel like they need to eat after they’ve expended energy, or just woken up, or “to keep their metabolism going”. Each of these reasons to eat cause you to think about other things besides whether you are actually hungry. In other words, it helps create mindless eating.

Thinking about your food as a pile of carbs, fats, or proteins makes you treat eating like a chemistry experiment, titrating exactly the right number of this, that, and the other thing. This totally saps the life and love out of eating. At that point, you are eating to eat, nothing more.

Thinking about food as the sum of it’s atoms is fine for a physicist, but that kind of reductionism leads people to feel like they can eat those molecules and they’ll be fine. Just have supplements, for example, and as long as you get the iron or niacin or whatever, you’ll be fine. Eating those very same molecules (but outside of the context of normal food) changes how your body deals with them. So … it’s not the same after all.

From the standpoint of your body, food comes in the context of the social environment of eating, and in the normal packaging that has been on this plant for … ever. The context of the molecules is as food. For example, eat an apple, not phytonutrients. Eat fish, not omega 3s. Drink tea, not catechins and epicatechins. If you do this, and take your time to taste your food, you will also be more likely to control the overconsumption that can make food bad for you.