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I recently read a study that shocked me.
According to this study, the typical person sets a goal to “eat healthier” an average of 4 times per month.
The same survey found that the average person had been on 4 different diets over a 5-year span, and quit prematurely during half of them.
Clearly, people want to eat healthier. And the majority of people don’t follow through.
There are many reasons for this - a major one being that most people don’t accurately understand how to construct a diet that is both healthy and sustainable for them.
But there’s another reason that has fascinated me lately…and requires us to go deep into our psyches.
Why do so many of us fail to follow through on our nutrition goals?
Because we are thoroughly, deeply undernourished.
Overweight is undernourished
I originally heard this idea from Dr. Syed Haider.
Being overweight, addicted to food, or physically unhealthy (in a way that you can trace back to your eating habits) are all symptoms of a larger problem.
This larger problem starts with the recognition that you are more than just your body. You are a physical being, for sure - that’s a wonderful, glorious reality.
But you are also a mind, a heart, and a soul.
As Dr. Haider puts it in this excellent Substack article,
“Your body, mind, heart and soul are just names for different aspects of your self and they all need nourishment. These aspects of self receive communication from the environment and communicate their needs back to us. The messages we send to ourselves by the choices we make create the outcome we see: our body composition, mood, energy, enthusiasm, satisfaction and everything else.”
The point here is profound:
If you’re addicted to eating foods that cause you more harm than good, it’s a symptom that something is unbalanced in the depths of your being.
Dr. Haider continues,
“If our whole self is not getting what it needs to thrive it will send signal flares back letting us know there is something missing. But most people misinterpret the ‘hunger’ signals being sent back to them and simply think they are hungry for physical food. Which is why people tend to eat more when they are tired, stressed, thirsty, or even feeling unloved.”
We’ve lost the ability to decipher what our whole selves are actually hungry for.
We detect a signal that something is missing, or out of balance. That signal often comes to us in the form of a vaguely uncomfortable feeling - this is our body’s way of trying to force us to take action in hopes of meeting that need.
However, our reaction to that vaguely uncomfortable feeling usually makes matters worse.
Typically, instead of asking what we are truly "hungry" for, we try to suppress the feeling.
From what I can observe, both in myself and in larger society, the two most prevalent ways of seeking relief from those uncomfortable “negative” feelings are:
Digital stimulation (social media, videos, Netflix, video games, etc.)
Mindless eating (usually with hyper-palatable, hyper-processed foods)
If you resort to these two strategies every time you experience a negative emotion, not only do you eventually put on a lot of weight and get addicted to your screens, but you’re never actually stopping to listen to the signal your body is trying to send you.
Letting “negative” emotions speak
These so-called “negative” emotions are communicating deep, internal imbalances that signal a mismatch in what our selves need and how we typically live our lives.
Boredom signals that we’re accustomed to constant stimulation to cover up our lack of adventure and meaning
Stress signals that we’re anxious about the future, or a relationship, or money/survival
Loneliness signals that we’ve put up walls between us and the people around us
Exhaustion signals that we overwork ourselves and don’t allow ourselves to rest
Disconnection from the natural world signals that we live 100% of the time in our artificial environments
Physical stagnation signals that we live incredibly sedentary lives
Of course, this is not an exhaustive list. But it’s helpful to start thinking about what might be at the root of these uncomfortable feelings so that we can actually resolve them.
The easy - and entirely unproductive - solution is to order DoorDash, stop at the McDonald’s drive-thru on the way home from a stressful day at work, or eat an entire pack of Oreos while binging a show on Netflix.
Note: I’m not saying that you should never eat takeout, watch TV, or indulge in a dessert - far from it.
What I am saying is that this should always be an intentional decision, not an attempt to mask the signals your subconscious self is desperately trying to send you.
Holistic nourishment
The solution is to seek to become the type of person who is wholly, deeply nourished in a multi-dimensional way.
Dr. Haider hits the nail on the head again:
”To be truly well nourished people need to balance their intellect with both ideas and daydreams, their hearts with both positive and negative emotions, their souls with both intimate connection and solitude, and their bodies with both food and fasting, movement and rest, sunshine and darkness, heat and cold, stress and relaxation.”
At the heart of holistic nourishment is the ability to embrace the inclusion of opposites.
This hearkens back to the hermetic principle of polarity, which states that everything has two poles.
There are two sides to everything. To be complete, you need to make room for pairs of opposites.
A healthy mindset is usually a “both-and” mindset.
Notice the pairs of opposites that Dr. Haider says are necessary in a truly well-nourished person:
Both ideas and daydreams
Both positive and negative emotions
Both intimate connections and solitude
Both food and fasting
Both movement and rest
Both sunshine and darkness
Both heat and cold
Both stress and relaxation
The tendency in today’s world, on the other hand, is to smooth out our experience, to remove the extremes.
Instead of experiencing both heat and cold, our homes are always a comfortable 75 degrees, and we rarely venture outside in uncomfortable temperatures to experience the extremes.
Instead of fully experiencing both positive and negative emotions, we suppress the uncomfortable ones and try to make life happy and breezy all the time.
Instead of training ourselves to be comfortable with solitude, we seek constant superficial connections…even if it’s just a cheap version of the real thing (aka social media).
Instead of having periods of eating and periods of fasting, we snack and graze all day long.
I posit that in order to be truly healthy, we need to start incorporating extremes back into our life.
Your circadian rhythm can’t be fully aligned unless you’re exposing your eyes to bright blue light in the morning and soft reddish light in the evening.
A well-designed exercise program should have days of hard work and intensity interspersed with days of rest.
You should eat nourishing foods when it’s time to eat, then let your digestive system rest in between.
There should be times when you focus your mind to think and articulate and reason, alternated with periods of time when you let it wander and daydream.
In a healthy, balanced life, everything fits. Everything has its place. We were designed for oscillation…experience was never meant to be static.
The ability to rule your cravings
When you are truly well-nourished in this sense, it liberates you to actually follow through on your nutritional goals. You won’t be eating in order to cover up an inner sense of lack - instead, you’ll be free to make intentional decisions about what to eat.
Someone who recognizes that both positive and negative emotions have a place will have no need to numb unpleasant ones with food.
You’ll be free to attend a social event and eat (or not), because your focus will be on the social connections, not just the dessert table.
Your life will be full of fun and adventure, so you won’t need to look to hyper-palatable foods to provide the big dopamine boosts that you’re lacking.
You won’t be a slave to your appetites, so you’ll be free to actually enjoy your meals.
As with many things, the Bible has it right.
“Everything is permissible for me, but not everything is beneficial. Everything is permissible for me, but I will not be mastered by anything” (1 Corinthians 6:12).
With nutrition, this is the ultimate goal - to know that you have permission to eat anything you’d like (we’re not saying that foods are morally good or bad), but that not all foods are equally beneficial…and you need to be free to decide to either eat it, or to abstain.
If you are at the mercy of your cravings, and if you find yourself continually going back to foods that you know aren’t serving you, it’s a sign that something is off.
Instead of being like the people in the study who doomed themselves to failure by making the same resolution to eat better every single week, dig a little deeper.
Are you suppressing a signal that your body is sending you? Is there an imbalance in any of the categories we listed earlier that you need to make right?
*Note: It’s possible that cravings could indicate nutrient deficiencies - this is definitely worth exploring, even though it’s not the specific topic of this article.
If you start to look at your nutrition goals not as ends in themselves, but a means of becoming a better human being and going on your own adventure of self-improvement, you’ll actually have a much better chance at following through on them.
Conclusion
If you struggle with intense cravings, emotional eating, or binges that make it difficult to follow through on nutrition goals you’ve set, allow yourself to consider this powerful question:
"Why?"
The next time you experience that craving, ask yourself “why” before you allow yourself to indulge it.
Are you actually craving movement? Go for a walk.
Are you craving companionship? Call a friend.
Are you bored? Pick up a hobby.
Are you tired? Lie down for 10 minutes with no other agenda but to rest.
Are you thirsty? Have a drink of water (maybe with a pinch of salt to provide electrolytes).
Sometimes, the best thing you can do is let your subconscious speak. When you start listening to it, you just might find that it stops fighting you, because it craves the exact things that will ultimately make you the healthiest version of yourself.
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