by Adams, Scott
Most adults understand the basic cause and effect of their diet choices. They know that overeating makes them feel bloated, beans make them gassy, and spicy food might make their noses run. Those causes and effects are so obvious that they are hard to miss. But have you ever tracked your mood, problem-solving ability, and energy level in relation to what you recently ate? For most of you, the answer is no. You probably think your mood is caused by what’s happening in your life, not the starchy food you ate for lunch.
If you look at your life from some distance, you can see that today is a lot like yesterday, and tomorrow won’t be that different either. Our lives stay roughly the same, while our moods can swing wildly. My proposition, which I invite you to be skeptical about, is that one of the primary factors in determining your energy level, and therefore your mood, is what you’ve eaten recently.*
Look for the Pattern
Don’t take my word for it. The food-is-mood hypothesis probably doesn’t pass your commonsense filter. It’s the sort of thing you need to experience for yourself. You’re wired to believe that your mood is determined by whatever good or bad events have happened in your life recently plus your genetic makeup. My observation, backed by the science, is that the person who eats right won’t be bothered as much by the little bumps in life’s road, and he or she will have greater optimism, too.
When bad luck comes around, your reaction to it is a combination of how bad the luck is plus how prepared your body is for the stress. You can’t keep all bad luck from finding you, but you can fortify yourself to the point where the smaller stuff bounces off. Your mood is a function of chemistry in your body, and food may be a far more dominant contributor to your chemistry than what is happening around you, at least during a normal day.
Remember the first time someone told you it would be hard to rub your stomach and pat your head at the same time? You probably didn’t believe it until you tried it yourself. Some types of knowledge can be acquired only by experience. Diet’s connection to mood is one of those categories of knowledge that must be experienced. Nothing I can tell you in a book will convince you that food is a huge determinant of mood if you’ve lived your entire life without noticing that potatoes make you sleepy, and probably cranky as a result. The only way you’ll believe that food drives your mood is by testing the claim in your daily life. By that I mean simply asking yourself how you feel at any given moment and then making a mental note of what you ate recently. Look for the pattern.
You might wonder why, if food controls mood, you haven’t noticed it already. The biggest reason is that you probably eat meals that are a combination of lots of different ingredients. You rarely isolate one kind of food just to see how it feels. You probably believe the reason you’re sleepy after a big meal is simply because you ate a lot and your body is diverting its energy from your brain and muscles to your digestive system. You think you’re sleepy in the afternoon because someone told you that’s what lunch does to people. You’re not a scientist who isolates one kind of food and does rigorous analysis. You eat when you’re hungry and try to sleep when you’re tired. The deeper truths about diet do a good job of hiding.
The best way to test the food-is-mood connection is to enjoy a hearty lunch at a Mexican restaurant—a virtual paradise of carbs—and monitor how you feel in a few hours. Check your energy level at about 2:00 P.M. Do you feel that you would prefer exercising or napping? I’ll tell you the answer in advance: You’ll want the nap.
Do you think your sleepiness in the afternoon might be a simple function of the time of day? That’s easy to test. Wait a few days and try the same experiment with breakfast instead of lunch. Order pancakes and hash-brown potatoes. See if you can stay awake until lunchtime. It won’t be easy. That experiment will tell you whether the time of day is more important than what you eat.
If you’re thinking the “heaviness” of the meal or the quantity is the cause of your sleepiness, try your Mexican-food experiment again another day but only eat half as much. You’ll discover that quantity doesn’t matter as much as you thought.
For the sake of comparison, experiment for a few days by skipping bread, potatoes, white rice, and other simple carbs. Eat fruits, veggies, nuts, salad, fish, or chicken. Now see how you feel a few hours after eating. I’ll bet the idea of exercising will sound more appealing after eating those types of foods compared with the day of your Mexican-food experiment.
Don’t take my word for anything on the topic of diet. People are different, and it seems we learn something new about nutrition every week. You should also have a healthy skepticism about diet studies because they are notoriously bad at sorting out correlation from causation. People who eat caviar probably live longer, but it’s not the caviar keeping them alive; there’s a known correlation between income and life expectancy. Diet studies are hard to trust because there are so many contradictory ones and often they are looking at specific populations and not the average person.
Whenever it’s practical and safe, consider your body a laboratory in which you can test different approaches to health. Eat something specific, such as a bowl of white rice, and see how you feel later. Or eat lots of carbs and weigh yourself at the end of the week. Look for the patterns. Which foods make you energetic and which ones make you sleepy? Which ones can you eat without gaining weight and which ones make you expand like a Macy’s parade float? When you get a handle on your own diet cause-and-effect patterns, you might discover they differ from my experience. For example, you might have wheat or gluten sensitivity or a lactose intolerance, or maybe you never get tired in the afternoon no matter what you eat. It’s important to figure out what works for you. And that will require experimenting.
In my case, eating simple carbs depletes my energy so thoroughly that a few hours after consuming them I can fall asleep within thirty seconds of closing my eyes. I literally use white rice like a sleeping pill on evenings when I’ve had too much coffee. But your body might respond differently or less dramatically to both coffee and white rice. You need to experiment to know for sure. Just remember that it is chemistry, not magic controlling your energy.
I haven’t mentioned pasta in my list of simple carbs to avoid, and that’s intentional. In my experience, pasta doesn’t make me sleepy and cranky like other simple carbs. I first discovered that pasta was mood neutral by eating a lot of it over the years and paying attention to how I felt later. While potatoes send me straight to my napping chair, pasta is a perfect preworkout snack. When studies later confirmed that pasta isn’t especially high on the glycemic index, the finding matched my own experience and passed my personal bullshit filter. Generally speaking, when it comes to diet, you want to stay consistent with science but also look for confirmation in your personal experience.
Peanuts are another example in which science and my own experience lined up. The science says that because peanuts have a high concentration of fat, they satisfy your appetite efficiently and provide fuel.2 The unpredicted outcome of adding fat-laden peanuts to your diet is that it improves your ability to lose weight. My experience matches the science exactly. Peanuts do satisfy my appetite, and the pattern I notice is that I eat smaller meals on days I eat peanuts.
Likewise, I find I can eat as much cheese as I want—I eat a lot of it on most days—and it does a great job of satisfying my hunger without making me tired. And as long as I do a good job with the rest of my diet, I don’t gain weight. I don’t believe science backs me up on the benefits of cheese, and if my cholesterol were high I would steer clear. I have some doubts about cheese, but for now I enjoy the taste and I appreciate the hunger-squashing utility of it. I’ll keep looking at the science as it evolves. Ask your doctor before you follow my lead on cheese. I mention cheese only because it illustrates my approach to choosing foods, not because I necessarily choose right. I’m trying to provide a rational template for diet choices, not a specific prescription for each of you.
Prior to reading this book, the way you probably looked a
t food was in terms of good versus bad, or fattening versus low calorie, or maybe carbs versus protein, or some combination of the above. All of those ways of looking at food have power to help you steer away from bad diet choices. The problem with the common view of food is that it will always make you feel as if you were in a battle with yourself. You crave bad foods because they are so darned tasty. You struggle to resist.
Science has demonstrated that humans have a limited supply of willpower.3 If you use up your supply resisting one temptation, it limits your ability to resist others. Struggling to do anything has a steep price because you don’t want to use up your willpower and energy on something as unimportant as staying away from the candy drawer. You might need your willpower later for something more substantial. What you need is a diet system that doesn’t rely on willpower. And that means reprogramming your food preferences so willpower is less necessary. I’ll explain how to do that in a minute.
Some of you will liken the idea of reprogramming your brain to self-hypnosis, and that might feel creepy or unlikely to work. A better approach, as I mentioned, is to think of your body as a moist, programmable robot whose outputs depend on its inputs, not magic. Imagine you’re an engineer who is trying to find the user interface for your moist robot body so you can make some useful adjustments. It’s as if you had one menu choice labeled “Make Sleepy” and another labeled “Energize.” You can choose “Make Sleepy” simply by eating simple carbs.
If the idea of reprogramming your mind sounds like L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics and the process of “auditing,” which is at the core of Scientology, that’s about half right. The part that’s right is that Dianetics also attempts to change behavior by changing the way you look at yourself and what makes you do what you do. Interestingly, as I pointed out earlier in this book, you can get good results by doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. For example, if you believe alcohol is the devil’s urine, it might eliminate your risk of drinking and driving. You can often get good results from inaccurate worldviews. Some famous philosophers, some scientists, and at least one cartoonist would speculate that inaccurate worldviews are the only kind there is.
Does Dianetics work in terms of creating good outcomes for its followers? I have no data to answer that question. But I wouldn’t be surprised if auditing does work for some people. Based on my experience, I think you could replace the auditing process in Scientology with a Ouija board and still have good outcomes for some people.
The Food–Exercise Connection
The traditional view of weight maintenance is that you need to exercise and watch your diet to get good results. That’s mostly true, but a more useful way to look at the connection between food and exercise is not that they are equal partners. A more practical view is that food is the fuel that makes exercise possible. When you eat simple carbs for lunch, you find yourself wanting a nap more than you want to spend an hour on the treadmill. If you stuff yourself for dinner, you might cancel your plans to go for a run. If you manage your diet right, you’ll want to exercise more, and that will translate into doing so. The starting point for good health is diet. Once you get your diet right, your energy level will increase and you’ll find yourself more in the mood for exercise.
It can be doubly hard to change your diet and start an exercise program at the same time, at least in the usual way people do these things, because both objectives require willpower. A smarter approach is to use a system to remove willpower from your diet choices—as I’ll explain in a bit—and let your increased energy guide you toward a natural preference for being more active. I’ll have more to say about exercise later. The main point for both diet and exercise is that you want to reduce the amount of willpower required. Any other approach is unsustainable.
Breaking the Simple-Carb Addiction
The willpower you need to resist simple carbs such as white potatoes, white bread, and white rice has to come from somewhere, and as I mentioned earlier, studies show that using willpower for anything reduces how much you have in reserve for other temptations. The approach that works for me involves stealing willpower from the part of my brain that tries to avoid overeating. You might want to give my method a try. For a few months, eat as much as you want of anything that is not a simple carb. That frees up your willpower so you can use it to avoid those delicious and convenient simple carbs.
If you were hungry and I said you couldn’t eat the delicious bread in the breadbasket in front of you, it would take a lot of willpower to resist. But if I said you couldn’t have the delicious bread but you could have anything else you wanted, and you could have it right now, suddenly the bread would be easy to resist. An attractive alternative makes willpower less necessary. It frees up your stockpile of willpower for other uses. Under my system, all you need to do is eat as much as you want of anything that isn’t a simple carb and keep on that path for a few months.
Would this plan make you gain weight for a few months? For some people it might. But the short term doesn’t matter; you’re in this for the long haul. It’s a system, not a diet with a specific weight goal. Remember, goals are a trap. You want systems, not goals. The first part of the system is to break your addiction to simple carbs.
My experience is that after you break the addiction it isn’t hard to recover from the occasional french-fry binge. Food isn’t like alcohol, where one drink can set an alcoholic back to the bottom. Eating a piece of bread is only a pebble in the road for someone who has broken the carb addiction.
If for several months you give yourself permission to eat as much as you want of the foods that don’t include addictive simple carbs, you’ll discover several things. For starters, you’ll have more energy without the simple carbs. And that will translate into keeping you more active, which in turn burns calories.
Another change you’ll notice after a few months without simple carbs is that your cravings will start to diminish. The sensation you feel as a preference for certain foods can be in reality more of an addiction than a true preference. For example, there was a long period in my life in which I couldn’t go a whole day without eating a giant Snickers candy bar. The first bite created a feeling of euphoria that I enjoyed in every particle of my being. But after a few months of eating as much as I wanted of healthier food, I lost the craving for Snickers bars. What I thought was some sort of deep genetic disposition to like chocolate was actually more of an addiction. After a few months of staying off the chocolate I lost the craving. Later, when I ate a Snickers bar just to test what would happen, I barely enjoyed it. It felt like nothing but unnecessary calories.
Just to be clear, I don’t include Snickers in the category of simple carbs that sap your energy. My experience was that the combination of chocolate and peanuts generally pepped me up, exactly as Snickers commercials suggest. My only problem with Snickers was that I binged on them.
I’ve had less success losing my desire for white rice and potatoes. Apparently I have a genuine preference for those tastes. But the desires aren’t so strong that I would pass up an apple to eat poorly. Today when I look at a pile of mashed potatoes, I automatically associate it with feeling crappy in an hour. And if that isn’t enough to keep the fork out of my hand, I give myself permission to eat as much as I want of good food instead. The diversion usually works.
Diet Coke
In the interest of full disclosure, over the course of my life I have consumed far too much Diet Coke. I have routinely consumed as many as twelve Diet Cokes per day. All of this was in the context of nearly every medical and nutritional expert warning against it. My problem was that I truly enjoyed each Diet Coke I drank, and when I looked for the science about the health risks, I saw a lot of correlation but no clear causation. But I kept an eye on it just in case the science became settled on one side or the other.
A few months ago, as part of my process for writing this book, I put my concept of cravings management to the ultimate test: I quit Diet Coke, cold turkey, after forty-plus years of extraordinaril
y regular consumption. The first week was hard, I admit. But I substituted coffee, which I also love, whenever I craved Diet Coke, and that greatly reduced my need to use willpower. Week one was a challenge. By week four, it was easy to resist Diet Coke. Eight weeks later, I see Diet Coke as a weird little colored water full of chemicals that I don’t need. My cravings are completely gone, and it didn’t require much of anything in terms of willpower beyond the first several days. I’m even enjoying my greater coffee consumption because I feel more alert all day. And coffee in moderation gets high marks from science for promoting good health.4
The reason I picked Diet Coke for my cravings-elimination test is that while I’m not convinced that diet soda is especially unhealthy for the occasional consumer, I wasn’t so sure that drinking twelve cans a day was contributing to a healthy life. And while the studies on the dangers of diet sodas stop short of being convincing, at least to me, at some point the sheer tonnage of negative health correlations reached a tipping point for my personal risk profile. So just to be clear, I am not personally aware of any proven health problems from an occasional diet soda. I just don’t like the odds.5
How to Know What to Eat
One of the biggest barriers to healthy eating is the inconvenience factor. Life is so busy for most of us that convenience trumps most other considerations. We do what’s easiest even if we know it shortens our lives. What you want is for healthy food to be more convenient than unhealthy food. I’ll give you a few tips that can help. But first let me describe just how hard it is to even know what is healthy, much less find it.
