Choose or Lose?

In my last post, I suggested that limiting your food choices could actually improve your eating experience. Faithful reader Ben made a comment that choices are good, as long as we remember that “No” is a choice. That got me thinking. No matter how the dictionary defines the word “choice,” in the popular culture, especially when talking about food, the word “choice” means one thing and one thing only: the right to say “Yes.”

This definition has enormous impact on our decision-making about what we will eat on a daily basis, for reasons not the least of which is that it is subconscious. By keeping this belief way on the back shelf of your mind’s refrigerator, you will feel that you have had a choice when you say yes to that 32-ounce Mountain Dew (also known as 496 calories and 31 teaspoons of sugar). If you say no to this nutritionally empty drink, you will not have had a choice. You will have been deprived.

Think about this for a few minutes and let it sink in. If you can eat The Three Little Pigs to your heart’s delight (and I mean this in an emotional sense only because the Pigs – better known as fat, sugar and salt – will destroy your actual physical heart), you have choice; you may even say you have “freedom of choice,” and we Americans sure do love to love our freedom. If you eat in a different way, perhaps in a healthier way, then your freedom of choice will have been curtailed, and you might find yourself ranting and raving about the evil nanny state run by a guy named Mike.

Now take this scenario a little further. Suppose you are overweight and you’d like to shed a few pounds. Chances are, you are overweight because you eat too much food that is high in the Pigs, so in order to lose weight, you must stop eating those foods and eat something else, like broccoli or apples, instead. If the way you experience this change is that you are being deprived of your choice to eat “good food” and forced to eat stuff that’s good for you (horrors!), the odds of your long-term weight loss success will be greatly diminished. On the other hand, if you decide that saying no to greasy, overly sweet meals really means saying yes to health, because maybe you deserve health, the outcome will likely be quite different.

Don’t get me wrong. What I’m suggesting is not easy and I haven’t completely mastered it myself. My closet is still stuffed with food demons and it’s not infrequently that I find myself craving the foods that made me fat. Like ice cream. Or a big honking bowl of macaroni and cheese. But I have a tool in my arsenal now that I didn’t have before. When I start to obsess about those bad boys, I remind myself how it felt to be 100 pounds overweight, which was the consequence of choosing to eat that way, and then I choose to eat something else. Or not eat at all.

The pushers and pimps of food culture will tell you that more is better. They lie. I’ll take my cue instead from the architect Mies van der Rohe, who famously said, “Less is more.” As in less fat, less sugar, less salt = more health, more vitality, more life. You can believe me or not. Once again, you choose.