No diet, no detox: how to relearn the art of eating
- Apr 13, 2016
- 5 min read
Our relationship with food has become disordered and obsessive. As the new year brings diet madness, it needn’t be such a struggle to learn good eating habits.
So many of our anxieties around diet take the form of a search for the perfect food, the one that will cure all our ills. Eat this! Don’t eat that! We obsess about the properties of various ingredients: the protein, the omega oils, the vitamins. But nutrients only count when a person picks up food and eats it. How we eat – how we approach food – is what really matters. If we are going to change our diets, we first have to relearn the art of eating, which is a question of psychology as much as nutrition. We have to find a way to want to eat what’s good for us.
All the foods that you regularly eat are ones that you learned to eat. Everyone starts life drinking milk. After that, it’s all up for grabs. From our first year of life, human tastes are astonishingly diverse.
Once you recognise the simple fact that food preferences are learned, many of the ways we approach eating start to look a little weird. To take a small example, consider the parents who go to great lengths to “hide” vegetables in children’s meals. Is broccoli really so terrible that it must be concealed from innocent minds?
By failing to see that eating habits are learned, we misunderstand the nature of our current diet predicament. As we are often reminded, eating has taken a dramatic collective wrong turn in recent decades. Around two-thirds of the population in rich countries are either overweight or obese; and the rest of the world is fast catching up. The moral usually drawn from these statistics is that we are powerless to resist the sugary, salty, fatty foods that the food industry promotes. But there’s something else going on here, which usually gets missed. Not everyone is equally susceptible to the dysfunction of our food supply. Some people manage to eat sugary, salty, fatty foods in modest quantities, and then stop. It’s in all our interests to find out how they have done it.
Many campaigners would say cooking is the answer. For cooking to become the solution to our diet crisis, we first have to learn how to adjust our responses to food. Cooking skills are no guarantee of health if your inclinations are for twice-fried chicken, Neapolitan rum babas and French aligot: potatoes mashed with a tonne of cheese.
Once we accept that eating is a learned behaviour, we see that the challenge is not to grasp information but to learn new habits. Governments keep trying to fix the obesity crisis with well-intentioned recommendations. But advice alone never taught a child to eat better (“I strongly advise you to finish that cabbage and follow it with a glass of milk!”), so it’s strange that we think it will work on adults.
The point is that before you can become a carrot eater, the carrots have to be desirable.
Viewed through the lens of behavioural psychology, eating is a classic form of learned behaviour. There is a stimulus – an apple tart, let’s say, glazed with apricot jam. And there is a response – your appetite for it. Finally, there is reinforcement – the sensory pleasure and feeling of fullness that eating the tart gives you. This reinforcement encourages you to seek out more apple tarts whenever you have the chance and – depending on just how great you feel after eating them – to choose them over other foods in the future.
In many ways, children are powerless at the table. They cannot control what is put in front of them, where they sit, or whether they are spoken to kindly or harshly as they eat. Their one great power is the ability to reject or accept. One of the biggest things many children learn at that table is that their choice to eat or not eat unleashes deep emotions in the grown‑ups close to them. They find that they can please their parents or drive them to rage, just by refusing dessert. (And then the adults complain that they are difficult at mealtimes.)
This behaviour is often immensely complex. In 1998 the social psychologist Roy Baumeister did a famous experiment. Baumeister, who is known for his work on self-defeating behaviours, found that the struggle of will required when a group of people were asked to eat “virtuous” foods such as radishes instead of the foods that they really wanted, such as chocolate and cookies, led to diminishing returns. They were so depleted by the effort of the task that when faced with another difficult task – solving a tricky puzzle – they would give up more quickly. The emotional effort of not eating the cookies had a “psychic cost”.
Changing food habits is one of the hardest things anyone can do, because the impulses governing our preferences are often hidden, even from ourselves. And yet adjusting what you eat is entirely possible. We do it all the time. Were this not the case, the food companies who launch new products each year would be wasting their money.
For our diets to change, as well as educating ourselves about nutrition – and yes, teaching ourselves to cook – we need to relearn the food experiences that first shaped us. The change doesn’t happen through rational argument. It is a form of reconditioning, meal by meal. You get to the point where not eating when you are not hungry – most of the time – is so instinctive and habitual it would feel odd to behave differently. Governments could do a great deal more to help us modify our eating habits. In place of all that advice, they could reshape the food environment in ways that would help us to learn better habits of our own accord. A few decades from now, the current laissez-faire attitudes to sugar – now present in 80% of supermarket foods – may seem as reckless and strange as permitting cars without seatbelts or smoking on aeroplanes. Given that our food choices are strongly determined by what’s readily available, regulating the sale of unhealthy food would automatically make many people eat differently. Banishing fast-food outlets from hospitals and the streets surrounding schools would be a start. One study shows that you can reduce chocolate consumption almost to zero in a student cafeteria by requiring people to line up for it separately from their main course.
But at an individual level, we won’t achieve much by waiting for a world where chocolate is scarce. Having a healthy relationship with food can act like a lifejacket, protecting you from the worst excesses of the obesogenic world we now inhabit. You see the greasy burger and you no longer think it has much to say to you. This is not about being thin. It’s about reaching a state where food is something that nourishes and makes us happy rather than sickening or tormenting us. It’s about feeding ourselves as a good parent would: with love, with variety, but also with limits. Changing the way you eat is far from simple, but nor, crucially, is it impossible. After all, as omnivores, we were not born knowing what to eat. We all had to learn it, every one of us, as children sitting expectantly, waiting to be fed.
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