There is no shortage of dietary advice available nowadays. Eat carbs, don’t eat carbs. Eat only meat, don’t eat any meat. Eat high fat, eat low fat. This advice is at best dizzying, and at worst contradictory. If you’re someone who has struggled with finding the right dietary pattern for you and you’re confused and frustrated by all the so-called “expert advice” out there you’re not alone. In this article we’ll cut through the crap, self-promotion, and myths that abound in our diet culture. Instead we’ll buoy understanding in scientific evidence with a healthy dose of pragmatism and reality.
Outcomes of a Healthy Diet
We must first start by establishing the outcomes we’re hoping to achieve with a healthy diet. If you asked most people this question, undoubtedly you’d most get answers centered around weight, body composition, and looking a certain way. While dietary patterns do certainly influence weight and body composition, that is not the sole reason to focus on a healthy diet. In fact, when people overemphasize eating for weight control and body composition it can result in unhealthy diet patterns and disordered eating.
In order to understand the key outcomes of a healthy diet, we have to zoom out and divorce ourselves from a diet culture that favors thinness and aesthetic ideals. In zooming out we can understand that a healthy diet allows for six critical outcomes:
- Adequate energy to fuel our daily activity.
- Nutrition to maintain or improve health.
- Recovery from activity/exercise.
- Eating experiences that are enjoyable, desirable, and shame-free
- Healthy social interaction and cultural rituals
- Weight management.
We’ll explore each one of these components in greater detail below. For now, I think it’s important to point out that the outcomes of a healthy diet aren’t just physical, they are also emotional, psychological, and social. Therein lies the complexity of our relationship with our dietary patterns. It’s more than just a biological act, and because of that the way we approach constructing what constitutes a healthy diet differs for each and everyone of us. Fear not, though, we’ll discuss some good, evidence-based, principles in this article.
Making Dietary Changes
Before we dive into the principles that facilitate outcomes mentioned above, we must first talk about making dietary changes. We all know this can be a very complex process to undertake. Here, too, it’s less the biology and more the psychology. Our dietary patterns are deeply ingrained into our habitual daily patterns. Beyond these patterns, as I said above, there are strong emotional and social factors that are at play when it comes to dietary choices and patterns. Therefore, it is not as simple as “flipping a switch” and eating healthier.
To make dietary changes requires not only knowledge of what foods to eat more and less of, but also requires the implementation of some time tested principles of behavior change. Ideally, if you had access to a resource like a registered dietitian, you’d have someone that can guide you through the process. To find a registered dietitian near you, click on this link. If you don’t have a professional to guide you on your behavior change journey, there are two key tools you can use to effectively facilitate dietary behavior change.
The first is something called a dietary recall. This is a behavior modification technique referred to as self-monitoring. Self-monitoring raises awareness and consciousness of behaviors that might otherwise go unnoticed. Although we eat most of the time, most of us are unaware of exactly what and how much we eat. A dietary recall raises awareness of both. Here are the steps to a dietary recall.
- Download one of the many food tracking apps available. MyFitnessPal and FatSecret are two good options.
- Either weigh and measure all your food for the dietary recall period (more accurate) or use these approximations to estimate your serving sizes.
- Eat for 7 days JUST LIKE NORMAL.The “just like normal” part is critical. The goal here is to not change any of your dietary patterns, it’s just to observe, without judgment, what those patterns are. You will likely be tempted to start altering your dietary patterns as you go through the recall period. Fight that urge and eat like you normally do. The goal here is to simply get an unbiased and accurate view of what and how much you’re eating for seven days.
- Use the dietary recall for tool number two.
After looking at your dietary recall you can use the principles in the rest of the article to determine where to make dietary changes. Before we get into the where, however, we have to talk about how to make dietary changes – this is the step most people get wrong. Dietary changes are difficult, because they’re so habitually ingrained (as we’ve established already).
There can be so many things that you’d like to change that you can be overwhelmed with where to start. Sometimes you even start to think you should change multiple things at one time. For most people this dooms them to failure. Making one dietary change is tough enough and it impacts other aspects of your diet. Making multiple changes all at once can be dizzying, unpredictable, and result in cognitive overload. This is where “shrinking the change” can be helpful. Here’s the method you can use to do it:
- Determine one dietary habit you’d like to change. Ideally this change would only affect ONE food item. I often say the thing you’d like to change happens at the intersection of what you need to change and what you want to change.
- Set a goal to make that single dietary change.
- At the end of each day, ask yourself the following question “did I make [insert dietary change here] today? Why or why not? On the days you did, learn from what made you successful that day and try to replicate it. On the days where you didn’t, learn from any mistakes that were made and problem solve in an effort to not make those same mistakes again.
- At the end of the week ask yourself the following question: “on a scale of 1-10 how difficult was it for you to implement your dietary change?” 10 = very difficult, 1 = very easy
- Progress to the next dietary change you want to make only after you answer the above question < 3 for two straight weeks.
Appropriate Energy Intake
If we think of a healthy diet as a house, the foundation of the house is proper calorie (or energy) intake. If you’re currently maintaining your weight, you’re in calorie balance. This means the amount of calories coming in (from food) are equal to the amount going out (from activity). This is a state where you’re fulfilling outcomes (1) adequate energy and (6) weight management.
If you’re currently gaining weight, you’re eating more calories than what you’re burning, and the reverse is true if you’re losing weight. Depending on what your weight management goal is you’ll need to determine the appropriate calorie intake. Although there are equations that help you determine this, they’re approximations at best. The easiest way to determine where you’re at relative to calorie balance is to weigh yourself at the beginning and end of your dietary recall week. For every one pound you lose you’re burning an extra 3500 calories over 7 days (500 calories/day). The reverse is true for every pound you gain.
While I’m not a proponent of long-term food logging (tends to not be sustainable) the information from your recall can be instructive for tool number two above. If your goal is to lose weight, and your weight measurements during the recall week suggested you’re gaining or maintaining weight, you know you need to eat less. Here your one goal for the week could be taking an item out of your diet and replacing it with a lower calorie item (or not replacing it at all).
Focus on Lean Proteins, Fruits, and Vegetables
These three items fall under the outcomes: (2) nutrition to maintain or improve health and (3) recovery from activity/exercise. Lean proteins (whether they’re plant or animal based) provide all important amino acids that are the building blocks of our tissue. An active person has a protein requirement of somewhere between 0.8-1.0 grams of protein per pound of body weight. Fruit and vegetables provide many critical vitamins and minerals that allow for all our metabolic processes to work properly. This drives energy and supports health. Having 5-6 servings of fruit AND 5-6 servings of veggies every day is a great goal to shoot for. Even if you’re well short of that each serving that moves you towards that number makes a difference.
Limit Highly Processed Food
Highly processed foods are foods that undergo a significant amount of refinement in manufacturing. This strips away a lot of their nutritional value turning them into more “empty calories” than anything else. These empty calories can tend to have some addictive properties.
These kinds of food can take away from the following dietary outcomes:(1) adequate energy, (2) nutrition for health, (3) recovery, and (6) weight management.
This doesn’t mean we should demonize these foods and never eat them (see the next section, below). It just means we should eat less of them. Most things that are outside of the perimeter, and up/down the aisles of a grocery store are processed to highly processed. Most foods on the outer perimeter of the grocery store are less refined, so that’s a good hint.
Everything in Moderation
To the point made above about not demonizing any foods, it is very reasonable to consume foods you enjoy in moderation. Deprivation never works well over the long-term and normally leads to overconsumption at some point. It also typically makes social eating situations stressful and unpleasant, because these foods tend to be an abundance in those settings. That said, having foods you like in moderation is important to achieve the outcomes of (4) eating experiences that are enjoyable, desirable, and shame-free, and (5) healthy social interaction and cultural rituals.
If you’re focused on eating mostly lean proteins, fruits and vegetables, having other food items in moderation shouldn’t be much of a problem. You likely won’t be as hungry for them anyway, because you’ll be full of healthy foods. A best practice here is to limit yourself to 1 serving wherever possible.
Putting it All Together – Step to a Healthy Diet
I’ve laid out a basic and flexible framework in this article. One that starts with understanding the outcomes of a healthy diet and zooms out from purely weight management. I also laid out the following high level principles:
- Start with how much.
- Focus on protein, fruits and vegetables.
- Limit highly processed foods.
- Enjoy all foods in moderation.
Finally, we discussed using the dietary recall to determine the current state of your diet. We paired with that using a tool (and a series of questions) to make one dietary change at a time for sustainability. Your ability to take ownership of your diet, and by way of it, your health, is in your hands. A nationally certified AFS Fitness Coach is here to help. Please reach out if you’re looking for someone to walk with you on your journey to greater health.