The boring diet: how I prevent food addiction
I.
Last year, when I was visiting my sister and her family in Portland, they took me to some of the famous food trucks. Apparently, they are popular enough that Anthony Bourdain came and tried them out at one point. The one I ate at was called Viking Soul Food. It was a nice spin on Norweigen cuisine. Now I don't have the refined palatte or food background to give a meaningful review of the place, but all I can say is that the food was really good. No, I mean so good that I started to get paranoid. Like, wondering if they had put cocaine directly into the sauce kind of good. It was supposed to be a pleasurable experience, eating really really good food, but the whole time I was really uneasy. I was worried that a switch would go off, and I would start to crave that level of good food, to the point where I would move to Portland, buy a house as close to these food trucks as possible, and spend the rest of my life overeating this food. After this experience, I call food like this hyper-yummy food.
I was a 90s kid. In my childhood, there were aggressive anti-drug, alcohol, and tobacco campaigns. We learned about all the different drugs. We learned about the concept of addiction. We learned that some drugs can make you addicted even after a single dose. On top of this, addiction runs in my family, so I have to be very careful when I come across things with addictive potential. What they didn't tell me at these say-no-to-drugs rallies is that addiction goes well beyond drugs. Especially now. I have written about my issues with things like the infinite scroll before. I've talked about my issues with hyper-yummy food in conversation, and I have some opinions on the topic, but I have never written them down. So here we are. In short, I think that we have optimized food to taste very good, in every fatty, sweet, and salty synergy possible. I would go further and hypothesize that our good-tasting food, and the addictive behavior it produces, is a contributor to the obesity epidemic.
What does a hyper-yummy addiction feel like for me? In the kitchen there is a cabinet that has chips, chocolate, and things of that nature that we leave out for guests when they come over. I generally avoid this cabinet on a day-to-day basis, and I generally avoid snacking on junk food. However, on the days where I do reach into this cabinet and have a bite of dark chocolate or a handful of chips, what I find is that in subsequent days, sometimes upwards of 3 days later, when I stand in the vicinity of this cabinet, I feel my mouth start to water, and I feel my hand start to have a mind of its own, as it reaches for the cabinet. That kind of behavior makes me uneasy, and I leave the kitchen. But it reminds me of those say-no-to-drugs campaigns in the 90s, where they tell you that one dose of heroin will have you addicted. One bite of chips. One bite of chocolate, and I can't go near that cabinet for several days.
II.
In graduate school, a close friend of mine was doing an IFBB bikini competition, part of the umbrella of so-called cosmetic athletics, which includes things like bodybuilding. You can think of IFBB bikini as building some muscle tone, cutting down to a six pack level bodyfat percentage (as a female), and wearing a bikini, and being judged by her physique. While the preparation does involve a lot of time spent in the gym, a lot of it involves an all-encompassing diet as well. But for the most part, it's not cutting down to half the calories you consume or whatever. It's different than that.
She had a coach (and IFBB pro figure competitor) who gave her a best-practices fitness and diet regimen. I did some of the dieting alongside her because I still had some latent bodybuilding aspirations at the time, so it was worth seeing what the lifestyle would be like. Thus, I can comment on what it felt like. Here is a standard meal on this diet.
One serving of brown rice1.
One serving of boneless, skinless chicken breast.
One serving of vegetables.
Water.
Upwards of five or six times a day. Absolutely no added sauce or seasonings. Total calories was comparable to what I'd otherwise consume in a given day (minus snacking, etc). But one thing that happened very quickly is I started to really not like the act of eating. It got to a point where I was dreading the next serving of chicken, rice, and veggies. So I only ate for the sake of relieving hunger, as the pleasure of eating was all but dead.
Now compare that to my experience at the food trucks in Portland, where it was that in reverse. Waiting for the next opportunity to go to the food trucks so I can feel good just like I felt good the last time I was there. That's known to heroin users as chasing the magic dragon. Absolutely nothing to do with relieving hunger at all. Now, at least on this build-muscle-lose-fat diet I didn't feel like I was losing control. The willpower was in actually eating the next meal, as opposed to avoiding going back for seconds.
III.
During the first COVID lockdown, we didn't go to any restaurants for several months. My wife cooks very healthy food, and I do as well. I have the meals that I cook for guests, but when I'm cooking for myself, the food I eat is particularly bland. I generally don't add much salt and pepper, if at all. I don't marinate the meat. Somewhat of a callback to the aforementioned cosmetic athlete diet, though not as extreme. So it was this for a long time. Then in the summer, there was a brief period where everything opened up again. We went to our local Italian restaurant and I got one of my usual dishes. It tasted just as I remember it to be, except enhanced somehow. I am pretty certain that they didn't chain the recipes or anything like that. My guess is that I ate minimally seasoned food for a long time, and then my tongue got sensitized to to anything not bland. The other thing I noticed was that it was a large portion of food, bigger than what I'd otherwise eat at home, but I had no problem finishing it. Did the good taste cause me to eat more? Probably. I know this to be the case with pizza. We all do.
There is a so-called palatability theory that I recently came across that resonates with my experiences and overall hypothesis, in terms of our brain being tricked into overeating by the modern hyper-yummy food that is available to us in massive quantities. What I've seen in my feeds is a focus on ultra-processed foods, but here I'm going beyond that and saying that the focus should be on good-tasting foods in general. Now, the obesity epidemic is complicated, and there are probably a variety of causes, but what I like about this is that its something that I can control. And it's something that for whatever reason is not really talked about. The idea that if you eat bland food, if you have a boring diet, you might be able to keep the weight off.
Right now I'm thinking of this in two ways. The first is simply getting in the habit of eating minimally seasoned food, minimal sweets, minimal chips, and things of that nature. This keeps me in the mode of eating to relieve hunger as opposed to eating for pleasure. The second is similar to the idea of the dopamine detox we do for our screen time. This is where you don't go on social media or don't check the news or whatever else for some number of hours or days or longer. Just enough to reset things. I think it might be possible to do a dopamine detox for food as well. Where you spend perhaps anywhere between a week and the length of Lent (40 days) eating bland food. Then when you go back to eating what you used to eat, you might be surprised at how overly salty or overly sweet this and that is.
Maybe being weirded out by really good tasting food is a good place to be. I can't imagine going to Viking Soul Food in Portland and having that be my baseline, where anything less than that is simply not good and not worth my time. This would be terrible both with respect to mental and physical health. A lot of this is preventative health on my end. At some point, my metabolism is going to be slow, and when that happens, I can't get away with having any food addictions. Will this "boring diet" ever take off in the general population? I don't know. I'm not a foodie. I have never lived for the taste of the next yummy thing, so maybe its easier for me. But I think what we all can do, foodie or not, is make our diet just a little more bland, just a little more boring, and see what that does. Maybe if you want to take control of your nutrition, that should be the first thing you do. Not lower the calories, but lower the yumminess.
[1] If you're working on muscle building, then you will have the standard one serving of brown rice per meal. If you are cutting fat, then you will have less. The protein to carbs ratio is going to be individualized both to the person and the goals. In the final phase of the diet, my friend had to cut out rice (and carbs for that matter) completely, and that is one of the things that got her down to 5% bodyfat. So yes, carbs do matter depending on what your goal is. Plenty has been written about that. But what I'm trying to emphasize in this article, and what is not often talked about, is shifting to blander food as an initial step.