Bob Welles 16 Oct 2012

How to remove unhealthy foods from your home and

your life

A user guide based on hard won experience

Why drastically reduce the consumption of unhealthy foods?

✤ If you drastically reduce consumption of unhealthy foods you will be better able to observe the effects of consuming them when you do.

✤ You want to find a sustainable, enjoyable diet that keeps you at your naturally healthy weight.

✤ Your body has a robust mechanism for maintaining its healthy weight. That mechanism fails when we eat foods that we did not evolve with that are engineered to increase our consumption of them and to decrease their cost of production, distribution, and sale.

✤ By definition unhealthy food leads to bad health and bad health is, among other things, unattractive and not fun.

How to stop eating unhealthy foods

✤ Get in touch with your body.

✤ Develop the ability to create healthy habits.

✤ Take a long term view. Do what is sustainable.

✤ “If I knew I was going to live this long, I'd have taken better care of myself.” Mickey Mantle

Get in touch with your body

✤ Reducing consumption of unhealthy foods requires effort. You must be in touch with your body to feel the benefits of that effort.

✤ Observe the effect of your diet on your performance in your sport or exercise regimen.

✤ Your tolerance for unhealthy foods will vary over time. To respond to your body’s needs you must be aware of them.

✤ Get data through measurement and log it.

✤ Blood tests. I have talked to a doctor who has seen patients who are not obese but whose blood tests indicate that they are pre-diabetic.

What works for me. Your mileage may vary.

✤ Eliminate snacking. Almost all processed snack food is unhealthy. The French don’t snack at all between their meals which are famously delicious. The French are not obese. Hunger between meals indicates a problem with your meals. Snacking only masks the problem.

✤ I remember the famous Steve Jobs quote "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?"

✤ Find a problem hard enough to be on the edge of your understanding.

✤ Observe that your understanding of that problem varies with your diet.