Redefining "Diet"

Eat well.
Two simple words that could win (or at least receive an honorable mention) in the “Most Confusion / Anxiety Causing Requests” competition. How did we end up here?

My grandmother was entering her adult life in Poland right after the Second World War. She learned how to cook almost intuitively. She followed recipes first, then she swapped some with her friends, and, with time, she became an excellent, and I mean excellent home cook. She was quite proud of it. And if you were to enter her home and try to correct her cooking, she would probably take a pan and chase you down the hallway. Without any education in the area of nutritional sciences, she learned how to feed us well. Nobody in the family was obese, and nobody who she was caring for developed diabetes.
But I don’t recall her ever mentioning Omega 3s, or complex carbohydrates, or soluble fiber, or unsaturated fats. She had her “grandma tricks” like “An apple a day will keep the doctor away” (she would say that when cutting an apple for little-me in the evening, and I loved it*) and prunes with lukewarm water in the morning, but that was the ‘scope’ of her nutrition-related knowledge. She would learn about cholesterol eventually, but it wasn’t till much, much, much later in her life.
(Her explosive introduction to margarine is worth a separate blog entry :) – mental note)

Fast forward several decades…
I needed to go to school, get a 4-year degree, pass a board exam, and get a license to be qualified and credentialed to talk to people about how to eat. 
And then I spent 10 years working with people who spent more time and energy on eating well than any generation before them, and yet – they were more confused about eating well than any generation before them.

We lost our way with food.
In a span of just a few generations, something that was so simple and so intuitive, became way too confusing for way too many people.

As a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist in training, I entered this world through the most challenging door possible (Hello Kreb’s Cycle!!!), and it took years to arrive at my current perspective, which is that

eating shouldn’t be difficult.

If we can dress properly for a workout without studying thermodynamics; if we can learn how to swim without studying hydrodynamics – we should be able to put a decent meal together without an advanced degree in nutrition.
I know, right? :) – what a concept!

In a sense, as a feeding human, I made this gigantic loop: I started with simple foods when I was a child, and then I swung all the way into the world of university-level nutrition and food science, only to come back to simplicity. And that simplicity of eating well is one of the pillars of Eat Be Stay Well.

I want to invite you to think about your “diet” not as a “diet program”, but “diet” in the sense of what we as humans, as Homo sapiens should be eating. If you look at pandas or lions in a ZOO (I am not going to get into ethics here) they are eating the same foods that they would eat in their natural habitats. Nobody is giving pandas colorful crunchy cereal, because they are in America now. Imagine the world without grocery stores, corner stores, gas stations, take-out places, restaurants – what would you eat? I don’t want you to freak out here, I just want you to make a mental grocery list: what foods would make the cut?
Chances are, you will run out of ideas quickly, and you are not alone.
Yes, this ‘exercise’ feels odd, but it gets your brain-gears to spin creatively, and – more importantly – it peels thin film that allows many food-like-products to masquerade as real foods. It encourages you to rethink words like “diet” and “food” – and this is a good place to be, if you want to see the food system in a new light.
I want to invite you to take a closer look at our food system. I sometimes joke that parts of it are like the woman in the red dress from “The Matrix” – attractive, and distracting, but if you know how to look, you will see her for what she really is – a combination of 0s and 1s. A grocery store may allure you with variety of products, but if you know how to look, you will see a combination of the same ingredients (most often sugar, corn, wheat flour, and salt). Reading Nutrition Facts Labels and Ingredient Lists are the two most powerful things that you can do in a grocery store. They are so essential and so critical that they will be an integral part of EAT WELL, and an upcoming session related to grocery shopping.
Last, but certainly not least, I want to invite you to think about your “diet” as an investment. Investment in a productive, focused afternoon at work; investment in stamina so that you can go for a walk; investment in energy so that you can spend 30 minutes learning a language or playing piano; investment in a good night’s sleep so that you can wake up refreshed and alert in the morning. We pay a very high price for on-the-go breakfasts, lunches that are result of rushed decisions made at 11.58 am when hungry and hangry (yes, it is a thing!), and dinners that are after-thoughts. If you invest in your body with care and attention and give it what it needs to become vibrant and radiant – I promise you, it will thrive back for you.

*Polish translation: Jedno jablko dziennie trzyma lekarza z dala ode mnie