I have always liked food: I enjoy cooking, I like eating, and I especially value sharing mealtimes together with family and loved ones. I also enjoy snacking, and I like going out to coffee shops, and I like eating out, and I like getting bits of take-out and nibbling them while I’m out for a walk or sitting in the park.

But I also like to be lean and healthy and fit. And for the last few years, I’ve been on a self-directed nutrition education kick.

These two areas of interest and appreciation have started to butt heads.

When I was young, I was very active, growing, and wasn’t particularly educated about (or interested in) nutrition. My family had a fairly healthy, whole-food, pioneer-style diet: lots of rice, pasta, and grains, but also lots of whole farm milk, fresh fruit, veggies, eggs, and some meat and fish. And very little processed food.

Growing up, I could pretty much eat as much as I wanted — and often did — without getting chubby or noticing any negative consequences.

I still like eating just as much, but now I’m more educated about the effects of different foods, as well as the effects they have on my specific body. But I also don’t want to become a utilitarian machine, who ignores the psychological and social gifts that food, and eating together, have to offer. I want to be vibrant and healthy, but I don’t want to optimize only for nutrition and numbers.

So, how to mesh the two?

Certain traditional cultures have done well with this. Like Italy and France, where high quality, wholesome food is a central part of the social fabric in a beautiful, healthy, and sustainable way; enjoyed and celebrated, but also kept in moderation and balance.

Western culture and North America, however, seem to be doing an exceptionally poor job of this, instead encouraging gluttony and excess at every step of the way, and making it much harder for anyone who wants to maintain a healthy and sustainable balance.

How to Be a Food Lover Without Overdoing It

I’ve tried a lot of different techniques, and below are the ones I’ve found most effective. Cycling through them, one at a time, for a few days at a stretch, can also work well.

• Get lots of exercise. This one is sweet. Especially if there’s some vigorous exercise modality that you actually enjoy. You can burn your way through the calories, stay healthy and fit, and have lots of headroom to eat the things you enjoy eating. Biking, hiking, long distance running, and sports are all options, as are bodybuilding and swimming.
• Eat slowly. I find I naturally eat less when I eat slowly. But it doesn’t reduce my enjoyment of the food, it actually increases it.
• Aim for proper meals. Consolidating your day’s food intake into two or three proper sit-down meals, rather than grab-and-go stand up snacking, seems to have good results. Again, it increases the enjoyment of the food rather than reducing it, while also naturally leading to healthier options and eating less.
• Try smaller portions. I’ve often noticed that the enjoyment gained from food (as you can see, this is a big thing for me…) decreases the more I eat. I can often get about 80% of the value from half the food, given 100% of my appreciation and attention. Try it out and see if you find the same. If you’d like to double up on saving time and energy cooking, make your usual amount but set half of it aside in the fridge, put the half you’re eating onto a nice ceramic plate with a good garnish so it still looks big and fancy, and enjoy your super-classy-and-modest meal!
• Preload with the healthy stuff. If I start my day with a good hearty meal of wholesome, healthy, not too calorie-dense food, I’m way less likely to end up snacking on less healthy things later on in the day.
• Proactively fill your day with other interesting things to do and think about, that aren’t food. Like coffee!
• Get enough protein and healthy fats. There’s hot debate about the right types, and amounts, of both of these macro-nutrients for optimal health, but getting enough of them early on in the day does seem to reduce cravings for processed foods, starches and sugars; three things that almost everyone seems to agree are good to limit in our diets.
• Reduce processed foods. Several of the pundits seem to agree that the main problem with the food system in North America is too much highly available, high-calorie, tantalizing, processed food. This isn’t what we evolved to eat, and it messes with our innate senses of satiety. It packs in too much energy in too condensed a form, while being engineered to be addictive, and leads to caloric overshoot. I still enjoy a good chocolate chip cookie, to be sure, especially when someone gives it to me, but I make an effort to get the bulk of my nutrition from nutritious, yummy, unprocessed foods. The less processed the better. Think raw veggies, baked tubers, fish, eggs, nuts, and fruit. Aside from being delicious, these high-quality food sources provide nutrition in its natural form, which the body is better equipped to process and account for without getting confused and wanting more than is healthy.
• Choose minimal. Sometimes making a little bait-and-switch on food selection can work well. For example, gradually weaning myself from coffee shop lattes onto grocery-store drip coffees, while not as gloriously bourgeois, has had good effects on both my finances and my calorie intake. Now, I can treat myself to a coffee out for half the price, and one-tenth the calories, while getting pretty much the exact same amount of enjoyment from it. Sometimes more, in fact, because of the non-trivial chances of a careless barista ruining my $7 drink.
• Find strategic cut-points. It’s worth identifying the points of least resistance for choosing the healthy option. It often seems like there’s a lot of resistance to forgoing something altogether; “no thanks, I’m not eating any desserts, currently” tends to elicit a cocktail of pity, sorrow, and annoyance from the host, as well as the long-suffering narrator, whereas a cheerful “yes please! but just a half portion” doesn’t usually trigger any negative repercussions. Similarly, I find forgoing second helpings is one of the easier ways to short-circuit the overeating cycle.
• Absence makes the heart grow fonder. A five-day water fast can turn the food enjoyment knobs to 11 like nothing else I’ve experienced. I haven’t found a way to make fasting at all easy or enjoyable — though some I’ve talked to have — but it certainly does foster a renewed appreciation for food. Go long enough drinking just water, and the simplest of meals becomes an exquisite feast. And the baseline re-calibration can last weeks.

Conclusion

These are my current best strategies for prioritizing being healthy and fit as well as remaining a die-hard foodie; two identities that don’t always place nice together.

Let me know your best tactics for this in the comments! What are your favourite ways to enjoy healthy and delicious food, without overdoing it?

Further Reading

I like to always have a health & wellness book on the go along with whatever else I’m reading, to give a little motivational nudge in that direction. Here are some of the best books I’ve read on the topic:

• What to Eat When: A Strategic Plan to Improve Your Health and Life Through Food by Michael F. Roizen and Michael Crupain (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40715560-what-to-eat-when)
• The 4-Hour Body by Timothy Ferriss (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7148931-the-4-hour-body)
• Glucose Revolution: The Life-Changing Power of Balancing Your Blood Sugar by Jessie Inchauspé (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58438618-glucose-revolution)
• The Oldest Cure in the World: Adventures in the Art and Science of Fasting by Steve Hendricks (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60310650-the-oldest-cure-in-the-world)
• Burn: The New Science of Human Metabolism by Herman Pontzer, Phd (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54886566-burn)
• Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity by Peter Attia (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61153739-outlive)

There's no one way to be absolutely sure about a video's authenticity, but experts say there are some simple clues that can help.

(Image credit: Screenshots by NPR)

Sometimes when I’m feeling extra ouchy, I spend time just staring at the wall. It’s about as thrilling as eating a plain cracker at a tax lecture, I know. The TV is right there, and I have games at my fingertips on my phone. But pain has the miraculous way of cutting through the bullshit. It can turn you surprisingly zen. It’s the ZenNecessities.

I stare at the wall so often that I painted one of my walls bright teal, so that when I’m wall-staring, I have a purdy color to look at. When choosing your Staring Wall, things like real estate, color, and texture all come into play.

On the aqua-marine-colored bright side, it gives me time to ponder things.

Useful things?

No.

I haven’t come up with the metaphysical answers to the universe, or solved the ancient riddle of folding a fitted sheet. I haven’t solved climate change or figured out the physics behind the Foodarackacycle on The Jetsons.

Here’s what I pondered last night while watching dry paint stay that way…

If the early bird gets the worm, why does the second mouse get the cheese? Is your early-adopter hustle-hard status dependent on your genus? And is the proverbial pecking order of work-hard-y-ness based on your taxonomic category? If so, does the third squirrel get the nut?

I’ve never been early for anything. As a habituated night owl, I’m pretty sure that I’ll arrive late to my own funeral. I’ve never been a ‘worker bee’, I’m more of a balanced raccoon.

It’s a bit of a brain boggler where I’d be in the pecking order of the parable of the ant and the grasshopper. That old Aesopian fable about the grasshopper who spends his summer on hootenanny and shenanigannery, while the ants work their little tails off to prepare for winter. A tale that ends in German-fairy-tale fashion, with the grasshopper asking the ants for help — and they leave him to die.

I’m pretty sure it’s what Republicans think socialism is.

But the most balanced humans aren’t the grasshopper or the ant. We try to find a happy balance between all work and all play. All work and all play make Robin a wall-staring potato.

I did things a little differently. I front-loaded my life, Benjamin-Button style by living abroad, travelling, and doing things like volcano boarding and getting my advanced scuba designation. I did it because I was always sick and had something wrong with me. This began in my teenage years, and I never thought I would live long. But this Benjaming-Buttonning makes me worry about my place on the ant-grasshopper continuum.

I’ve worked, and I’ve contributed to the Canada Pension Plan, so I’ll have at least a little saved for winter (albeit…not much). I’ve never made enough money to invest in things like real estate, stocks, or 401Ks.

But I’ve always wondered what the point of saving life until retirement is, if you’re not sure you’ll even be around for it?

In Canada, even though it can be quite flexible and customizable, the official retirement age is 65. Statistically, however, 15–20% of people won’t make it to that age. That’s a 1 in 5 chance you’re saving for retirement for nothing.

It’s quite the perverse dystopian lottery.

You still have a 4 in 5 chance that you’ll make it to retirement though. So we probably shouldn’t be the grasshopper, but in case we’re the unlucky one, we shouldn’t be the ant either. So, onto my squirrel-nut hypothesis…what about the third squirrel getting the nut?

Squirrels spend the summers of their lives finding nuts. They eat some, and they bury the rest for the future in some sort of nut-based 401K. There was an internet rumor going around some years ago that squirrels spend all that nut-burying time in vain, forgetting where most of them are.

So, some squirrel aficionado, who wouldn’t stand for this squirrel slander, did a study on it. In reality, they don’t lose their nuts. They have intricate little mind maps, and do recover most of their nutty loot.

They do lose some of their nut investment strategy though. They lose some of their seedtirement fund; sometimes to environmental factors, sometimes they forget where they squirrelled away their savings. And sometimes their competitor squirrels steal their nuts, like an animal on Wall Street who wiped out their 401Knut.

Unlike the ants, however, squirrels take time to play and be social. They engage socially with others in chasing and play fights, and alone by doing crazy acrobatics and playing with objects.

The squirrels have it figured out.

So the early bird gets the worm, the second mouse gets the cheese, the squirrels calculatedly frolic, and the grasshopper dies.

Between the early bird, the worker ant, the debaucherous grasshopper, and the nutty squirrel — I’m definitely the latter. I shouldn’t be surprised though, since I’m nuttier than a squirrel turd. Perhaps we should all be the nut-obsessed squirrel. Hmph. Who would’ve thought being squirrely should be a life goal?

This was weird. I might be losing my mind.

…I’ll go back to staring at the wall now.

Join Robin’s Hood…

Become a paid supporter of Robin’s Hood and join our band of merry mofos. We’d be happy to have you at any level that’s comfortable…

$1 per month ($10/year) ~ $2 per month ~ $3 per month ~ $4 per month ~ $5 per month

Don’t have any money? Don’t worry, me neither, and I still love you.

Right now I’m coaching for Inkhaven, a month-long marathon writing event where our brave residents are writing a blog post every single day for the entire month of November.

And I’m pleased that some of them have seen success – relevant figures seeing the posts, shares on Hacker News and Twitter and LessWrong. The amount of writing is nuts, so people are trying out different styles and topics – some posts are effort-rich, some are quick takes or stories or lists.

Some people have come up to me – one of their pieces has gotten some decent reception, but the feeling is mixed, because it’s not the piece they hoped would go big. Their thick research-driven considered takes or discussions of values or whatever, the ones they’d been meaning to write for years, apparently go mostly unread, whereas their random-thought “oh shit I need to get a post out by midnight or else the Inkhaven coaches will burn me at the stake”¹ posts get to the front page of Hacker News, where probably Elon Musk and God read them.

It happens to me too – some of my own pieces that took me the most effort, or that I’m proudest of, have zero notable comments or responses. I’m not upset about it. I’ve been around the block. It happens.

But for those people, those new bloggers who are kind of upset about the internet’s bad taste, might benefit from reading artist Dimespin’s essay written to other visual artists: “Why people like your doodles better than your finished works.”

e.g.:

This piece is good and even if you’re not a visual artist, you can probably make your own analogies by reading it. That said, to spell out a few for the writerly crowd:

The quick post is short, the effortpost is long

Here is the most important thing I can tell you for writing things that people might choose to read on purpose: Make it short. Everyone has 10,000,000 other things they could be reading. Make it efficient. Make it count.

If you are Scott Alexander, you can get huge readership on your long articles. If you aren’t, try either writing short things or becoming Scott Alexander. Pro tip: One of these things is easier than the other.

The quick post is about something interesting, the topic of the effortpost bores most people

The random historical event you read half a sentence about on Wikipedia and it caught your eye? Maybe that means that it could catch a lot of people’s eyes, and your quick post has brought it to them. If you’ve spend ten years formulating a theory about your field of work, that might only be interesting to people who care about that field. Or it’s about one of those “what is good anyhow” or “my theory of consciousness” type questions that people either already know about or already know they don’t give a shit about. Everyone has their own theory of consciousness, Harold!

The quick post has a fun controversial take, the effortpost is boringly evenhanded or laden with nuance

The quick post is low-context, the effortpost is high-context

The quick posts that aren’t even about a thing you’re an expert in – well, okay, you don’t know a lot, but you’ve written it as a non-expert and it’s at a non-expert’s level of understanding. Most readers aren’t experts in whatever random thing. You are automatically going on this journey of discovery with them.

Meanwhile, it’s really hard to explain something you have a detailed technical understanding of, in a way that’s approachable to others. You haven’t spoken to someone who ISN’T a software engineer in eight months. You’re tripping over feldspars left and right. Even if you try to explain it to a novice, you might not do it very well. “To appreciate why this modern factory design choice is interesting, we have to understand the history of automobile manufacturing logistics. In 1886 – ” Okay, maybe you’re right, but I’m also already closing the tab.

The quick post is has a casual style, the effortpost is inscrutably formal

Excessive linguistic density frequently triggers a distinct reticence in opportunistic audiences to apply interpretive labor to the text in question.

AKA: oh my god, just talk like a normal person, nobody wants to read all that.

You might put formal language into a piece because you are an expert and you’re thinking about it in jargon and conceptual terms. In this case, try saying it like you’d explain it to your buddy who doesn’t know jack shit about it.

You might also use formal language in an attempt to Make It Look Professional – unless you’re aiming for a really particular audience that eats up formality, just stop doing that! Readability is kind.

If you’re a writer and you’ve run into this situation and you’re upset about the internet’s bad taste and lack of discernment, my main advice is that on some level, you gotta get over it. You will never have any control over what random people find interesting, or what the algorithms decide to promote, or anything at all about other people. You’re lucky to be getting an audience at all, and if you are, you’re doing at least something right.

If you’re smart, you can convert these flickers of fame into more readership for your other better stuff – but the attention of the internet is best modeled as a random swarm of locusts that will occasionally land on your ripe fields based on its inscrutable whims. You can go crazy analyzing it or you can just keep farming.

Maybe you should just do the opposite of all these things so your writing becomes popular? Well, I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not.

If you care about maximizing readership, I dunno, sure. Clickbait is popular for a reason – it works. If you don’t lie to the readers or advocate for anything evil, then I don’t think you’re doing anything wrong by optimizing for readership.

Note that some topics have inherently wider appeal than others – a short light post discussing something concrete and weird about the world is definitely going to get more readers than a piece that compares different philosophical schools. But if you care about philosophy, maybe the second piece is more important to you to write. The numbers aren’t a proxy for value of the piece or quality of its ideas.

Even if you’re exclusively interested in maximizing reception, audience might matter. I think very few people cared about my 2017 summary of a 2015 Blue Ribbon Study Panel on Biosecurity report, which is fair – I wrote it because I had already read this 83-page-long report, and figured someone else might just like to see my notes. And empirically they did, because a major biosecurity funder came up to me at an event and said they read it and really appreciated that I wrote it – they wanted to know what was in the original report and didn’t want to read 83 pages. This was a fantastic audience for it to reach. Or, like, if you want to contribute to the academic discourse, probably you want to engage with the academic literature, and that’s just inherently gonna dissuade many casual readers.

But listen, I bet you’re not just writing to maximize audience. Friend of the blog Ozy Brennan once said that being a writer requires “the absolute conviction that total strangers should listen to you because your words are interesting and valuable” (as well as “the decision to choose a career where you never leave the house or talk to anyone”.)

You’re here to say something interesting and valuable, right? I don’t think you ought to smooth out everything you touch for the masses. You want to say something that only you could say or that will hit the reader who needs it at the right time. You want to impress that one guy at the Blogging Club, or you practice “blogging as warnings scrawled on the cave wall”, or you’re writing for nice future AGIs creating rescue simulations of you based on your digital text corpus. Listen. Don’t lose your mind about it. Just try to say something beautiful and true. Or, failing that, say something fascinating and baffling.

But, I mean, obviously it’d be nice if the masses turn out to want to hear it too. I get it. There’s nuance.

This post is mirrored to Eukaryote Writes Blog, Substack, and Lesswrong.

Support Eukaryote Writes Blog on Patreon.

1. Nobody has dropped out yet! Isn’t that amazing? ︎