This essay was originally published in The Free Press on Tuesday, November 25th.

Earlier this year, someone started a viral trend of asking ChatGPT this question: If you were the devil, how would you destroy the next generation, without them even knowing it?

Chat’s responses were profound and unsettling: “I wouldn’t come with violence. I’d come with convenience.” “I’d keep them busy. Always distracted.”

“I’d watch their minds rot slowly, sweetly, silently. And the best part is, they’d never know it was me. They’d call it freedom.”

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As a social psychologist who has been trying since 2015 to figure out what on earth was happening to Gen Z, I was stunned. Why? Because what the AI proposed doing is pretty much what technology seems to be doing to children today. It seemed to be saying: If the devil wanted to destroy a generation, he could just give them all smartphones.

My work over the last decade has centered on one question: Why did the mental health of Gen Z — the cohort born between 1996 and 2012 — plummet in so many countries starting in the early 2010s? I first focused on the role of overprotection (“coddling”). But since then, there’s been a growing body of evidence implicating technology, particularly smartphones and social media.

So, borrowing from the cybersecurity concept of red teaming — the practice of hiring an entity to pretend they are the enemy, seek out vulnerabilities, and hack into a network or organization — I decided to ask ChatGPT myself how its “devil” would stunt adolescent development in the digital age. Because what better way to stop the ongoing invisible corrosion of the human spirit than to get in the devil’s head?

It began:

If I were to think this through as a thought experiment—imagining “the devil” in a metaphorical sense—the most effective way to destroy the next generation without them realizing it would be through slow, invisible corrosions of the human spirit, rather than obvious attacks.

I approach spirituality as a social scientist who believes that whether or not God exists, spirituality is a deep part of human nature, shaped by natural selection and cultural evolution, and central to human flourishing and self-transcendence. Our “better angels” call us upward and out of our daily concerns. Our inner demons pull us downward, where we become more selfish and easily tempted.

In The Anxious Generation, I devoted a whole chapter to “spiritual degradation” because so much of life online pulls people “downward.” Growing up online, kids learn to live in ways that directly contradict the advice given to us by the world’s great spiritual traditions. Meditation, forgiveness, and sacred boundaries that must not be transgressed? Forget about it. Online, kids get constant stimulation, pressure to judge others instantly, and videos showing violations of every conceivable taboo.

You can see a sudden change in the spiritual health of young Americans in a long-running national survey of high school seniors who were asked whether “life often feels meaningless.” The figure below shows the percent who answered that they “agree” or “strongly agree.” The numbers were low and even declining a bit back when Gen X and millennials were in high school. But as soon as Gen Z entered the dataset, around 2013, meaninglessness surged.

Figure 1. Percent of high school seniors who selected “agree” or “strongly agree.” Source: Monitoring the Future study, graphed by Nikolaus Greb.

In the rest of this essay, I reprint Chat’s seven-step plan, in italics, followed by my own commentary.

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1. Erode Attention and Presence

If young people can’t focus deeply, they can’t learn, create, or love well. The subtle trap is to addict them to constant stimulation—endless scrolling, notifications, micro-bursts of dopamine. They’ll feel busy, “connected,” even informed, while in reality their capacity for sustained thought and presence erodes. They won’t know what they’ve lost.

So many of us in the education world have seen this precise change in our students over the past decade: They have more difficulty reading books, sitting through a 75-minute class, or doing their homework. This isn’t just a “kids these days” observation; it’s what the kids themselves began to say around 2015, when American high school seniors suddenly started reporting a lot more “difficulty thinking or concentrating.”

Figure 2. From Monitoring the Future. As reported in The FT by Burn-Murdoch (2025).

As soon as life and consciousness moved onto smartphones, students found it harder to engage in what Cal Newport calls “deep work,” and what the devil calls “sustained thought and presence.” When young people lose the ability to be fully present with a task, a book, a friend, or a romantic partner, they become less likely to be successful in love and in work — the two areas that psychologists since Freud have agreed are crucial for human flourishing. When constant distractions make love and work shallower and more fragmented, it makes sense that life suddenly feels more meaningless.

2. Confuse Identity and Purpose

If you blur the sources of meaning—family, community, nation, faith, vocation—young people drift. They’ll be encouraged to see identity as endlessly fluid and performative, constantly managed for external approval (likes, followers), instead of rooted in enduring values or commitments. This makes them malleable, anxious, and dependent on external validation.

Here the devil uses the word that best explains why some kids have been pushed into a pit of despair while others have stood their ground: rootedness. In our research for The Anxious Generation, Zach Rausch and I found that those who were rooted in binding moral communities had some protection from the negative mental-health effects of the new phone-based childhood. Teens who said “religion is important in my family” suffered smaller increases in depression and anxiety. So did self-described conservatives, who generally live in a more constraining, binding moral matrix, while progressive moralities aim to grant people more freedom to choose their values and create their own identities. So what happens when we re-graph the data from Figure 1 by politics and religiosity?

Figure 3. The sense of meaninglessness increased most for secular liberals. Data from Monitoring the Future, graphed by Nik Greb.

We find that the differences between the four groups were relatively small between 1991 and 2011, but then the lines fan out. Figure 3 shows that liberals from secular families were most likely to be washed away into meaninglessness during the “great rewiring of childhood,” the period from 2010 to 2015 in which teens traded in their flip phones for smartphones loaded with social media apps.

A child who constructs an adult identity while drawing from a stable and time-tested set of values, beliefs, and stories, given to her by trusted adults within a religious or philosophical tradition, will fare far better than a child who attempts to construct an adult identity by herself while drawing from a billion pieces of short and ephemeral content, produced mostly by young people and bots, which cannot be assembled into a coherent worldview.

3. Flood Them with Information, Starve Them of Wisdom

Make everything available instantly, but strip away guidance about how to weigh, sort, and interpret. Give them infinite answers without teaching how to ask good questions. In that haze, truth and falsehood feel equally slippery, so cynicism becomes natural. A generation that doubts everything believes nothing.

To write my first book, The Happiness Hypothesis, I read all the wisdom literature I could find, East and West. I extracted 10 common psychological claims, and then evaluated them from the lens of modern psychology. The ancients’ insights into social relationships and consciousness were timeless and precious. It’s not that people in ancient Rome, Israel, India, and China were smarter or wiser than us; it’s that we have the benefit of reading only the books and ideas that our ancestors thought to be worth preserving across a hundred generations.

Yet anyone raised in a blender of social media and AI slop is immersed in content that was generated within the last few weeks. Content becomes popular not because it conveys wisdom but because it comes tagged with popularity via likes, view counts, or the prestige of the person who shared it. Without the ability to know what is true, without the ability to share a consensual reality with a stable community of fellow citizens over a long period of time, we are like the descendants of Noah in the days after the Tower of Babel was destroyed. We cannot understand each other or the world we inhabit.

4. Replace Real Relationships with Simulacra

Encourage digital substitutes for friendship, love, and intimacy. People will accumulate “connections” while feeling lonelier than ever. Superficial bonds are easier to monetize and manipulate than the deep ties of family, friendship, and community. The tragedy is that they may not realize what real connection feels like.

The devil targets real relationships because research consistently shows that having close relationships is one of the best predictors of happiness. He damages those relationships indirectly by pushing quantity over quality. Most young people have accounts on multiple platforms, so the time and effort it takes to keep up with trends and “friends” is mind-boggling. It’s currently estimated that teens spend five hours per day, on average, just on social media platforms. This makes it harder for young people to spend time, long stretches of time, talking or walking or just being with the small number of people who matter most. Some of the activities that are known to strengthen bonds, such as physical touch, sharing a meal, and synchronous movement, are impossible online.

But don’t worry! The tech industry has a cure for the diseases it causes. As Mark Zuckerberg explained, the average American has fewer than three friends, but wants 15. Meta’s AI companions will fill that gap! And it’s not just for friends. Meta’s AIs were specifically permitted to engage in “sensual conversations” with children, according to a leaked internal policy memo that was approved by Meta’s full leadership. Why should young people have to learn difficult skills like flirting, dating, becoming a good lover, and committing to another person — all of which bring risks of rejection — when they have an endless supply of virtual erotic companions with customizable bodies, voices, and kinks, who will never shame, abandon, or contradict them?

5. Normalize Hedonism, Pathologize Discipline

Convince them that comfort, consumption, and self-expression are the highest goods, while restraint, sacrifice, and long-term commitment are oppressive. That way, they’ll celebrate indulgence while mocking tradition and discipline—the very things that build strength and freedom across generations.

Children are antifragile. They need to do hard things, over and over, and suffer setbacks and losses, in order to become strong, independent adults. Key to this maturation is the fact that our brains give us a pleasurable pulse of dopamine every time we make progress toward a goal, and that dopamine increases our motivation to continue. We want our kids to pursue long-term goals and learn that it is profoundly rewarding when they succeed, especially when they overcome obstacles along the way. Discipline is the ability to persist on a path even when there may be no progress and no rewards for days at a time.

Smartphones give millions of companies a way to hack the reward system by offering young people small prizes on a variable ratio schedule, like a slot machine. Everything is gamified; everything brings more dopamine within minutes. Why pursue any long-term projects (diploma, romantic partner, job) when you can experience so much pleasure without getting up from your chair?

Many members of Gen Z are thriving in their 20s, but it’s a smaller percentage than for any of the five previous generations. One reason is that so many have fallen into “problematic use” of platforms designed to hook them, from social media and video games to porn and the new scourge of online sports betting, which has recently overtaken high school boys. Like the denizens of 19th-century opium dens, the heavy users of these products are addicted, unfree, undisciplined, and unhappy.

6. Undermine Trust Across Generations

Sow suspicion between parents and children, teachers and students, elders and youth. If every authority figure is portrayed as untrustworthy or obsolete, the next generation grows rootless—cut off from inherited wisdom and forced to navigate the world with only the guidance of peers and algorithms.

For as long as humans have had cultures, the accumulated wisdom of a community has been passed down vertically, from older generations to younger ones, with some degree of variation and innovation at each step. The phone-based childhood has rerouted cultural transmission on a planetary scale, turning it sideways as peer-to-peer transmission pushes out the intergenerational. Even if parents work hard to pass on family traditions, the number of megabytes of information they can convey is small compared to the terabytes of content coming in from peers, influencers, and bots.

Of course, technology has been changing the transmission of culture for centuries, and as the pace of change sped up, our grandparents’ knowledge appeared less useful. Yet still, there were always wide avenues of intergenerational transmission, including books, which were much more widely read by young people before they got smartphones. Even television was a powerful connector, exposing Boomer and Gen X kids to vast numbers of movies and TV shows from previous decades. Edmund Burke made the case for the necessity of vertical transmission in 1790:

We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.

The devil’s plan is to cut off young people from the wisdom of “nations and ages” and force them to make the difficult transition to adulthood with “only the guidance of peers and algorithms.”

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7. Make Everything a Marketplace

If every experience—play, art, sex, spirituality, even friendship—becomes commodified, then nothing remains sacred. Young people may mistake consumption for meaning, never realizing that depth requires some things to be beyond price.

It is widely said that the “users” of social media are not the customers. They are the product, whose attention is sucked out through their eyeballs and sold to advertisers. Young people are the most prized catch because if they can be locked into your platform, you can extract their attention for many years to come.

Part of the damage done during extraction is that young people come to see everyone and everything in life as a kind of commodity to be consumed, reposted, or exploited in the never-ending task of managing their online brand. Freya India, a Gen Z writer who is part of my team at After Babel, shows how the mad competition for likes on social media pushes girls to turn their boyfriends into full-time cameramen and to turn a father’s funeral or a visit to Auschwitz into an opportunity for a sexy selfie. The title of Freya’s forthcoming book is Girls®: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything.

Conclusion: Learning from the Red Team

Chat closes the plan with this epilogue:

In short: if I were the devil, I’d destroy the next generation not by terror or violence, but by distraction, disconnection, and slow erosion of meaning. They wouldn’t even notice, because it would feel like freedom and entertainment.

Those three terms — distraction, disconnection, and the erosion of meaning — summarize the Devil’s project. In order to defend young people, we need technology in childhood to promote the opposite: focus, connection, and meaning. Basic phones and e-readers generally confer such benefits. But as we look back on the devastation of adolescent mental health, relationships, attention, and meaning that has occurred since 2012, I think we are forced to conclude that smartphones, tablets, and social media have been doing the Devil’s work.

In The Happiness Hypothesis, I wrote that happiness does not come from outside (from getting what you want), nor does it come primarily from within (from accepting the world as it is). Rather, it comes from between — from getting the right kind of embedding or relatedness between yourself and others, yourself and some kind of productive work, and yourself and something larger than yourself. Those embeddings take time and commitment. They grow slowly. They are less likely to grow to maturity when children go through puberty on smartphones and social media platforms.

So if we want the next generation to develop focus, connection, and a sense of meaning, we must delay the onset of the fully online life until the end of the period of rapid culture-learning and brain rewiring known as puberty, which is over for most kids by age 16 or 17. That was the goal of the four norms I proposed in The Anxious Generation:

• No smartphones before high school

• No social media before 16

• Phone-free schools, bell to bell, from K through 12

• More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world

When enacted together, these four norms roll back the phone-based childhood and give children time and opportunities to play, develop friendships, read books, grow a stable identity, and learn to pay sustained attention.

We can save future generations from spiritual devastation. We can bring down those high rates of agreement that “life often feels meaningless.” We can — and must — defeat the Devil and reclaim childhood in the real world.

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When it comes to hard problems, computer scientists seem to be stuck. Consider, for example, the notorious problem of finding the shortest round-trip route that passes through every city on a map exactly once. All known methods for solving this “traveling salesperson problem” are painfully slow on maps with many cities, and researchers suspect there’s no way to do better. But nobody knows how to…

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This year I stopped being a consultant, started a tiny company, sold hundreds of little modular synths, hosted two incredible events, and I’m slowly getting used to calling myself an electronic musical instrument designer.

1. Global deaths from air pollution are falling fast. Between 2013 and 2023 deaths per 100,000 fell 21%. Tens of millions of people are alive today who’d have died if pollution controls hadn’t worked. [Angus Hervey]
2. An early version of DeepSeek, the Chinese AI, “did exceptionally well at reasoning, but had the crippling weakness that its outputs were an unintelligible mix of Chinese and English.” [Paul Taylor]
3. You can (maybe) avoid paying tax on an unused office block by filling it with plastic tubs containing snails and lettuce. The office becomes, legally, a farm, so (maybe) exempt from tax under UK law. [Jim Waterson]
4. You can unlock the wheels on a shopping cart by playing sounds on your phone. [Joseph Gabay]
5. In the UK, water companies and offshore rigs communicate by bouncing radio waves off trails created by millions of small meteorites as they burn up in the atmosphere. [Meteor Communications Ltd] (I learned about this while prepping for the Dyski Radio Music retreat.)
6. London is safer today, with fewer murders, than at any time since I moved here almost 30 years ago. [Fraser Nelson]
7. A fusion energy start-up has developed a process to turn mercury into gold. Each year, their plant would produce 5 tonnes of gold and one gigawatt of electricity, both worth a similar amount. Unfortunately, the gold will be slightly radioactive, so must be left for 14–18 years before it’s safe to handle. [Tom Wilson]
8. Job apps for nurses can set payment rates by analysing a nurse’s credit card debt to decide how desperate they are for work. [Katie J. Wells & Funda Ustek Spilda]
9. Apple’s iPhone Air demo video was modified for the South Korean market because the ‘jibgeson’ 🤏 gesture is intensely controversial — men in gaming communities believe it means “Korean men have small genitals” and it’s sparked various consumer boycotts. [Kim Min-Young]
10. The Casio F91W — the ubiquitous digital watch, worn by Osama Bin Laden, costing just £12 — has been faked for years, and the fakes are getting better and better. [Andy C]
11. The Radioactive Shrimp Scare of 2025 was likely caused when a recycling plant in Cikande, Indonesia accidentally melted scrap metal from a piece of medical or industrial equipment containing Caesium-137. A plume of smoke was released across Java, entering the BMS Foods plant which processes 1/3rd of the shrimp imported into the US. [Paris Martineau]
12. Woodwork is older than humans. [Christopher Schwarz]
13. Most characters in the film Idiocracy wear Crocs because the film’s wardrobe director thought they were too horrible-looking to ever become popular. [Alex Kasprak]
14. Nearly 0.7% of US exports, by value, are human blood or blood products. [dynomight]
15. Relaxed mowing is when local councils cut grass less often to reduce costs and encourage biodiversity. [Richard Beecham]
16. The Ceremonial Bugle is a small plastic device that slides into a real bugle and allows a non-musician to perform at a funeral. It has a discreet switch to select ‘Taps’, ‘Last Post’ or one of ten other calls. [Simon Britton via Nicolas Collins]
17. Robot hands need fingernails. [Robot Man, via Matt Webb]
18. First names affect how you are perceived at work. ‘Anna’ and ‘Joseph’ are consistently considered trustworthy, honest and reliable, while ‘Victoria’ and ‘Ryan’ are considered competitive, ambitious and extrovert. [Susanna Grundmann & Co]
19. Retrospekt is a Milwaukee company with 40 employees that sells old technology; early 2000s digital cameras, iPods, corded phones. They recently bought 40 pallets of old VHS tapes. [Daisy Alioto & Francis Zierer]
20. A gram of silica gel has almost the same surface area as two basketball courts. [Spencer Wright]
21. A study of 500 diners found “attractive servers earn approximately $1,261 more per year in tips than unattractive servers.” Mostly because of “female customers tipping attractive females more than unattractive females.” [Matt Parrett]
22. One of the first ever Velvet Underground gigs was entertaining the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry. [Adam Ritchie]
23. In the 2000s, at least 20% of the phones used in Sub-Saharan Africa physically passed through one building on Nathan Road in Hong Kong. [Peter Bil’ak]
24. During 2024, the bubble tea and ice cream chain Mixue overtook McDonald’s as the world’s largest fast food chain with 47k branches. Founder Zhang Hongchao had multiple restaurant failures before he started selling ¥1 ice cream cones near a school. [Sam Tang]
25. “Dependency length is the number of words during which the reader needs to ‘hold their breath’ before they reach a resolution.” [Conversion Rate Experts]
26. Despite having the same name and the same triple diamond logo, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (cars, rockets, air conditioners) and Mitsubishi Pencil (pencils, pens, markers) are completely separate companies. The pencil company started ten years earlier, in 1887. [Carson Monetti]
27. Researchers at MIT have developed a fibre computer that is stretchable and machine washable with 6 hours of battery life, weighing about as much as a sheet of A4 paper. [Nikhil Gupta & co]
28. 51% of the animals in farms across the world are shrimp. [Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla]
29. Every receipt for every purchase in Taiwan includes a lottery number worth up to £250k. It’s a tax compliance scheme with benefits. [Pablo Musumeci]
30. Xiaotiancai is a smartwatch for tweens, with more than 50 million users in China. The watch has social features that have created a huge grey market where children pay for bots and outsourced professional account management to boost likes and followers. [Li Xin]
31. In 2023, Nigeria had a million more births than the whole of Europe. [Our World in Data, via Charles Onyango-Obbo]
32. Childhood peanut allergies are falling dramatically, perhaps because advice to avoid peanuts was reversed. [Simar Bajaj]
33. The serial killer epidemic in 1970–80s US may have been caused by lead fumes from cars and factories, and solved by environmental regulations. [Caroline Fraser via James Lasdun]
34. For the last 50 years, happiness in Europe was U-shaped over a lifetime. Higher for the young and old, lower in the middle. That’s changed over the last decade. In Northern Europe, the young are less happy, and wellbeing rises with age. In Southern Europe, the old are less happy, and wellbeing falls with age. [David G Blanchflower & Co]
35. Namibia is the first country in the world where women hold the top three positions of power simultaneously (President, Vice President, Speaker). [Joy Funmilola Oke via Susan Emmett]
36. The new domestic status symbol in LA is a massive front door. [Clio Chang]
37. Why aren’t subtitles animated to graphically represent the mood of the speakers? Researchers in Southern Brazil have developed a system that does exactly that. [Calua de Lacerda Pataca & Co]
38. Americans have been shrinking since the early 1980s. [John Komlos]
39. In 1895, Tokyo bought electricity generators from the German company AEG, operating at 50Hz. A year later, Osaka bought generators from General Electric, operating at 60Hz. 130 years later the country is still split, with two separate electricity grids operating at two different frequencies. [Alice Gordenker]
40. Writing is a way to escape your mind’s default setting. [Kupajo]
41. The decoy effect in pricing (where adding a third, overpriced, option can encourage people to make a more expensive choice) has been validated by a study of 3.6 million wine purchases in a British supermarket. [Tom Stafford] (I wrote more about pricing and decoy effects a few years ago.)
42. Chinese CO2 emissions fell by 1% in 2025, due to record solar power and falling coal use for energy generation. [Lauri Myllyvirta]
43. Singer Momoka Tojo was forced by her management to post a selfie with the message ‘good night’ every day for a year as punishment after she shared a photo of her boyfriend. [Matthew Hernon]
44. North Korean workers are constantly applying for IT jobs in big US companies with fake CVs and AI-enhanced interviews. One Fortune 50 company submitted their new-hire list to the FBI: “Six came back positive for North Korean agents, two of them were Indian citizens being paid by North Korea to take these jobs.” [Jessica Lyons]
45. The Danish Government pays over $1mn each year to private metal detectorists for archaeological finds, according to a law passed in 1241. [Elizabeth Anne Brown]
46. Global suicide rates have declined by 29% since 2000, due to measures like pesticide bans, more responsible media reporting of suicide, mental health education in schools and improved healthcare responses. [Dévora Kestel & co, via Angus Hervey again]
47. When returned Hewlett-Packard printers are refurbished, a printer cable is added to the packaging. This solves the most common cause of returns — people who can’t get the Wi-Fi to connect. [David Owen]
48. In September 2005, Steve Jobs announced (12:29) a feature called Smart Shuffle, which made iPod randomisation less random, in order to appear more random. Twenty years later, Spotify are still trying to find a shuffle algorithm that users like. [Heather McCalden]
49. Marchetti’s Constant is the idea that throughout human history, from cave dwellers to ancient Greeks to 21st century Londoners, people tend to commute for about an hour a day — 30 minutes out, 30 minutes home. So faster travel leads to longer distances, not less time. [Cesare Marchetti, plus a 2025 update]
50. Food spending drops 5% in households where at least one person is on Ozempic or other GLP-1 drugs. Savoury snacks go down 10%, fast food spending down 8%. The only thing that seems to go up is yoghurt. [Sylvia Hristakeva & co]
51. British Chaos refers to a cluster of TikTok personalities that “once might have just been a local character in a pub in Stevenage but have become international celebrities.” [Clive Martin]
52. Gall’s law says: “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.” [John Gall p.52]

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Tom Whitwell is a former journalist, editor and consultant who now designs open source music electronics as Music Thing Modular, and runs experimental music retreats with Dyski. Follow his work on the Workshop Notes Newsletter. Say hello: tom.whitwell@gmail.com

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)