I have been informed that my diet does not contain enough fat.
Seriously. I’m an American. Who doesn’t eat enough fat. Obviously I am a commie pinko traitor who hates all that we stand for in this country.
I learned this after complaining to my physical therapist/trainer today that I’m gaining weight. I was frustrated, because I had recently added an extra half-hour of cardio onto my workouts. The extra cardio made me exhausted later in the day unless I ate more, but it seemed like no matter how much I ate, I was always ravenous.
My trainer asked me to describe my diet. Protein, carbs, some fat, and ideally some greens at breakfast. Protein shake and a banana after working out. Low-fat protein, carbs, greens at lunch. A bit of trail mix for a snack. Bean-based vegetable stew for dinner, with a slice of bread, and more greens. Except sometimes I just couldn’t stop eating the damn trail mix.
“That sounds really good,” he said. “But you should try to work a bit more fat in there, especially at lunch. A few slices of avocado should do it.”
It seems my problem was a fairly common one. The extra cardio made extra metabolic demands, and triggered my body into starvation mode. Body thinks it’s starving, sends hunger signals to the brain, yada yada yada, you’re hungry all the time, and your body tells you to take a nap to conserve calories, so you lay down fat instead of the muscle you’re need in order to do that extra cardio.
The stupid thing is, that for much of the winter I had been having a some guacamole with my lunch. I loved it. I get the avocados at my local farmers’ market, so they’re super fresh, and my lunches were incredibly tasty — but I felt slightly guilty, thinking that I didn’t really need that extra fat. Then, several weeks ago, I heard a program about research into food addiction and nutrition on the local NPR station. Fats and sugars, apparently, trigger dopamine in much the same way as addictive drugs like opiates. This means that when you start eating them, it’s hard to stop. Of course, your body needs carbohydrates and fats in order to function. “But,” said one of the guests on the program, “if you live in America today there’s very little chance you aren’t getting enough fat.”
“Wow,” I thought, “he has a really good point. I really don’t need those extra fat calories from those avocados. Besides, the dopamine system is the one that goes haywire in ADD, which is probably why that guacamole tastes so incredibly good. I’ll stop eating it.” And I did, and I felt virtuous.
If I’d stopped to think about what he said, I would have realized that I was committing a logical fallacy. I inferred from the fact that I live in America, and the standard American diet is high in fat, that my diet was therefore high in fat (it’s the fallacy of division, kids! Yay!) . The problem here is that I do not eat the standard American diet. I’m a vegetarian, and that simple fact alone means that my diet is not “standard”. It does not necessarily follow that any vegetarian diet is low in fat, but mine is — because I take scrupulous pains to make sure it’s healthy and balanced, because if I don’t, I experience brain fail.
Of course, if I’d stopped to think at all, I would have realized that it’s stupid to change a diet that’s working for you based on a throwaway line from a radio show, even if the person speaking it happens to be a neuroscientist who studies the effects of addiction and nutrition on the brain. Yeah, fat triggers dopamine, and yeah, that means it can be addictive — but, as the neuroscientist would have been happy to tell me, sometimes dopamine is triggered for very good reasons. Those guacamole soy-chicken wraps tasted probably tasted wonderful because they contained what my body needed.
Obviously, I didn’t stop to think. My decision to deprive myself of that tasty, tasty guacamole was based on an almost unconscious equation of “deprivation” with “virtue”, and the assumption that what I saw as morally “good” was going to be “good” for me (another logical fallacy, btw).
There’s probably a whole essay here about the Obesity Epidemic(tm) and the media. Why was I so quick to assume that there was something wrong with how I eat? Why did I take that off-hand statement to heart, when my weight is Normal(tm) and I’m in excellent health? How many other people out there take statements like that to heart, and inadvertently sabotage their own health and fitness in the process? And how can we have a much-needed national conversation about health, exercise, and nutrition when it’s all so damned complicated?
That’s an essay for another day. In the mean time, I’ve learned a lot from the aftermath of that fateful decision to forgo those few ounces of guacamole:
1. Nutrition, while basically simple, is very sensitive to individual situations.
2. Self-deprivation for its own sake is super lame.
3. My body can tell me what it needs, and I should damn well listen to it.
4. In spite of my Liberal Arts Education(tm), which trained me in the rigors of Critical Thinking(tm), I am just as vulnerable as anyone else to making irrational, emotionally-driven choices.
and
5. Did I mention my body is smarter than I am?
For now, I’ve reinstated that guacamole, and after only one day I already feel much better. I didn’t get ravenous in the afternoon, I didn’t fall asleep, my mood was stable, and I could even focus mentally. Virtue can go to hell.
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