Food morality

Good and bad foods

Diet culture is heavily focused on good foods and bad foods as if foods have some morality attached to them. What is considered bad varies, but almost any diet whatsoever will have some bad foods:

• Protein is bad

• Meat is bad

• Carbs are bad

• Sugar is bad

• Fat is bad

• Etc

These are food groups, but they apply to individual foods as well. Kale is "clean", french fries are "dirty".

Foods do not have a moral dimension, they are just food.

Health

How about health? Surely that matters? Yes, having a healthy diet is important, however, what a healthy diet means is your diet as a whole, not individual meals or individual foods. If you had a healthy day of eating full of whole foods, fruit and vegetables, having some ice cream at the end of the day does not harm your health in any way. No food in isolation is powerful enough to cause any negative effect if eaten in moderation.

It's true that some foods better contribute towards fat loss or health than others. Broccoli is both more diet and health-friendly than Oreos. This is hard to argue against. This is fine, but just remember that this doesn't need to be viewed in a dramatic good and evil framework. They're both just food, one just happens to have more nutrients and lower calories than the other.

Balance

Obsessing about eating "clean" food can be problematic, and that progress into orthorexia nervosa, an (unofficial but real) eating disorder by excessive preoccupation with eating "pure" food. Always remember that what matters for your health and body goals is your overall diet.

However, I find that some people take this anti-clean food approach too far, and they propose to abolish the very concept of junk food, for example. I find this extreme and unnecessary. Here is how I recommend thinking about it: your overall diet is always what matters, but some foods will contribute towards your health and fat loss goals more than others, as we have discussed.

Money analogy

Here is an analogy that I find super helpful: imagine that you are trying to take your personal finances more seriously, optimizing your spending and trying to save some money. There is no single action that will make or break your finances. What matters is your overall spending and saving habits. It doesn't mean that now you have to pick the cheapest rice possible, even though a better-tasting rice is available for some extra cents.

But this doesn't mean that some actions aren't contributing for a bigger effect towards your financial goals. While you don't have to save every cent possible on every decision, there are some decisions that have a disproportional effect. For example, someone might have a very expensive subscription that spends a lot of their budget. This doesn't mean that, in principle, you can't have an expensive subscription. Maybe everything else about their finances is perfect except that and overall, they are on track for their goals.

Nevertheless, we can reasonably say that specific action is not budget-friendly. The same applies to food and dieting. What always matters is the entire context and viewing the whole process holistically, but likewise, the whole context is made up of tiny decisions, and those tiny decisions will have different impacts!