The Eating Operating System

If the topic of nutrition is scary to you, here it is simplified into a three-line haiku: "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants." It is simple, accurate and elegant, and the credit belongs to Michael Pollan, who wrote it in The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

Memorable quotes are like little bits of programming code you can use to install mental operating system updates. This one is powerful because it is short, easy to remember and very true.

Remember that your subconscious mind does not want to be updated. New input is regularly forgotten and ignored. Have you ever decided to make a change, made a really good plan, and then simply forgot to do it? It is as if every time you put the update disk in, the computer spits it out. That is normal — it is your subconscious maintaining the status quo.

That is why repetition and reminders are so important. When your subconscious sees that this update is not going away, it begins to accept it. Write the quote on a card and post it somewhere you will see it. The refrigerator works well.

As strange as it sounds, we simply do not have enough food in our diet. We have plenty of things to eat — just not enough food.

For the most part, processed food does not contain 100% food. In the past our food was grown, raised or taken from the wild. Now the bulk of it passes through one or more factories on the way to us, and as we process food we remove many of the vital components that make it food. Worse, the industry not only removes the food from our food, it also adds "not food" to it.

If a food comes out of a package, it was touched by a hundred or more machines before it reached your lips. This assembly-line method was pioneered by Henry Ford to make cars. All things considered, food produced this way is only slightly better for you than eating your minivan — and your minivan and a package of snack food may even share some ingredients.

A client once said something remarkably insightful. He and his wife — who never seems to struggle with her weight — went to a party. She looked around at the gooey, cheesy pasta dishes and the gravy-coated meat choices and said, matter-of-factly, "There is no food for me here."

This perplexed and annoyed him. Looking out over the same buffet, he saw sweet temptation. He saw FOOD. Lots of food.

Two people, one table, two completely different definitions of the word. Her definition was doing the work that his willpower had to do. That is what updating an operating system means in practice: not gritting your teeth harder at the buffet, but changing what the word food means to you before you ever get there.