Eating Healthy is Hard

Differentiating between simple and easy

Making healthy eating decisions is often portrayed as an easy thing to do. Especially by people who are good at doing it. This creates the idea that it isn’t hard to eat better so people get discouraged when it is for them.

I think the portrayal is meant to be that healthy eating is simple as in the action itself is not complicated. You simply don’t put bad foods in your mouth and instead put good foods in your mouth. But let’s not confuse simple with easy.

Eating healthy is hard. Especially considering that the standard American diet has presented us with cheap, delicious, addictive food options that are easily accessible and presented to us in frequently our day-to-day lives. Coupled with the fact that foods marketed as healthy are typically more expensive and everyone has a different idea of what eating healthy is. You have a recipe for a difficult lifestyle change.

So we won’t sugar coat healthy eating as something that is easy to do here. We will instead address it as a very difficult thing to do. But we also won’t make that an excuse for not trying to doing it though.

As humans we are meant to endure hard things and often times when we do, we come out stronger for it afterwards. Whether its working out, sitting in a cold tub, learning a new language, trying to be a better spouse or parent, etc. as humans we adapt to difficult things by becoming better. And even better is the adaptation makes it easier to do the hard thing. Add in the benefit the hard thing is actually providing and you realize that one of the best things we can do for ourselves are hard things. Eating healthy is one of them.

Don’t fear the difficult road, it often leads you right where you need to be.

Thanks for reading,

Chris Irvin

P.S. If you are digging this newsletter, I would really appreciate it if you could share it with a friend who you think would also benefit from reading it!