Own Your Health

It's what you control

I posted a newsletter earlier this week talking about nutrition self-control. In that article, I discussed the concept of developing a “profession in aversion”, introduced to us by the Greek philosopher Epictetus.

In that article, I made the following statement, “If you slip up and make a poor food choice when you are trying to be conscious of eating better, the biggest tragedy is not the food that you ate but rather that you were unable to prevent yourself from doing something you told yourself you wouldn’t do. Your inability to say no.”

I posted this statement on Twitter and my Instagram and boy, it was not received well. I had a slew of people commenting saying that I was promoting eating disorders and one girl even claimed that my account had given her an eating disorder.

In the end, I took this post down. Not because people didn’t like it or because it resulted in conflict (if you’ve seen my posts about plant-based dieting, you’ll know conflict doesn’t bother me) but rather because I realized that the point I was trying to get across was not getting across due to my delivery (maybe the word tragedy was a little too harsh).

If you, like many others, read that statement as, “it’s all your fault if you slip up, you should feel really bad about it and never do it again", then I want to take some time in this newsletter to clear the air.

I do not believe that we should feel bad about slipping up on our diets. The goal isn't to be perfect. The point I was attempting to make with my quote is that often times when someone slips up on their diet, all they think about is the food they ate and all of the cons they have heard about that food. I think that is the wrong place to be focusing that energy.

The food has already been consumed, we cannot change the past. If you are going to dedicate any energy towards what has occurred, it should not be towards beating yourself up for eating that food. It should be towards thinking about why you were unable to follow through with your plans to avoid eating that food so that you can improve yourself for the future. After all, how we respond in any given situation is truly the only thing in our control.

I don’t suggest reviewing your self-control because I think you should strive to be perfect in your ability to say no or that being perfect is even necessary. I suggest reviewing why you were unable to say no because the skill it takes to say no to a delicious food will undoubtedly bleed into other areas of your life.

The word diet came from the ancient Greek term diaita. In ancient Greece, diet was not just the food you put in your body. It was the sum of everything you consumed. What you ate, drank, your exercise, your social interaction, and everything you exposed your brain to. Diaita was the way you lived.

To the ancient Greeks, the nutrition aspect of diaita was very important because of its impact on the other areas that made up their understanding of diet. They believed that those who could not control their eating habits would not be in control of other temptations in life like money, power, and sexual temptations. To be gluttonous was perceived as lacking morales.

Now I hope this goes without say that this does not mean that someone who slips up and has a slice of pizza is more likely to cheat on their spouse. However, I think there is something that we could learn from the way the ancient Greeks looked at nutrition and its role in the rest of our lives.

Being able to say no and follow through on it gives us power. It trains our self-control muscles in ways that could benefit us in other aspects of life. Being able to say no to the doughnuts in your work’s breakroom may make you more likely to say no to the alcohol you have been trying to avoid or the cigarette you have been trying to quit. Being able to say no and follow through with your dietary choices might train your self-control muscles in ways that allow you to finally get to the gym, become a more patient parent, and less of a procrastinator at work. Being able to say no might actually give you the confidence in yourself that you can do the things you set your mind to which might be the first stone that needs turning to make a big leap forward in your life.

This is not about perfection. This is about striving to be better guys. We live in a day and age where access to delicious tasting foods is abundant. I do not believe we need to avoid these things entirely but we should strive to avoid these things when our desire is to avoid them. This is what it means to develop a profession in aversion. This is the point I was trying to get across in my newsletter earlier in the week.

As a final note, I want anyone who is following my work to know that I am not posting necessarily posting things to make people feel good about themselves. I do the work I do for the people who have the desire to be better and actually want to take some action on it!

Now that we have cleared the air on this topic, stay tuned for the next newsletter where I will be discussing how to actually become a profession in aversion, how we should look at taking breaks from our diet, and most importantly, how you can feel in control of your health!