Prefer What Is Beneficial

to your health

This time of the year has always been wedding season for my wife and I. It feels like every weekend we have another wedding to attend which we love because we are incredibly blessed to have such good friends. But it also creates a lot of opportunities to indulge.

This weekend we had a rooftop wedding reception on the beach and it was a blast. Now I’ll be honest, I love to enjoy a few drinks at weddings, especially when the venue features a good bourbon menu like this one did. But I try to limit the damage to just the drinks and not go overboard on the food. Which isn’t necessarily an easy thing. Especially after a few bourbons!

This particular reception didn’t make it easy. The food was absolutely incredible. Every 5 minutes a server was walking around with a tray of delicious food. Oysters, short rib and carrots, charcuterie, tiny fried chicken sandwiches, shrimp & grits, and a plethora of incredible-looking desserts.

Despite the wide variety of delicious foods, I found that I had a pretty strong preference for the healthier foods that were available. In the past, this always wasn’t the case. I was much more likely to give myself permission to eat poorly because of the special occasion. Even when I first stopped giving myself permission, I still found myself drawn to the more unhealthy food choices in situations like this. But this time something was different which was reflected by the ease with which I decided to forgo the dessert table( I did opt for a second plate of short rib though).

Reflecting on this weekend I thought about something I read a while back from the stoic philosopher Masonius Rufus:

“What else is gluttony but intemperance in the matter of nourishment, causing men to prefer what is pleasant in food to what is beneficial.”

Our health journies have many different stages to them. When we first begin, we have so much motivation to make a change that we are able to ride that motivation to make better food choices for a period of time. According to Dr. B.J. Fogg, motivation is not a reliable tool for success as we often see motivation wain over time and usually rather quickly.

This is why it is so common to fall into the yo-yo dieting trend of eating healthy for a couple weeks followed by a few weeks of absolute nutritional debauchery. We’ve all been there!

Anyone who has been fortunate to bust out of this initial phase of dieting and develop better nutritional habits usually finds themselves more likely to make better nutrition decisions. While this stage of the health journey is so much better than the latter, it doesn’t mean it’s easy. As Rufus says:

“Exercising moderation and decorum in eating, demonstrating self-control there first of all, not an easy thing to do, but one which requires much attention and practice.”

At this stage of your health journey, it may feel like you’re having to really restrain yourself when tempted with foods you really want to eat. It may include awkwardness when out to dinner with friends or family when you opt for a healthier meal over the many unhealthy. It may even feel like a complete lack of enjoyment when you are eating healthier foods. I can tell you have been there too!

But then there is a final stage of your health journey where you find it incredibly easy to make better health decisions. You develop a preference for what is beneficial. For what makes you feel good. And this preference makes you able to continually choose better nutrition habits without having to give it much thought. This is what I experienced this weekend.

This is not to say that reaching this stage of your health journey is easy or quick. Some of you reading this may feel like achieving such a state is impossible. Let me tell you, it’s not! Rufus tells us that it requires constant practice to “accustom ourselves to choosing food not for enjoyment but for nourishment, not to tickle the palate but to strengthen the body.”

As you progress through your health journey be mindful. Think about how you are feeling, why you are making the positive health choices you are making, why you keep making the negative ones, and the benefits and consequences of each. As you continue to reconnect with your body and be thoughtful about your nutrition choices, you will restore your evolutionary ability to be drawn to foods that nourish your body over foods that simply offer pleasure.

The struggle will be worth it when you experience the many benefits Rufus points out like, “better able to do hard work, less fatigued by their labor, less frequently ill, enduring more cheerfully cold, heat, lack of sleep, and every such hardship.”

Thanks for reading,

Chris Irvin

P.S. If you enjoyed this reading, please support the newsletter by subscribing. If you are already a subscriber then thank you! This newsletter would be pointless without folks like you to read it!