I got this thought-provoking comment from my friend Puck about my somewhat vague post on food from yesterday:

Eating’s a pleasure. “Eat Food: Feel Good.” Granted “Eat Food” in this case can also end up with “get fat and unhealthy” but it can be controlled without having to resort to “Almost never Eat Food and when you do restrict your input incredibly”.

I don’t see any reward — aside from no risk of eating too much — of not enjoying yourself. Neither of us believe in some sort of finish line to life where you get rewarded for what you did in it.

You get rewarded in life *by* what you do in it. And that’s why I eat yummy food.

I had a strong reaction to this comment because of the bit about almost never eating and restricting input incredibly.  This could be a reference to either veganism or to regular eating just highly restricted - and both of these are things I have experienced.  So I thought, why not blog about it?  I do live for your comments!

In the old days, when I ate the standard North American diet, I struggled a lot with my weight.  I found it very difficult to manage my food intake so that I wasn’t overeating.  The pleasure I took from chips and burgers and fries was always tainted by a sense of guilt and shame, because I knew I was paying for that pleasure in pounds.  I never really freely enjoyed all that bad food, because I was never able to just accept and love my overweight body.  I also suspected, though at that time had done no research, that the kind of food I was eating was probably also bad for my health over the long term.  So I can only speak for myself, though I suspect others will identify: eating was not a pleasure, or at least not a pure one.

I dieted for years, and dieting did feel like starving.  I had to really cut back to see any progress, which was depressing as hell and impossible to maintain.  So I can see why making the changes required to maintain a healthily low weight feels so impossible and like such a deprivation. Like frogs in a pot, I think we get blinded to the reality around us, which is that we have created an environment of plenty and therefore artificial need.  This, I believe, is the source of much of the difficulty with dieting.  Losing five pounds wouldn’t be hard if we weren’t so thoroughly accustomed to eating chips and fries and doughnuts and chocolate bars all the time.  We have come to accept this kind of eating as the normal set point; now even a whole foods carnivorous diet would seem extreme.

The problem is that the pleasure we derive from food has become associated with the worst kinds of food - deep fried, heavily salted, prepackaged, full of high fructose corn syrup.  We’ve lost our taste for regular old food, fresh from the ground or the animal.  Giving up these bad foods is experienced as an intolerable punishment - we feel entitled to the bad food, and enter an endless cycle of eating, feeling guilty, gaining weight, trying to lose it, failing, experiencing hopelessness, and returning to the bad food.  We have become slaves to our conveniences.  “Eat food: Feel good” has become a trap.

Here is the best part of being a vegan: I eat like a hog and can lose weight.  In addition to eating only plants, I really work to keep my fat intake down to around ten percent of calories.  This means in practice that I get my fats almost exclusively from the plants themselves, not from added oils.  This also means that my food is not very calorie dense compared to the normal diet.  So I eat all the time.  I usually have four proper meals every day, and I snack on fruit and veggies throughout the day.  I never feel deprived.  I never go hungry.

The irony is that now that I have restricted my diet, I finally have the freedom I craved to truly, purely enjoy food.  I don’t worry about my weight at all now.  So when I sit down to a meal, there’s nothing on my mind except whether to have my salad before or after the main course.  The guilt is gone and the lard is going.  This is what it is to truly enjoy food in an environment of plenty.  Puck, I eat yummy food too!

But of course I pay a price.  I can’t just eat anything at all.  I can’t have an ice cream sandwich, for example, which is surely one of summer’s chief joys.  The question is, Is this a real deprivation?  It might be, if I were constantly hungry and frustrated with being a vegan.  But my belly is always full, and who cares about ice cream sandwiches when there are fresh fruit smoothies?  The more I relax into this lifestyle, the less it feels like a chore or a deprivation.  It’s becoming more and more normal to me, and along with this normalcy comes comfort and pleasure.  It hasn’t always been easy, as I said yesterday.  I’m going against a lifetime of eating differently than I do now, and there are things I miss a lot.  But it gets easier, and now I’m in a pretty good place with veganism.

So to Puck I would say I do enjoy myself, thoroughly, full-bellied-ly.  My relationship to food is no longer conflicted.  Will I be rewarded for this lifestyle within my lifespan?  Only time will tell, but assuming I fall within two standard deviations of the norm, epidemiological data says I have a great chance of avoiding heart attacks, obesity, and certain cancers, and diabetes.  It’s just a matter of deciding if it’s worth it to you (anyone).

I’m sure there is also a way to eat a carnivorous diet that doesn’t involve a sense of deprivation or weight gain, but alas, I never discovered it.  Of course I was never able to kick the junk food habit, which surely contributed.  I doubt deprivation is the necessary state for meat eaters who want to stay trim, though avoiding deprivation from hunger probably requires abandoning junk food almost entirely.  I don’t think I would advocate anything so strict as almost never eat and when you do restrict incredibly - there must be some middle ground between overeating and undereating that allows people to feel full, to purely enjoy food, and provide for all nutritional needs.  I mean besides veganism.