Last week I posted some thoughts regarding virtue ethics. The previous week I wrote disparagingly about Clean Eating. Since then, a lot of people have asked me about the connection between diet and virtue.
OK, Tom Hanks is right. No one has asked me that. But still, it’s a question I’d like to engage. Because it isn’t as though Americans are particularly healthy. Our habits are so far from what they ought to be that the FDA has approved a device that will suck the bad decisions right out of your stomach.
So if what we’re doing isn’t working, and if Clean Eating isn’t the solution, what should we do? I’m so glad you asked.
Diets are like tightropes, suspended a few inches off of the ground. People have strong opinions about which tightrope is best. Maybe they’re a believer in Paleo, raw food, or intermittent fasting. But whichever tightrope they choose, that’s their focus. They hope to stay on the tightrope indefinitely (or at least into the ill-defined future). Through the pure exertion of willpower, they intend to balance perfectly until balancing becomes as easy as walking.
Of course, things seldom work out this way. Life becomes demanding, busy, or unpredictable, and so they fall off of the tightrope. Maybe they try to hop back on, but before long, they are on the ground again. Eventually they find that they’ve abandoned the tightrope all together. They are walking again on the same ground they’ve tried to leave behind so many times before. Perhaps they’ve even become interested in a new tightrope. What’s this Keto diet all about?
UCLA researcher Tracy Mann conducted a study that looked into the problems with dieting.
We found that the majority of people regained all the weight, plus more. Sustained weight loss was found only in a small minority of participants, while complete weight regain was found in the majority. Diets do not lead to sustained weight loss or health benefits for the majority of people.
Although diets tend to be effective in the short term, dieters tend to fall off the tightrope in the long term. And, over time, all of those falls begin to take a toll.
We concluded most of [the study participants] would have been better off not going on the diet at all. Their weight would be pretty much the same, and their bodies would not suffer the wear and tear from losing weight and gaining it all back.
Ms. Mann isn’t the only one criticizing dieting. Sandra Aamodt’s popular TED Talk explains why diets make us fat. And just yesterday, NPR reported that yo-yo dieting may be bad for our hearts.
So, what does Virtue Ethics have to say about all of this? What, exactly, is the Aristotelian plan for weight loss? As I described last week, Virtue Ethics is chiefly concerned with what kind of people we are. In other words, it is less interested in the tightrope than it is in the ground. And so the key question is: when we fall of our diets, where do we land? What are our underlying habits? And what does it take to change them?
Our habits are the things we do without trying. Our habits don’t take any willpower. For instance, imagine that you wake up one Saturday morning to find that your spouse has bought a box of doughnuts. You’re probably going to eat some, but not all, of those doughnuts. As much as you might like doughnuts, you probably don’t evenwant to eat all of them. When you manage not to eat an entire box of doughnuts, you aren’t exercising willpower. You aren’t walking on a tightrope. You are walking on the ground.
I’m more interested in changing my habits than I am in balancing perfectly upon some artificial diet. When I think about my life 10 or 20 years from now, I want health to be second nature. To achieve that, I think I need to pay more attention to my habits than the latest nutritional fad.
For the past couple of years I’ve been working on this very thing. I’ve chosen one habit per year that I want to change, and made that my focus. I try to think about what I really want to do, not just for this year, but for the rest of my life. For the first year, for instance, I focused on overeating. I noticed that I had a tendency to mindlessly finish the food on my plate, whether I was hungry for it or not. The resulting over-full feeling was something I was happy to be rid of.
That first year seemed to be moving awfully slowly. I didn’t feel like I was doing enough. The plan didn’t seem sufficiently difficult. Yet, the habit has stuck. It’s not something I have to think about any more because it has become second nature. For instance, if I eat a lot of chips and salsa before a meal, I take it pretty slow on the meal. I had to consciously pay attention to it for the first few months. But somewhere between then and now it has become second nature.
This has been a somewhat strange post to write. Talking about dieting seems at once too personal and not serious enough. Yet, it’s clearly something that a lot of people spend a lot of time thinking about and even anguishing over. Virtue Ethics may be the stuff of serious books and learned lectures. Yet, I think it has application for this kind of very practical subject.