I have always liked food: I enjoy cooking, I like eating, and I especially value sharing mealtimes together with family and loved ones. I also enjoy snacking, and I like going out to coffee shops, and I like eating out, and I like getting bits of take-out and nibbling them while I’m out for a walk or sitting in the park.

But I also like to be lean and healthy and fit. And for the last few years, I’ve been on a self-directed nutrition education kick.

These two areas of interest and appreciation have started to butt heads.

When I was young, I was very active, growing, and wasn’t particularly educated about (or interested in) nutrition. My family had a fairly healthy, whole-food, pioneer-style diet: lots of rice, pasta, and grains, but also lots of whole farm milk, fresh fruit, veggies, eggs, and some meat and fish. And very little processed food.

Growing up, I could pretty much eat as much as I wanted — and often did — without getting chubby or noticing any negative consequences.

I still like eating just as much, but now I’m more educated about the effects of different foods, as well as the effects they have on my specific body. But I also don’t want to become a utilitarian machine, who ignores the psychological and social gifts that food, and eating together, have to offer. I want to be vibrant and healthy, but I don’t want to optimize only for nutrition and numbers.

So, how to mesh the two?

Certain traditional cultures have done well with this. Like Italy and France, where high quality, wholesome food is a central part of the social fabric in a beautiful, healthy, and sustainable way; enjoyed and celebrated, but also kept in moderation and balance.

Western culture and North America, however, seem to be doing an exceptionally poor job of this, instead encouraging gluttony and excess at every step of the way, and making it much harder for anyone who wants to maintain a healthy and sustainable balance.

How to Be a Food Lover Without Overdoing It

I’ve tried a lot of different techniques, and below are the ones I’ve found most effective. Cycling through them, one at a time, for a few days at a stretch, can also work well.

• Get lots of exercise. This one is sweet. Especially if there’s some vigorous exercise modality that you actually enjoy. You can burn your way through the calories, stay healthy and fit, and have lots of headroom to eat the things you enjoy eating. Biking, hiking, long distance running, and sports are all options, as are bodybuilding and swimming.
• Eat slowly. I find I naturally eat less when I eat slowly. But it doesn’t reduce my enjoyment of the food, it actually increases it.
• Aim for proper meals. Consolidating your day’s food intake into two or three proper sit-down meals, rather than grab-and-go stand up snacking, seems to have good results. Again, it increases the enjoyment of the food rather than reducing it, while also naturally leading to healthier options and eating less.
• Try smaller portions. I’ve often noticed that the enjoyment gained from food (as you can see, this is a big thing for me…) decreases the more I eat. I can often get about 80% of the value from half the food, given 100% of my appreciation and attention. Try it out and see if you find the same. If you’d like to double up on saving time and energy cooking, make your usual amount but set half of it aside in the fridge, put the half you’re eating onto a nice ceramic plate with a good garnish so it still looks big and fancy, and enjoy your super-classy-and-modest meal!
• Preload with the healthy stuff. If I start my day with a good hearty meal of wholesome, healthy, not too calorie-dense food, I’m way less likely to end up snacking on less healthy things later on in the day.
• Proactively fill your day with other interesting things to do and think about, that aren’t food. Like coffee!
• Get enough protein and healthy fats. There’s hot debate about the right types, and amounts, of both of these macro-nutrients for optimal health, but getting enough of them early on in the day does seem to reduce cravings for processed foods, starches and sugars; three things that almost everyone seems to agree are good to limit in our diets.
• Reduce processed foods. Several of the pundits seem to agree that the main problem with the food system in North America is too much highly available, high-calorie, tantalizing, processed food. This isn’t what we evolved to eat, and it messes with our innate senses of satiety. It packs in too much energy in too condensed a form, while being engineered to be addictive, and leads to caloric overshoot. I still enjoy a good chocolate chip cookie, to be sure, especially when someone gives it to me, but I make an effort to get the bulk of my nutrition from nutritious, yummy, unprocessed foods. The less processed the better. Think raw veggies, baked tubers, fish, eggs, nuts, and fruit. Aside from being delicious, these high-quality food sources provide nutrition in its natural form, which the body is better equipped to process and account for without getting confused and wanting more than is healthy.
• Choose minimal. Sometimes making a little bait-and-switch on food selection can work well. For example, gradually weaning myself from coffee shop lattes onto grocery-store drip coffees, while not as gloriously bourgeois, has had good effects on both my finances and my calorie intake. Now, I can treat myself to a coffee out for half the price, and one-tenth the calories, while getting pretty much the exact same amount of enjoyment from it. Sometimes more, in fact, because of the non-trivial chances of a careless barista ruining my $7 drink.
• Find strategic cut-points. It’s worth identifying the points of least resistance for choosing the healthy option. It often seems like there’s a lot of resistance to forgoing something altogether; “no thanks, I’m not eating any desserts, currently” tends to elicit a cocktail of pity, sorrow, and annoyance from the host, as well as the long-suffering narrator, whereas a cheerful “yes please! but just a half portion” doesn’t usually trigger any negative repercussions. Similarly, I find forgoing second helpings is one of the easier ways to short-circuit the overeating cycle.
• Absence makes the heart grow fonder. A five-day water fast can turn the food enjoyment knobs to 11 like nothing else I’ve experienced. I haven’t found a way to make fasting at all easy or enjoyable — though some I’ve talked to have — but it certainly does foster a renewed appreciation for food. Go long enough drinking just water, and the simplest of meals becomes an exquisite feast. And the baseline re-calibration can last weeks.

Conclusion

These are my current best strategies for prioritizing being healthy and fit as well as remaining a die-hard foodie; two identities that don’t always place nice together.

Let me know your best tactics for this in the comments! What are your favourite ways to enjoy healthy and delicious food, without overdoing it?

Further Reading

I like to always have a health & wellness book on the go along with whatever else I’m reading, to give a little motivational nudge in that direction. Here are some of the best books I’ve read on the topic:

• What to Eat When: A Strategic Plan to Improve Your Health and Life Through Food by Michael F. Roizen and Michael Crupain (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40715560-what-to-eat-when)
• The 4-Hour Body by Timothy Ferriss (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7148931-the-4-hour-body)
• Glucose Revolution: The Life-Changing Power of Balancing Your Blood Sugar by Jessie Inchauspé (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58438618-glucose-revolution)
• The Oldest Cure in the World: Adventures in the Art and Science of Fasting by Steve Hendricks (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60310650-the-oldest-cure-in-the-world)
• Burn: The New Science of Human Metabolism by Herman Pontzer, Phd (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54886566-burn)
• Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity by Peter Attia (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61153739-outlive)