How Redefining Food Translates Into Weight Loss

Note: this article is part of our series series of no diet weight loss for gay men

Most Americans have a limited definition of food. We don’t see it having much symbolic value or recognize its power to forge connections, build community, provide comfort or a sense of belonging, except for maybe during the holidays. 

We see food as fuel, so most of our conversations revolve around its nutritional value. Is this food good or bad for us? Will it make us skinny or fat? Healthy or sick? 

Will it energize us or weigh us down? Will it make us bloat or not? Will it cause systemic inflammation? Will it clear the mind or give us brain fog? Will it cause cancer?

Researchers refer to the American eating consciousness, our relationship to and definition of what we eat as “food as nutrients.” We’re obsessed with its nutritional value, its potential for expanding or contracting our health. 

This limiting, single-minded focus on food as fuel prevents us from valuing what Epicureanism is all about—the aesthetics, the rituals and the physical, emotional, and spiritual nourishment food provides.

Why set the mood with candlelight if you're eating just for sustenance? Why hold hands and say a prayer in gratitude if food is just energy to get you through the day? Why tap a Tibetan singing bowl to concentrate the mind if food is just for the body?

If food is only important for the nutrients they contain, then it doesn't matter what you serve it on or who you eat it with. Rituals don't matter. Traditions don't matter. Putting it on a flimsy paper plate makes no more difference in enjoyment than putting it on your treasured grandmother’s dishes.

Until we change our consciousness away from “food as nutrients” to something far more expansive, creating rituals and shaping the aesthetics will always feel like add-ons we can toss away when they become inconvenient. 

We’ll forget to “eat until the pleasure subsides,” use environmental instead of internal cues to stop eating and insist on bigger and bigger portions.

The paradigm of “food as nutrients” is hostile to Epicurean ideals that can help you lose weight. And it should be. If you’re only eating for the nutrients then pleasure should be eyed warily, for it will often lead you to consume less than optimal nutrients.

If you’re only concerned with the nutritional value of food, its medical advantages, then dieting makes sense. An ethic of restraint makes sense. You must be able to call some foods good and some foods bad, or how will you know what to eat?

The “food as nutrients” consciousness can’t help but develop a moral classification system that tags every food as either healthy and good or unhealthy and bad. This helps you reach the only goal that counts—not pleasure, but the eating of correct nutrients.

This kind of thinking makes pleasure health’s enemy. It means our pleasure-seeking impulses must be subject to restraint and moderation lest we commit the deadly sin of gluttony.

We who resist temptation are considered righteous and moral. Those who yield to it are not. Once you moralize self-control, which “food as nutrients” does, then people are judged as ‘good’ if they abstain and ‘bad’ if they indulge.

If you only pick food based on its nutritional value then you have the moral obligation to resist the pleasure of comfort food, even though it will add to your well-being.

This need to control pleasure perpetuates the ideology of dieting. By cultivating strict moral guidelines about what’s right and wrong to eat, “food as nutrients” disciples constantly face sins they’ve got to stop themselves from committing.

Why Our Current Consciousness Keeps Us Fat

Perhaps the biggest problem with a “food as nutrients” consciousness is this: The definition of good nutrition is in a constant state of flux. What we think of as “good” today might change tomorrow.

For centuries, the reigning dietary framework was based on the four humors: blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. Later, we quantified the value of food in terms of calories. 

Then “nutritionism” took over which has alternately veered from the Age of The Vitamin, to the Era of Fortified Foods, to the Generation of Nutraceuticals, and finally to where we are now, somewhere between the fighting fiefdoms of macro (carbohydrates, proteins, fats) and micro (vitamins and minerals) nutrients.

Here’s the problem. Changing views of what constitutes good nutrition wreak havoc on us. The same moral classification system that once labeled eggs as the dietary work of the devil now says it’s the stuff of salvation. Nuts and avocados, once feared as a mark of the beast are now signs of the rapture.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, tomatoes were thought to be poisonous; now they’re glorious. Yellowfin and skipjack, the tuna varieties most widely eaten today, were largely thought of as “junk fish.” Today, tuna is charmingly known as “chicken of the sea.” 

Oatmeal was once only used as animal feed. Until the 1980s, portobello mushrooms were considered an unsightly waste product.

What are we glorifying today that we’ll demonize tomorrow? 

More importantly, where do all these psychotic swings in the definition of good nutrition leave people constrained by the consciousness of “food as nutrients?” 

Right where you’d expect them to be. Lost, confused, frustrated, and angry.

And let’s not forget, FAT.

Because when you pray at the “food as nutrition” altar, with its unstable assumptions of what is and is not allowed, you end up doing some stupid things. Like loading up on sugar to avoid fat, trying twenty different diets, or eating snacks with Olestra, the chemical that came with an anal leakage warning.

A Better Way

If not “food as nutrients” then what? 

Let’s break into the vaults of Social Psychology and see if we can fence anything valuable. The current thinking among researchers in the field is that we should shift our paradigm to something they call “food as well-being.” 

This means your food choices don't stop at the medical advantages they confer (i.e. weight loss, body size, health) but expand to its psychological, emotional, cultural, social, and spiritual benefits (love, connection, belonging, comfort).

Here’s what they mean. Nobody sits down to eat a plate of nutrients. We sit down for a meal that gives physical, emotional, and psychological nourishment. We eat for comfort, pleasure, love, identity, and community. Anything that enhances those needs—aesthetics and rituals come to mind—enhances our well-being.

A “food as well being” consciousness absolutely values the nutritional content of food, but it recognizes that nutrition is just one of many factors we use to decide what to eat.

In this consciousness, what you eat can't be separated from how you eat it, what you eat it on, the context you eat it in and the cultural meaning it revolves around. It is concerned with the medical, psychological, and emotional prosperity food brings to our everyday lives. It values the multi-dimensional aspects of nourishment and sustenance.

How do you make the switch from “food as nutrients” to “food as well-being?” By focusing on Epicurean pleasure. 

It’s not just about gravitating toward better-tasting food even if it’s nutritionally suspect (covered in the “Nutrilicious” chapter) but erasing the artificial distinction we Viscerals have made between the “non-food” aspects of eating —aesthetics, sensory pleasures, rituals and cultural and religious traditions—and the food itself.

Nobody personifies the American pursuit of visceral pleasures—and the “food as nutrients” consciousness—more than Fat Bastard, the fictional character in the Austin Powers movie series. He defined the American approach to eating with his famous line: “Get in my belly!” 

Fat Bastard didn’t care how you tasted or what you looked like. He certainly wasn’t going to say grace or put you on a beautiful platter or eat you “until the pleasantness of your flavor subsides.” You looked nutritious and he wanted a full belly, end of story.

If you’re struggling with your inner Fat Bastard, try turning the command "Get in my belly!" into a question: “What can I do to enhance the pleasure of you getting in my belly?”

Restaurants can teach us a lot about how to incorporate this kind of “food as well-being” into our lives. The very word “restaurant” comes from the verb “to restore,” plainly showing us that food is more than nutrients.

Pick a restaurant, any restaurant. A French bistro, an Italian trattoria, an American diner. It could be high, mid, or low-end. Doesn’t matter. They all follow the Epicurean ideals of enhancing the pleasure we get out of food. How? Let’s look.

Ambiance

It starts with creating the air of an “event.” You are not just coming to fill your stomach (you could do that at home). You are coming for a certain kind of food experience. From the lighting to the tablecloths (or lack of), from the cutlery to the serving platters, the purpose of the environment is to help you enjoy the food more. 

Aesthetics

There’s a traditional saying in the Middle East —“The eye eats before the mouth.”  It refers to giving food an attractive and pleasing appearance, presenting it in certain ways that increase positive emotions and meaningful memories. 

Rituals

From the servers introducing themselves to placing drink orders before the meal, there is a sequence of events designed to deepen the food experience. Sometimes they’re grand—like the pageantry and majesty of a wine tasting; sometimes they’re small, like the waitstaff singing happy birthday.

Cultural Provenance

The menu says the salmon is wild caught. The server says the steak came from grass-fed, Argentinian Pampas cows. The Jamaican woman at the farmer’s market has a unique way of shredding chicken for the chicken salad. We enjoy food more when we know where it’s sourced, how it’s prepared, and what stories, myths and legends are attached to it.

The Quest for the Holy Quail

You certainly don't want to turn your home into a restaurant, but restaurants that offer a “total table” experience can guide you to the things that are important—atmosphere, aesthetics, rituals, traditions, stories, and practices.

Try to “tablescape” your dining room or kitchen table with different lighting or perhaps using the ceiling as a “fifth wall” (with wallpaper, paint, or molding). Would candles set a mood? Should you dress up the floor with a rug? Do you have plates and cutlery with interesting stories attached to them?

When you operate out of a belief that being fed isn't the same thing as being nourished you stop seeing food as separate from the environment it’s in, the people who partake, and the feelings it evokes. 

You want to improve these “non-food” aspects not because they’ll help you lose weight or make you look good (although they will) but because you have a new consciousness compelled to express these values.

In the Epicurean mindset, meaning and connection are more important than money and status. It’s not about spending a fortune or getting your dining room featured in an Architectural Digest spread; it’s about helping food become more than the thing that fills your belly. 

In this consciousness, your beloved grandmother’s worn, wobbly table is more valuable than a new, luxury dining table with gold inlays.

You don't have to be a faddist, a sommelier, or an effete aristocrat to cultivate an Epicurean, “food as well-being” consciousness. You just must appreciate food’s multi-dimensional pleasures.

Nothing will help you make the transition from “food as nutrients” to “food as well-being” than incorporating rituals to every meal and snack.  Yes, snacks. If pleasure is the driving force in the epistemology of “food as well-being” then rituals are the fuel it runs on. 

Cross-cultural researchers have known for decades that rituals are inseparable from aesthetics, integral to gratification and indivisible from the comfort food provides. 

What they didn’t know, until recently, was how instrumental they are to losing weight.

And that’s what we’ll discuss next week.  Stay tuned!