Reboot

There are the equivalent of ten teaspoons of sugar in a can of Coke. Of course, the actual sweetener is high-fructose corn syrup. Consume enough Coke, and you greatly increase your risk of diabetes, as well as numerous other health problems. I know this, yet I still find myself consuming it on a regular basis.

The theme repeats across much of my diet. I know what's bad for me, yet I eat it anyway. Even attempts at healthy eating are scuttled by too much junk sneaking its way into my meals. A nice salad is healthy... until it's doused with four tablespoons of dressing. Lean meat is okay... but the quantity I consume keeps increasing.

That's not to say I try to eat healthy all the time. Many meals come from restaurants, where the primary goals are to supply flavor and quantity, not health. I could go into how many calories there are in a meal at McDonalds, but what's the point? We all know how bad it is.

And we eat it anyway.

For me, there's a collection of reasons why I continue to eat poorly. I was raised with certain eating habits, and knowing that some of them are not good doesn't make the training go away. (I'm like Pavlov's dog, drooling for burgers and fries when hunger rings its bell.) Even looking at food options with greater knowledge in the present doesn't prevent pleasure, convenience, and stress from all playing a role eating what I want instead of what I need.

I'm a bad food addict, and it's getting worse over time. If I don't change this, I'm going to have serious health problems in the future. This isn't the first time I've admitted this to myself. Yet, even when such an admission has led to positive progress, I end up back-sliding into the bad stuff.

So it's time to reboot.

My wife and I are going to try the "Eat to Live" plan, a very intensive vegan diet. The initial phase of the plan is six weeks, and when we reach that point, we'll figure out what to do next.

For me, the goal is simple. I've become accustomed to so much meat, fat, salt, and sugar that I need a break from them to be able to allow them back into my diet in reasonable amount. To achieve this, I'm going to shortchange the pleasure aspect of food for a while. And before you try to tell me that cutting out numerous things from my diet will someone increase pleasure via some amazing recipes, I'll point out that if the most flavorful way to prepare something is also healthy, that's how we'd do it already.

This is not to say that there's no way to have flavorful, healthy food, but I've always found that one of the biggest problems for me is having a healthy recipe that aims to duplicate something else. Invariably, I always want the something else.

So for the next six weeks, my mindset is that food is fuel, and I want to ingest the best fuel possible (a big topic of debate which I'll talk about another day). I know that in the beginning I'll still want all the bad stuff, but after enough healthy meals, my body may reboot. That's the hope, the goal, and the plan. So let's get started and see what happens.