This answer to “What makes you secretly go, ‘yeah, good luck with that’?” struck me hard because it’s the perfect description of sobriety vs recovery. And, it’s the perfect description of dieting vs changing your diet.
Modern people with access to bountiful food have a terrible diet, and every single one of us knows it. Every single one of us actually knows that we should eat more fruit/veg/whole grains, less salt and fat and sugar. Lots of people are also learning that they should eat less processed food, and more whole foods.
Diet Illogic
So what do we do? We try food “sobriety”, in the form of whatever timed, specialized diet speaks to us. The logic in our heads goes something like this:
I need to lose weight! I need to be healthier!
Being healthier means more veggies and whole grains and stuff!
…..I’m going to drink heavily sugared, chemical-ed “diet” drinks until I’m literally sick of them!
Alternate, not-arrived-at-via-clear-thinking solutions include crash starvation diets, no-cook diets, low fat diets, high fat/low carb diets….pretty much anything and everything that feels less like a life change and more like a culinary punishment.
Very, very few people want you to eat well
Meanwhile, every single message we receive from absolutely everywhere tells us 1) to eat more, 2) to eat crap, and 3) that it’s our fault if we can’t lose weight.
If you haven’t noticed, I’m a whole-foods-vegan now. Vegan since May, and happy for loads of reasons I’ll talk about extensively. But the thing that really stands out to you if you become vegan is how very weird you suddenly are, compared to everything. Billboards advertise nothing but meat. Restaurants are named mostly after meat. People talk fondly of hardly any other foods but meat. It’s genuinely hard to find things to eat – other than lettuce leaves – at any given restaurant, because literally everything has meat, meat fat, dairy, or eggs in it. EVERYTHING.
So, there’s lots and lots of pressure from every corner to eat things that are unhealthy, and that help you gain weight.
Story time: I mentioned some dish online and tagged it vegan, and someone replied “it’d be better with bacon”. “But I don’t eat bacon,” said I. They responded with absolute horror.
Bacon isn’t life, people. I could really give a shit about bacon, even before I became vegan. Yeah sure, it’s yummy. So is orange juice and vodka, and nobody’s horrified that I’m not actively, at this moment, drinking a screwdriver. What’s with the weird pressure to eat that shit? (I suspect it has a lot to do with collective guilt soothing, as in “I’m doing this bad thing, and if you don’t do it too you’re showing me up!”)
Anyway, the point is: it’s hard to change the way you eat, because marketing and social forces are in a constant flow toward the meaty, fatty, salty, packaged, and terribly unhealthy.
So seriously, how do you do food recovery (and not just food sobriety)?
Well, here’s how I did it:
- Education. I’ve been reading over the years, watching documentaries. It helps the idea sink in that society at large is super wrong about food. We’ve also shared this information with the kids, via snippets and documentaries and discussions and more discussions.
- Groundwork. We’ve also been, more and more, building up our skills at eating at home, making wonderful whole food dishes – many of them quite simple! (Our favorite go-to meal is canned refried beans on corn tortillas, with salsa and guac and whatever.)
- More groundwork. We’ve also done little family experiments over the years – there was the Sugar Awareness Week in 2013 and again in 2014, and the no-packaged-foods September in 2014. These went over pretty damn well…experiments are fun.
- Environment switch. I was lucky; after years of tooling around with these things, Meat-Free Mondays, and so on, it was my husband Sean who suddenly decided to go vegan this year. I said, “…..well I’ll go with you!” And we talked to the kids, and the 2 under 18s went with us, too! I’m lucky because we got to change our whole environment at once. I don’t have to fix my own meal, and then add meat for them, or fight to eat well while we have tons and tons of packaged goods lying around.Changing what we keep in the kitchen, and how we go about eating, has made all the difference in the world.
This won’t be the path for everyone. Shoot, you may achieve a wonderful diet recovery without going so far as whole foods vegan, the way we have. But it might help you to know that there was quite a lot of education and groundwork, and that transforming (or, mostly transforming) your home environment is key.
A few extras
Even on days when I pig out, it hardly matters, because I’m pigging out on whole grains and fruits and such. Most days I don’t pig out, though. I don’t feel the need, because I’m mostly off added sugar, and completely off sodas (which make me snacky as all hell).
There’s nothing in the kitchen that’s really bad, so when I go in and snack, I end up finding good things. We just don’t have Cheezits and sugary cereal and candy – all my old standbys – around any more.
What our pantry and fridge looks like these days…remember that these are the things we love:
- taco fixings, always
- tons of nuts and dried fruit
- tons of different grains, including oatmeal, whole oats, whole wheat, etc. Great in stews and morning porridge.
- some frozen bean burger patties (I’m too lazy to make them myself, most days)
- tofu (not everyone here is a fan, but I am) and tempeh (great for mixing in spaghetti sauce)
- a fruit bowl
- tons of veggies, for dishes and salads, and juicing
- taters and yams
- tortilla chips, sometimes
- Triscuit (original)
- popcorn kernels
- oils like avocado and olive
- lotsa dried pasta, a jar of spaghetti sauce
- home baked bread (while not necessary, this is lovely)
- tea and coffee, soy milk, homemade cashew milk (super easy)
Of course, I haven’t even begun to talk about health benefits, energy benefits, food cost, juicing (not really), and so on and so forth. We can talk more in the comments. In fact, I’ll talk about our holiday meals down in the comment section. I just wanted to hammer out the idea of diet recovery, not just food sobriety.
We Owls 
Thanksgiving this year was marvelous. When you cook your own food, it turns out you really don’t end up missing much as a vegan. We still had potatoes and gravy, yams (clearly bending the “no added sugar rule” for that one), bread, vegan butter, veggies, pie, and on and one. Sean even made a turkey breast for the omnivores, or as we like to joke: “heathens”.
Christmas was even easier. We made not-at-all-traditional vegan chili and cornbread, with cobbler. Our recipe has tons of tomatoes, mushrooms, beans, grains, and such. I’ve seen other, very different recipes. Oh! And this is our first “no added sugar” year for Xmas (the young kids are VERY strict about sugar), so I made fruit-sweetened cookies and cakes for their stockings, which went over fabulously.
Everything you said is completely true. And everyone thinks vegan means you have to eat crap, or nothing but salads. Even when I do eat salad, it’s not the traditional kind. I just urge you that it’s the whole foods part that makes this, so do turn yourself into a junkfood vegan. You’ll still be unhealthy and you won’t lose any weight.