An Augustinian Approach to Weight Loss

“OK, sure, we can try Ozempic,” said my new PCP doctor, “but first, can I recommend to you a podcast on intuitive eating?”

If any area of human life brings forward the challenges of behavior change, love, judgment, rejection, and the bound will, it’s our relationship with food. When St. Paul says that “we don’t do what we know we should do, and we do what we know we shouldn’t do” (Rom 7), food is perhaps the best illustration of this principle. It’s well documented that the modern (American) diet isn’t suitable for a long and healthy life. Too much sugar and bad fats, not enough nutrients and good fats, too many calories, obesity epidemic, diabetes, heart disease, etc. etc.  I can’t think of another arena of life where people are so fully informed about how to make good choices, but make bad choices instead.

This is the point Nicholas Cannariato makes in the New York Times with the headline “Why Do So Many Food Documentaries Seem to Think We’re Stupid?” Quite the headline, but it gets to the heart of the matter: our society’s strategy to effect dietary change is education and choice, and despite decades of investment in that strategy, things have gotten worse. Hence, why my PCP felt compelled to counter my request for one of the new weight loss drugs with a podcast. Cannariato’s article outlines the issue:

There’s a question that has been rattling around my mind ever since I watched Netflix’s “You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment” back in January: Why are so many TV shows and documentaries so eager to inform us that eating fruits and vegetables is better for our health, and for the environment, than the stuff many of us eat instead?

To be fair to “You Are What You Eat,” it does offer slightly more than this: It clearly wants to persuade you to eat less meat. The docuseries uses sets of identical twins to explore how different diets affect overall health; of each pair, one is assigned a vegan diet and the other a “healthy” omnivorous diet. The sisters Wendy and Pam, for instance, are told by a fitness expert that they could be at risk for diabetes, then informed, as though they might not have heard this before, that “nutrition will help that a great deal, as well as exercising.” They return in the final episode, in which they’re expected to have gained muscle and lost fat. Pam, on the vegan diet, has lost around eight pounds, most of it muscle; Wendy, on the omnivore diet, has lost about three, all of it muscle. They confess to not following their meal plans perfectly. Unsurprisingly, being told the “correct” thing to eat didn’t instantly reshape their lives.

You can tell that the assembled experts who proceed to admonish them are straining to be diplomatic, but it only makes them seem patronizing. How else could someone sound while telling you what you already know, as if you didn’t already know it? Fruits and vegetables are healthy dietary choices. Exercise is good for you. Most of us have fully absorbed these messages by the time we hit third grade. And yet television still reminds us of them with a muted arrogance and a patronizing smile.

Cannariato goes on to identify the problems behind this patently ineffective approach. It assumes that the act of eating more healthy is fundamentally about survival, and the driving value behind eating is “longevity.” (Calling Ernest Becker — Mr. Becker, to the front desk, please!). Dieticians prescribe vegetables like Moses delivered the tablets from Sinai. Deviations from their code are punishable by death (Rom 7:9). Thou shalt eat broccoli, or else … But any sociologist will tell you how food is much more than sustenance: it is celebration, ceremony, tradition, the marking time, stress relief, medicine, romance, and affection. Cannariato wonders who among us watches these food documentaries. His guess: it’s probably not the kind of people whose eating habits the documentarians hope to change.

What makes Cannariato so wise is his thoroughly Augustinian approach to a solution: people will make lifestyle adjustments, he argues, when eating becomes less about the law of dieting and more about renewed desires.

This is precisely what is missing from so many of today’s health-and-nutrition shows: They have surprisingly little to say about the satisfaction all those fruits and vegetables and whole grains can offer beyond what you might see at your next physical. Our cravings may not be rational, but they are changeable; it is entirely possible — challenging, but possible — to cultivate a genuine love of healthy food instead of food that slowly kills us. But rarely is that love born of metrics.

It is, in my experience, sparked by pleasure. You can learn how to love shiitake mushrooms or garlicky broccoli or crisp but tender roasted chickpeas, heaped with blistered scallions and peppers, over a bowl of deepest gold saffron rice — not because they will improve your next set of blood tests but because they are fully capable of tasting fantastic. I used to happily consume my share of burgers and fries like any number of Americans, and I took great pleasure in it. What changed, for me, wasn’t some sudden realization that other choices might be healthier or more virtuous; it was that I began learning how to cook and slowly realized how delicious plants could be. The key was learning that the zingy zest of lemon, the bright sting of ginger or the muted earth of spinach could be every bit as delicious as anything else I’d been feeding myself. Feeling better, feeling healthier, came from that enjoyment.

I’ve got my own challenges with eating, but what Cannariato says speaks to my experience. About a decade ago, my mother-in-law made the family oven roasted broccoli for dinner. Sprinkled with garlic salt and olive oil  and roasted at 350 for twenty minutes until the florets began to crisp, it knocked my socks off. It was the first time I ever went back for a third helping of a vegetable. If Cannariato has this kind of relationship with other vegetables, as his comments on lemon and ginger suggest, I think he’s probably on to something.

Where, then, might we go to find some solution? If 95% of all diets fail, where might we go to have our passions for good and healthy food unlocked? Cannariato has an answer here too:

This is why, watching all this nutrition programming, I often find myself wondering if their aims would be better accomplished by simple cooking shows. Turn on a cooking show, and you probably will not be scolded or patronized by people who know little of your struggles or the loves, memories and traditions you have forged around food. Turn on a cooking show, and you will see the pursuit and the practice of pleasure itself — say, the ways mushrooms can muster intense savoriness or roasted vegetables can be as satisfying as anything that bleeds. You will see new ways to love food. And that, if you’re lucky, may point the way toward a healthier way to live.

The Wygovi, by the way, won’t be covered by insurance, and I don’t have the $1,200 a month to pay for it out of pocket. Perhaps, then, counterintuitively, it’s time to turn on the Food Network. If my mother-in-law can inspire within me a love of broccoli, who knows what the professionals can do?