Eating Well… in Moderation

mtwadmin - Fri, September 03, 2010

For the past year, I’ve made a healthy diet a main priority in my life.  I eat mostly fruits and vegetables, mostly home-cooked, and mostly organic.  If I opt for meat, it’s usually fish.  I’ve definitely seen a big difference in how I look and feel, but I’m not perfect, and I find myself occasionally feeling as if I have two food personalities who coexist within the same body only semi-congenially.  Basically, when I’m not sauteing carrots in olive oil or drinking green smoothies, I have a wicked sweet tooth.

Even when noshing on ice cream (my first love) and cake (a close second), I tend to stick with “real” food.  Food made from scratch with real stuff in it, and more recently, obnoxious foodie/crunchy stuff like flax and coconut oil and blue agave syrup.  Still, several times a week I desire, crave, heck, I need a fix, and I bake up a batch of cookies or run to JP Licks for a scoop of FTO White Coffee or Fresh Peach.  (By the way, when you sign up for the JP Licks rewards card, you get a FREE ice cream sundae on the month of your birthday.  Hellooooo, September!)

So how do I reconcile the leek-loving Dr. Jekyll with the frosting-fiend Mr. Hyde?  I listen to all those wise(wo)men from days of yore and take everything in moderation.

My friend Troy (owner of Horror Business in Allston) used to be a pro body-builder.  He is in incredible shape, and believes diet is even more important than exercise if you really want to be in top physical form.  He told me his secret is a strict diet, one that includes one day a week where he eats whatever he wants.  Six days a week he eats like a monk, and then there’s Sunday.  “It’s disgusting the food I put into my body on a Sunday,” he says.

If that approach is a little too extreme for you, you could opt for the “special occasion” mentality.  By “saving” your treats for the potluck on Saturday, a wedding, or a special date night, you give yourself permission to eat these things, and they become pleasurable events rather than “guilty pleasures.”  (Can we get rid of the idea of guilt surrounding food, please?)

Small dishes are also great options.  (Small means the opposite of large, America.)  A few squares of dark chocolate, a few spoonfuls of ice cream, or a mini cupcake (like the one I just had on Tuesday from The Chocolate Tarte in Somerville… soooo good….) is not going to ruin your waistline or your health, even if you partake almost every day.  If you’re the kind of person who responds to small daily pleasures, this may work better for you than trying to “save up” for sweets only once a week.  Your little treat may become a small ritual in your day.  A nice punctuation to look forward to and fuel you on to your next activity.

Medicinenet.com agrees that sweets can be an okay, even a beneficial part of a healthy diet.  “[C]onstant self-denial can lead to dietary defiance and end up derailing all your good intentions,” says Larrian Gillespie, MD, as quoted in this blog post.  And Molly Kimball, a Registered Dietitian, states “Once you say it’s OK to eat something, there is no guilt…. You don’t inhale three without tasting them and then taste the fourth. You enjoy every one.”

I’m definitely going to enjoy my free birthday sundae.  It’s the only one I’ll get all year!