Everybody eats, so when it comes to dispensing eating advice, there’s no shortage of people willing to tell you how to do it. Turn on the TV, and you’ll hear the latest warnings about what’s wrong with our food supply. Flip through a magazine and you’ll find the next miracle diet that promises to make you thin and beautiful. Search the Internet and you’ll uncover more information than you ever wanted to know about nutrition and your health.
With so many sources to choose from, where should you turn for answers to your diet and fitness questions? The experts are easy to identify and ready to help.
Learning to Eat
Human beings reign over other species due to our highly developed brains. But we start our lives as extremely helpless creatures. Everything we need to survive must be provided for us for the first several years of life.
We come into this world with no instinct to forage for our own food or feed ourselves.
The only way we know what or how to eat is by imitating what we see our caregivers doing. Most of human history has been a struggle for survival, so getting enough was the goal. All anyone had to know about nutrition could be summed up in a single precept: Eat what is available.
Then when the agricultural industry was able to produce vast surpluses and the food industry was able to package and deliver many more food choices at affordable prices, deciding what to eat became complicated. With fully stocked supermarkets and limitless fast food franchises, caregivers started to give instructions about eating to their young along with their meals, saying things like “Drink your milk, it’s good for you,” and “Finish that lamb chop, I worked hard to pay for that meat.”
Fortunately, nutrition science came of age just about the time people were grappling with the choice between white bread and whole wheat, and professionals were needed to answer the question, “What should I eat?”
Eating for the Right Reasons
Even once nutrition scientists analyzed the composition of all the foods we grow, put labels on the boxes to tell us what is in them, and provided charts and pyramids to illustrate how much we needed to eat each day, people still were not compliant with the eating advice they received. That may have been due to the fact we found many foods tasted a whole lot better when doctored up with a lot of salt, sugar, and fat, helping us to gradually drift from the “eat to live” mode, to a “live to eat” mentality.
In addition to making foods taste better, food was suddenly available everywhere. It’s sold in gas stations, drug stores, and Laundromats, and we have incorporated eating into almost everything we do, like going to the movies, the mall, or the gym. And we associate every occasion we celebrate and every emotion we feel with a reason to eat that creates a constant battle between nutrition facts and the pleasures of the palate.
Finding an Eating Expert
If the accumulated input of your eating experiences has left you baffled about how to do it right, take heart in the knowledge you are not alone. It is also worth noting that finding good nutrition information is not really what’s so difficult, but changing behavior is.
If you are truly interested in getting your eating act together, you won’t be able to do it just by asking a trim and fit friend how she does it or buying the latest diet book being touted on Oprah. You must be prepared to realign your lifestyle based on a whole new set of beliefs about how, when, what and how much you should eat and be active.
The eating coach who can guide you through this process is a registered dietitian or someone with the designation RD after their name. The first phase should involve a thorough assessment of your food likes and dislikes, your culinary acumen, your time and financial constraints, family heritage, medical status, and past dieting and exercise efforts. The new eating and activity plan should be customized for you and you should have an equal voice in the goals being set and how quickly they are met.
Putting all the pieces of this healthy lifestyle together cannot be done in a few hours or even a few months, but whatever time it takes, it is time well invested since the benefits will last the rest of your life. To find your personal eating advisor, use the “Find a Nutrition Professional” link at the American Dietetic Association,or look for a nutrition consultant who is a registered dietitian in your local telephone directory or online search.
UChic readers who responded to this month’s question, “What sources do you turn to for accurate nutrition and diet information?” mentioned everything but an RD. Most respondents said they rely on health and fitness magazines, popular web sites and their family and friends. Don’t run the risk of getting the wrong information or highly generalized advice. Take your nutritional health personally and work with a registered dietitian who will personalize your care.