Dietitians Explain Why Eating Habits Are More Important than Dieting
After a year of restricted travel and staying at home, it’s not surprising many of us are seriously considering a diet to help lose some of the extra pounds we packed on between Zoom calls and Netflix. While this reads like conventional wisdom—restricting what you eat in an attempt to “get healthy”— many nutritionists and medical experts are asking us to ditch the diet. Instead, experts are encouraging us to redefine our relationship with food to build better eating habits.
“The word ‘diet’ gets a bad rap,” says Brittany Zelikoff, MS, RDN, LD, a clinical dietitian specializing in renal health at Harris Health System’s Riverside Dialysis Center. “We equate being on a diet as a set of restrictions—I can’t eat X, Y and Z—when in fact a ‘diet’ is just the foods we eat.”
Rather than viewing your diet restrictively, nutrition advocates like Zelikoff see a better way.
“Think of your diet as building a healthy eating habit,” she explains. “Let’s ditch the can and cant’s and focus on eating healthy, nourishing foods.”
Dr. Carol Liu, PhD, RDN, LD, a physician and clinical dietitian at Harris Health’s Strawberry Health Center, agrees. “A healthy diet is about eating balanced foods with lots of variety,” she says.
A healthy eating habit: easier said than done. Or is it? Liu and Zelikoff would disagree. For them, the seemingly endless cycle of dieting then binging, or eating a narrow diet of just a few types of foods, are products more from a lack of information, opportunity and consideration rather than a lack of desire. People want to eat healthy; they just may not know how to go about it in a way that works for them.
“At its heart, nutrition is individual,” says Zelikoff. “And nutrition is one of the most important things we can do for ourselves. As a society, we got used to fast-paced convenience. Starting a healthy eating habit is as simple as committing to making more meals at home, planning your meals before you go grocery shopping or meal-prepping at the beginning of each week. Finding a way to prepare your food yourself, rather than buying prepared meals can make a real difference.”
To eat healthily, Liu advocates what she calls the “healthy plate.” If you model your meal plate based on these recommendations, you stand a far better chance of enjoying a healthier diet. According to Liu, the healthy plate is made up of 50% non-starchy veggies like lettuce, mushrooms, radish and celery, the types of low-calorie, high fiber vegetables that one can eat in any quantity. The other half of a healthy plate includes a protein—either a lean meat like chicken or fish or, if you’re a vegetarian, cheese, nuts or beans—and a moderately portioned carbohydrate. Getting in the habit of building your plate to mirror the healthy plate model will ultimately be more effective than dieting.
“Diets can be effective in the very shortterm,” Liu says. “But in the long term, building a healthy eating habit where you eat a variety of foods in a moderate amount is better than a diet, because once you have the habit, eating healthy is easy.”
We’ve always known that eating healthy is better than eating junk food, but research is beginning to show that nutrition is not
only important for your day-to-day health, your diet can fundamentally improve your long-term health outcomes.
Liu notes many of our chronic illnesses like diabetes and heart disease can be mitigated by a healthy diet and exercise. Zelikoff notes the very existence of dialysis treatment—life-saving procedures that clean the blood of those with kidney issues—initially suffered from the same chronic diseases a healthy diet helps to prevent.
So, if we’re ditching the diet, how do we lose this weight we picked up during quarantine? The answer is somewhat counterintuitive. According to health experts like Liu and Zelikoff, weight loss shouldn’t be your primary indicator of health. Instead, focus on eating a variety of foods prepared at home whenever possible and getting regular exercise. Do this, they say, and the weight will begin to come off on its own.
However, just because we’re being encouraged to enjoy a wide variety of foods, doesn’t mean everything is encouraged equally. Eat red meat occasionally, yes, but eat lean meats more often. Have dessert, but avoid sugary beverages. Liu notes one 12 ounce can of Coke has the carbohydrate equivalent of two pieces of toast; plus sugar-sweetened drinks can contribute to obesity because they provide large amounts of liquid calories that fool the body to keep eating. After eating a large meal, people usually have less appetite and eat less at the next meal. That adjustment occurs easier with solid foods and not beverages.
Liu recommends drinking low-sugar, low-calorie beverages like diet soda, fruit-infused water, mineral water and carbonated water.
Cook with oil, sure, but the kind of oil you cook with matters. Try using virgin olive oil or avocado oil rather than vegetable oil, which is essentially soy-bean oil, a product that has oversaturated our diet, according to Zelikoff. Soy-bean oil is so detrimental, she adds, you’re better off cooking with butter than soy-bean oil. Above all, Liu and Zelikoff stress their most important takeaway for readers is to build healthy eating habits. When you engage with nutrition this way, not only will you be happier because you’re not constantly restricting what you eat, you’ll also have better health outcomes moving forward, Liu says.
On the macrolevel, we’re beginning to see how, in a preventative healthcare system like Harris Health, food is medicine. Fighting the challenges of eating healthy regardless of socio-economic factors in neighborhoods must be a priority to properly care for Harris County’s population. Harris Health’s Food Farmacy program, an embedded food dispensing store located within its healthcare sites, is just one way Harris Health and dietitians like Zelikoff and Liu are trying to even the playing field. By making healthy food more easily available and teaching patients the importance of building healthy eating habits, programs like this establish a strong foundation for immediate and long-term health success.
For more information about Harris Health’s Food Farmacy programs, visit www.harrishealth.org.