Why it takes so long to clean up your diet?

[caelanb]

Hello, I am slightly confused about the difficulties regarding cleaning up a diet. What makes cleaning up your diet take so long? Isn't it just as simple as stopping eating the foods not in a diet or stopping eating unhealthy foods? For example, Leo said, he's been cleaning up his diet for the past 10 years, but what was taking him so long to do so? If you wanna start a keto diet, eat more fats and less carbs, if you wanna start a vegan diet, stop eating animal products, if you wanna just eat less processed foods, start eating more whole foods, what makes this take so long? Just wondering, thank you:D

[jjer94]

• We may have emotional attachments to certain foods. Example: You can't give up mac and cheese because your mom made it for you every other night back in the day, and now you associate it with love. Giving it up feels like giving up love.
• We may eat out of boredom.
• We may eat to cover up feelings of anger, sadness, or anxiety. Junk food is the best for this purpose, because it zaps the body of energy, thus suppressing the negative emotions.
• We may eat because of a lack of self-respect. If we don't love ourselves, then we can guarantee that we will yo-yo. If we love ourselves and treat our body as a temple, then we want to eat healthy as opposed to not wanting to eat junk (i.e. positive motivation). That takes time to cultivate.
• We may eat as a protection mechanism. For example, many women with histories of abuse are attached to being overweight because it provides not only physical protection, but sexual protection. Culturally speaking, very few guys are attracted to overweight women. 
• If we're ungrounded and live in our heads a lot, giving up meat and other dense protein will be difficult, since those foods are very grounding. 
• The body needs time to heal. Going straight from junk food to raw vegan is like trying to put clean air through a dusty filter. Wiping the dust off that filter will take a long time, which is why a slow transition is best.
• We may not have enough information. We may need to spend time reading dozens of diet books to synthesize perspectives and find patterns. 
• We need to be observant of direct experience. Which foods give us brain fog, which make us bloat, which make us feel like crap? Finding those foods to eliminate takes time. Which foods give us mental clarity, which give us pure energy, which give us vitality? Finding those foods to eat regularly takes time. 

[caelanb]

Wow thank you, I am unaware of those things I have with my diet like if I have emotional attachments to any food or how I feel when I eat different foods (brain fog) (I can sorta tell which foods cause bloating). Ever since I was young I’ve been eating what my parents (or whoever feeds me) have given me, which is relatively healthy, we had deserts and treats everyone (bdays and special events) once in a while, but for me, food was/is just food (there is no good or bad food just better or worst this is mostly what my dietician says too) and so the type of food does not really effect me, I think of it as energy and that’s about it. But now that I hear people cleaning up their diet, I am assuming diet has a lot do to with you as a person, how you feel and such. And, also how can people get food addictions? Leo said in his video on addictions that we are addicted to the food we eat, which I do not agree with because I can stop eating any food though I would not want to because I enjoy them and they are quite healthy.

Edited December 31, 2017 by caelanb

[jjer94]

@caelanb Great question! That's the one point I forgot. Ingredients like sugar are physically addictive. Some studies say that sugar can be as addictive as nicotine and cocaine. Combine it with fat, and that is a recipe for disaster (pun definitely intended). Cheese is another one; when digested, a byproduct is casomorphine. With wheat products, it's gluteomorphines. 

However, most of the time, food addictions are emotionally based. We can get addicted to anything, but food is an easy target. It's pleasurable to consume and suppresses emotions. It's easy to hide or deny a food addiction because everybody eats. So how do people get addicted to food? When they start to depend on it for emotional reasons.

[caelanb]

I've never heard of casomorphines and gluteomorphines, where did you get that info?