One of the biggest mistakes I see people making with their eating is confusing healthy food with nutritious food.
Healthy and nutritious are not synonyms.
Why does this distinction even matter?
Because if you try to eat in a way that you think is healthy, but it really isn’t, you are setting yourself up for inconsistent and unproductive eating.
Nutritious food is food that is packed with nutrition. It has a lot of vitamins and minerals.
However, healthy food is more subjective and is relative to the person eating it, their goals, and where they are on their health and fitness journey.
For example, let’s compare an apple to a cookie.
Which one is more nutritious?
Well… the apple is, of course. It has more nutrition.
Now, which one is healthier?
That is going to depend on the individual person eating it, their current relationship with food, and where they are on their journey.
For some people, choosing to eat the apple over the cookie can create feelings of restriction and deprivation.
And this creates a cause and effect that drives bingeing or other compulsive eating behaviors.
This happens because they have their own unique satiation, satisfaction, and nourishment needs that aren’t getting met when they eat the apple.
And when those needs don’t get met, they go into a restriction and deprivation debt. And that debt gets paid back with interest (ie compulsive eating) in the future.
For these people, eating the cookie instead could neutralize these feelings and result in more consistent eating.
They might end up avoiding overeating at night, or having a free-for-all on the weekend.
So for them, the cookie, while not more nutritious, is actually healthier for them, as it leads to a healthier outcome.
Make sense?
Health is a journey and it evolves with the person. Of course the goal is to eat mostly nutritious food, but this is a process.
It requires you to work on healing your relationship with food so that in time, what is healthy and what is nutritious are one-in-the-same.
That’s when it becomes easy to eat whole foods. And that’s when you end up achieving your healthiest weight.
It just happens. You don’t even have to try anymore. It’s a natural side effect of you healing.
Talk soon…