A couple of my friends have a hard time balancing their diets (getting pretty much anything green / vegetable on their plate). I’ve brought it up with them a lot, suggesting they come to the salad or vegan bar with me but they insist they’re fine. What can I do?

Dear Concerned Consumer,

While this is a question from late last year, I still find it to be an important one to address and discuss, because this is a sentiment I find is quite common. While I take your query to be in good conscience, I want to advise caution in this dilemma. I do want to give a more thoughtful response, as I said, I believe your concern is from a genuine place of compassion and care for your friend, and I want to honor that. So, I will give my thoughts, then a little bit of the reasoning behind it and hopefully it will give you a clearer direction about how to approach this. 

When we go about commenting on someone’s life, food or otherwise, I think the best approach is always starting from the place of an observation, not a judgment. If you are going to broach this conversation at all, I’d recommend starting with something like “I noticed that…” or “Do you usually…” 

That is, if you haven’t had this conversation before. If you have, then I’d say lay off. It’s unfortunate, but how we word things concerning how other people eat can often be really detrimental. Food is not just sustenance for our physical health, but also for our mental and social health as well. Meeting those needs is going to look different from person to person.

To get a second opinion, I spoke to Josh Palomera, Bates’ own dietician. In regards to your query, I think he gave some great advice by saying, “We don’t want anyone feeling attacked, but we do want them to be thoughtful.”

Palomera has worked with many Batesies, helping them be more thoughtful in regards to their own diet. Note here, dear reader, that being thoughtful does not always mean being disciplined! As Josh reminded me, Commons is the first time a lot of people are getting to have control over their diets. That being so, we’re all figuring it out! 

What being thoughtful means to Palomera is understanding where we get our ideas about food from. Culture contributes a lot to how we see food and how we structure our lives around it. Calories, sugars, fats – these are all words that we’ve developed a particular affect towards. What Palomera recommends is making a concerted effort to break down our emotions we have around food and these terms, that at the end of the day are just measurements. 

I asked Palomera what he thought about the commonly-held idea that there is a daily ‘allowance’ of calories one should go above, he said:

“Our bodies don’t work on a 24-hour schedule, so we don’t wake up in the morning and everything has just reset to zero. But for some reason, we think that we can’t go over that number every day. We need a certain number of calories each day to function properly. Undershooting it will affect your ability as a student to concentrate, your energy levels and your mood.”

Instead, he says that students should listen to their own “hunger cues,” which Palomera defined for me as “the signals from your body that tell you when to eat and when to stop eating.” How these queues work, like most things in our bodies, is different from person to person. But what is consistent is this: you should be listening to your body! If it’s hungry, feed it! 

Palomera also noted that our hunger queues can also be affected by our physical and mental health, “anxiety can throw your hunger cues out the window, but you can’t really go without eating. Just because you don’t feel hungry doesn’t necessarily mean that you shouldn’t eat,” Palomera said. 

Your relationship with food is as unique as you are, so don’t try to force yourself into a specific lifestyle because you think it will make you healthier, it often can be the opposite. As Palomera put it: “If you are considering dieting, think [about] what your end goal is, and what your motivation is.” 

Palomera’s rule of thumb: “Every plate should have three things: first a carbohydrate. It’s the primary fuel our body runs on. Second, a protein, which helps with muscle growth and recovery, our hormones, and feeling ‘full’ and energized. Finally, some amount of color. This usually comes in the form of fruits/vegetables that contain fiber and nutrients that are crucial to our health.” 

Palomera does advise, however, that these are just guidelines, and by no means are a hard and fast rule for everyone. They can certainly be your rule of thumb, but it shouldn’t be universal. Your concern for your friends is admirable, but why do you think it’s manifesting in this way? It’s worth considering if you are invested in being the best friend you can be. 

It’s a tangent from the question at hand, but it’s worth thinking about how you were taught to see food. Lots of little things can contribute to an unhealthy mindset toward food; that is to say, even things like small innocuous comments can have big changes in how others see the way they eat.

I’ll end with this, and perhaps it’s not an answer to the question at hand, but nonetheless it’s wise and indispensable advice (as most of mine is): when it comes to how we live our lives, be it food or anything else, it’s always better to follow the joy, rather than the discipline. Food tastes good! At least it should. 

I leave you with the influential words of the philosopher, author, and British television cook, Nigella Lawson. She writes in her essay Cook, Eat, Repeat: “Eating is such a huge elemental pleasure: what a strangely puny act to want to police it… What I refuse to live with, categorically, and essentially set myself against, is the erosion of pleasure by dint of turning it into a means of self-persecution.”