But really, it’s even more easy to just eat good, real food. If you ask me, all those diets out there, with their restrictions and measurements and the like, are a ton more work than taking a couple rice balls out of the freezer, throwing some lean chicken and lots of veggies into a saute pan, and making a yummy, filling stir-fry.

Another commenter has already quoted you on this, but I love it so much I’ll quote it again:

“But delicious, high-quality food is not only about health. It is also about taste, enjoyment, community and life. Food is something that is worth building your days around, because when approached from this angle food improves your quality of life in every way. Eating like this is not a disorder, it is a culture. And it is something that we desperately need to rediscover.”

I whole-heartedly agree!

It might sound rhetorical at first but stop and think about it for a moment. Do you think that it’s food you’re eating? Or drinking, or injecting, or otherwise taking into your body for the purpose of nourishment? Do you believe that what you are eating right now is giving your body what it requires to sustain itself in perfect health indefinitely? If you do believe that, and if you fail to return to good health, or fail to maintain good health, or plainly and obviously grow sick, then isn’t it time to consider that maybe what you are eating isn’t actually food? Following the same logic, isn’t it time that maybe you consider that your obsession with food is merely a side effect of the non-food you’re eating, combined with your belief that it should keep you healthy?

You see, there’s a whole boatload of things we eat, or drink, or otherwise take into our body, that aren’t food, and that don’t nourish us. Some might even be poisonous, immediately or over a long period. The things that are poisonous immediately are easy to spot. And we call the result “food poisoning”. But the long term poisons, those are much much more dangerous. They’re insidious in their effects. They’re so slow to act that we can continue for years to believe that they’re good for us. Until one point, 20 years later, we grow sick from it yet are absolutely oblivious to the actual cause of this illness. All the more so because we’ve been eating it believing that it was going to prevent the very illness that it caused. But the point is that it’s still food poisoning, it’s just not so obvious at first and for a long time yet.

Do you believe that sugar is food? How much of it do you eat every day? How much of the other things, which convert to sugar when you digest them, do you eat every day? Do you believe that those things are food anyway? Do you believe that something which is obviously bad for you, i.e. processed grains for example, somehow becomes wholesome and healthful when it’s wrapped up in a neat little package, i.e. whole grains? I mean, think about it, they both come from the same thing, but one happens to be crushed into a fine powder.

Finally, how much of those things, which you consider bad, do you really need to eat, and for how long, until you grow sick from them? Would you believe barely 90 grams per day? Would you believe that most of you eat over 200 grams of it per day? I believe it.

You gotta eat something. It might as well be food.

The trouble is, there’s a deep fear that if we totally give up the diet mentality, which was created by years of dieting or even just hearing dieting advice as it has long stood in as healthy eating advice, we’ll completely lose in the battle against getting unhealthfully fat (or even fat at all — but that’s a subject for another time). And many of us might because we’ve lost touch with our bodies’ cues for eating or even just what truly feels good, again as a result of dieting or listening to dieting advice.

The way out is as you describe — getting back in touch with what real healthy eating is and supporting real healthy eating culturally. Just as important, though, may be learning to trust again that our bodies will respond positively to healthy eating that doesn’t look like a diet. That’s a tough thing for many folks to trust. It’s just seems too indulgent to work, and while Americans tend to be pretty indulgent, we distrust that, too. Of course, that’s a reflection of taking indulgence to an extreme.

Btw, we can apply this discussion to the general population’s resistance to physical activity, too. “Experts” took that to an extreme, too, and subsequently implanted a negative attitude about moving our bodies.