Food is Fuel vs Social Eating and Food Centered Gathering

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Alex Parker

Fitness Coach • Make weight loss & building muscle effortless and permanent.

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Listen and learn the ways you can level up your health and fitness lifestyle to be more integrated, and more effortless. We talk about anything and everything related to improving mindset, muscles, and meals. Or in other words we cover everything health, fitness, and self-improvement related.

Alex: 00:08

I had this thought that I would drive to go pick up my kids from school, which I do every single day at this time. And I thought, what if during this 15 minute drive, I recorded some thoughts and turned it into a podcast episode? So here we are, giving it a shot. The topic I wanted to talk about today is holiday food and family events. Because this is such a common problem.

Alex: 00:36

And the reason it's such a common problem is because there are so many events happening all the time. You have Thanksgiving. You've got Christmas events. You've got Christmas work parties, you've got family parties, you've got birthdays, you've got, gatherings. We have a lot of social gatherings around church events, church ceremonial events, people are getting married.

Alex: 00:57

There's so many different things that are happening all the time. Right? And it just seems like you can never cut a break. And particularly, if you're trying to go into a diet or a deficit and you're cutting your calories down, it feels like suddenly you feel the weight of all these events happening all the time. So I frequently hear from clients and myself is when can we just not go to an event because it's so much work to to try to either avoid the foods that you find really enticing or to not offend your, whatever in law who made their favorite dish and you don't wanna eat it because it doesn't fit your plan?

Alex: 01:40

And so how do I navigate this when there's so much happening, especially right now around this winter holiday season? There's so many holidays. I feel like October just kicks it off with Halloween and the buckets and buckets of candy that we dish out and collect, that our kids collect and then we confiscate it from them and we end up eating it. So there's that. So it really kinda just puts a lot of people in this downward spiral when it comes to their nutrition, and they find it really difficult to maintain any level of maintenance or deficit through the holidays.

Alex: 02:16

So what do you do? 1st, I want to highlight a sort of disclaimer and that is I don't preach that any food is bad. There's just I don't wanna moralize food. I think that food has its place, but I do want to emphasize that it's like spending money and that it's a budget, and there are trade offs. I wouldn't go buy a doughnut for a $100.

Alex: 02:42

I just wouldn't. It wouldn't be worth it to me. I wouldn't buy I'm trying to think of, like, what, this is an everyday item, a pencil. Right? If I go to buy a pencil, just a number 2 lead pencil, I wouldn't spend a $100 on it.

Alex: 02:58

It's just not worth it to me. And so I'll use that phrase a lot worth it to kind of highlight whether or not something is, well, worth what it is taking from you. Right? And there's always this transaction. You're giving something and you're getting something in return.

Alex: 03:17

And in money, that makes perfect sense. You give over the $100, you get the number 2 pencil. That worth it? No. I'm not gonna make the trade.

Alex: 03:25

And what we get out of it sometimes is a, like, multitude of different various things. It's like an experience. It's a feeling, a sensation. It's connection. It's camaraderie.

Alex: 03:35

It's uniqueness or specialty novelty. Right? If this was the only pencil in the world that was made this way and it was crafted in some exotic part of the world out of the one last species of a certain tree, maybe you'd pay a dollar or a $100 or more for that pencil. Right? And so there's all these different reasons that drive up the value or the exchange rate of a certain thing.

Alex: 04:02

Now this applies across economics. It applies to just your personal finances. It also applies to food. And, so when something is not worth it, what are you giving up when it comes to food? What are you giving and what are you getting in return?

Alex: 04:18

You are giving up a portion of the energy that you're going to burn in the day or your needed fuel for the day. Anything that you give more than that, you will store as excess. And it's kind of backwards because you're not giving, you are actually ingesting. Right? You are ingesting.

Alex: 04:41

But in an inverted way, think of the amount of calories you can eat in a day as a budget. The budget that you can eat while maintaining good health. If you blow your budget day after day after day, your body just has this built in credit system. It doesn't put it on a credit card. It stores it as fat.

Alex: 05:00

Right? Now if you went out and you just spent and spent and spent and spent and you didn't have to choose between a debit or a credit card, just always use a card. And if you had the cash, it would come out. And if you didn't, it would go into debt. A lot of people would be very far into debt because they didn't actively have to go create a credit card and sign up for a credit card and intentionally choose to use credit.

Alex: 05:22

Right? So it's kind of an abstract principle, but we'll work with it. The idea that's important is that you have these trade offs. You're trading a portion of your budget for an experience with food and nutrition and fuel. Right?

Alex: 05:36

So what are the things that we want from food? We want to not be starving. We want to feel nourished. We want to feel good. We want our energy levels to feel well, and we want to have enough protein that supplies the building blocks for our goals to build muscle tissue, restore muscle tissue, and other protein based tissues in our body, our heart, our lungs, our skin, and all sorts of aspects of our body that are not just your skeletal muscle.

Alex: 06:09

And you want it to taste good and you might want it to foster connection with friends. These are all things that you hope to get out of eating in your transaction. Right? So in this, there's a spectrum and the spectrum is on one side, it's the people that only look at their food like fuel. I don't care about anything but it's just fuel and nourishment to the demands of my body.

Alex: 06:35

I don't care about any experiences that are emotional or sentimental in any other fashion. Right? On the other side of that spectrum is the people that are only making emotional decisions when it comes to food. If they don't feel like they're in the mood for it, they don't need it. If they're in the mood for it, they'll eat it whether or not it's good for them.

Alex: 06:52

Right? It's a completely indulgent impulsive way of eating. Now, I don't think either is right or good or balanced or healthy. I actually believe that somewhere in the middle, as usually it is, it's always somewhere in the middle that is where we want to be. So what does the middle look like?

Alex: 07:12

It is I'm making food choices based on what fuels my body, what feels good, what nourishes it, what fulfills my goals as far as building and restoring good health. But it also tastes good, and I enjoy eating it by myself or with friends in a social environment, and it creates a positive net experience as far as just emotional experiences go. Now with that said, where do we fall when it comes to family events? When I married Lindsay, she comes from a family that has a background where food is very much a social thing. So we do social things with food.

Alex: 07:54

We make food social things. We kind of always combine them together. And so when it was like, let's go socialize, let's go eat food. When it's time to eat, if it's not a social thing, let's not eat until it's a social thing. Right?

Alex: 08:09

And, it wasn't always that way, but it definitely turned into this kind of cultural family habit where when we were sad about something and we were sad about a lot of things. When we're first married, we were struggling with, infertility and ups and downs of lots of various life things. And when it was, like, a moment to console, we would go out to eat, and we would eat some really rich Italian food. That was her go to. And then when we were happy and we still wanted to celebrate or we wanted to go have a good time, we would go out and we would eat some rich food with desserts.

Alex: 08:48

Now this really put me down the, like, emotional activated my emotional eater in me to a degree I didn't really know was possible within. So, I had to crawl out of that hole. That was kind of an interesting place to crawl out of, but eventually, I realized I was very much an emotional eater. And so whether happy or sad or stressed, food became the answer. And so that's a little bit of a tangent, but when it comes to I'll talk a little bit about how I crawled out of that hole, hopefully, if I make it on the trip here.

Alex: 09:30

But when it comes to family events, how do we act? There's various pressures that we feel. Different families create different pressures. Some of them are, that relative that was like, you gotta eat my pie. Come on.

Alex: 09:42

I slaved over this. Why aren't you eating my pie? Don't tell me you're on a stupid diet. Right? You don't wanna lose weight.

Alex: 09:48

You don't wanna lose weight. You don't need to lose weight. Someone's gonna it's gonna guilt you for either not indulging in their favored indulgence or for something that they made. Or they're gonna guilt you for thinking that you want to improve your health and reduce your excess body fat. Then there's other families where the general culture is just overeating and no one's gonna guilt you, but you just have this habit of eating until you're stuffed at family events.

Alex: 10:14

Or maybe you go to a family event and the only thing available there is carbs and fats and there's just not a culture of protein. There's lots of different things that can exist and sometimes you're very deeply tied to your favorite foods. They're nostalgic. They pull on the heartstrings. One of the things that I recommend for people going into the situation, wanting to maintain some level of a food plan, is to have a plan in the first place.

Alex: 10:44

Having a plan doesn't mean you have a specific calorie limit that you're gonna reach, but it does mean that you're setting yourself up to intentionally make decisions around the food that you're going to be eating. So let's say at your Thanksgiving dinner, you have turkey, you have stuffing, you have pumpkin pie, you have green beans, mashed potatoes, whatever whatever foods you eat at your family events. Making a decision ahead of time when you're not really hungry or feeling nostalgia of the events is to decide how much you're going to eat. Walking through mentally the actions you're gonna take when you're there. I'm gonna have one scoop, whatever your scoop is, of mashed potatoes.

Alex: 11:32

I'm gonna have one scoop of stuffing. I'm gonna have 2 slices of turkey. I'm gonna prioritize my protein. I'm going to have 1 thin slice of pumpkin pie. And this is, like, the most rudimentary and easy way to control your eating is controlling your portions.

Alex: 11:52

If you don't plan on measuring anything or trying to track your macros or any of the more rigid, more detailed, more granular ways of figuring out your food, then just decide what you're gonna eat ahead of time because this is checking your intentions. Now if you wanna track, if you wanna weigh things, that's up to you. I don't recommend it for holidays. I don't recommend it for family events. Usually becomes more of a tedium and a frustration than anything, and can encourage eating disorders or disordered eating.

Alex: 12:24

But I wanna come back to the frequency of family events. We've never lived in a time where the availability of food is so prevalent, especially in America and lots of countries. But everything is just so easily accessed. Calories are easily accessible everywhere in every form. And on top of that, we have gatherings and events all the time.

Alex: 12:46

You your kids have sports events. We have social gatherings. We have religious gatherings. We've got family gatherings. If you have a large connected family, you're always getting together.

Alex: 12:56

A lot of the families here in Utah are going to their parents' house every weekend to eat with their parents, and it's kind of this bigger meal. And they don't really have control over what they're eating or choices they make. I was talking to a client today, and I was giving her advice on how to handle these situations. And I realized I was sounding like I was on the side of the spectrum towards food is just fuel. Because I would go to these events, banquets, whatever, and I would choose a meat portion, a veggie portion, a salad portion, and maybe a few desserts I would take one bite out of and just taste it.

Alex: 13:39

Now that feels restricted if you have a history of being on the other side of the spectrum. The directional movement from one side, one extreme to the other, feels like you're heading to the other extreme. When really you're just heading towards the middle. And, so find honestly where you are on the spectrum. Are you leaning towards a little bit more neurotic, trying to just make your food only nutrition, only fuel, you don't care about indulgence and connection and maybe enjoying your food?

Alex: 14:13

Are you trying to eat broccoli and chicken and rice for all your meals because you think that's the way? You're too far on one side towards food as fuel and you need to move towards food as enjoyment. Find ways of enjoying it. And if you're too far on the indulgent side, where food is deeply rooted in emotion and connection and sentiment, then find your way moving the other direction towards choices need to be made based on nutrition, on fuel, on what is good and nourishing for your body. Right?

Alex: 14:49

And then ultimately, my final piece of advice is choose what is special to you. Because when everything is special, it's not special at all. And I've been going through this with our kids where they want to eat treats all the time and Halloween's kind of set it off in motion again, but they wanna eat treats and candy multiple times per week, every week through the month to where eating desserts isn't even a special thing. So when we say, hey, we're gonna take you guys out to ice cream, it's like, can we go to this place? And I'm like, what happened to, like, going out to ice cream as a family being special?

Alex: 15:28

And I realize it's our own fault. But when it hasn't been special to begin with or unique and constrained to begin with, then indulgence isn't special. And this, the law of constraint, really does make things special. And it's a beautiful concept, but when you are on a budget, saving up for a trip and spending on a big purchase is really enjoyable. When you are on a food plan of sorts, a constrained way of eating, where you're controlling your impulses, then going out to eat and indulging in something feels very special.

Alex: 16:11

When you're eating pizza and burgers every night or multiple times a week, then going out to eat hamburgers with some friends doesn't really feel special. And, so pick what's special to you. If you're having events with families and gatherings all the time that are bringing treats and ice cream and sandwich ice cream sandwiches and donuts to every gathering that you're at, then just opt out. You can. You are allowed to opt out of having treats.

Alex: 16:41

Just because someone brought donuts to the party doesn't mean you have to eat them. And anyone who tries to guilt you into eating them, well, they've got their own battles to fight. But you are entitled 100% to the nutrition you put in your body. And you not taking ownership of that is not taking ownership of your health. You're the only person accountable for what goes in your mouth.

Alex: 17:08

And so that's my final encouragement is make indulgence special. Don't eliminate it from your life, but find where you are on the spectrum of food is fuel or food is life, indulgent life, and move towards the middle. Make some corrective movement, and find a way that you can enjoy connection with people, you can moderate the amount that you consume, and you can enjoy it and be nourished at the same time. I can go to a family gathering. I can choose the steak option or the pork cutlet option.

Alex: 17:44

I can opt in for some veggies and I can have some bites of desserts. I can tell the person that made the pie, hey, I tried your pie. It was amazing. You are a really good pie maker or whatever, but you don't have to eat 3 slices of pie to be able to say that and connect with them. Hopefully, this resonates going into the holidays.

Alex: 18:05

Hopefully, this is helpful, if not just insightful, but find where you're at and enjoy the holidays. Don't fall into an eating disorder. Don't fall into disordered eating when it comes around holidays. Don't be the person at the holiday party that's like, oh, I can't have any. I'm trying to watch my waistline.

Alex: 18:21

Like, just own your choices and have a good time. Make connections with friends, family, and I hope you enjoy the holidays.