Junk Food and Its Effect on Personal Growth

I write about wellness, and the request that lands in my inbox most often is some variation of "cover superfoods." These are the foods carrying more nutritional punch than the everyday stuff on your shelf. Laughter may be the best medicine, but what sits on your plate has its own healing power. Which raises a strange question: if food can work for us, why do so many of us keep reaching for the kind that works against us? Below I want to poke at that question and sketch out a few ways eating better can feed your own growth.

So what is it about junk food? One theory: people are wired to push back, and anything labeled bad for us becomes a little more tempting for exactly that reason. Another possibility, less flattering, is that a lot of us quietly think so little of ourselves that we stop caring what ends up in our stomachs. The pattern isn't limited to food. Alcohol, drugs, sex, the same impulse shows up anywhere addiction can get a grip. None of those things is evil on its own, by the way. Even drugs, if they were legalized and regulated, would be a different conversation, and that's actually a series I plan to get into over the next few weeks.

Look closely at your eating and you run into a loop that almost seems designed to trap you. Eat cleaner and you feel better about yourself, your hunger steadies, your sleep improves. Fine. But how do you start eating cleaner when you already feel lousy about yourself, and the cheap food you keep eating is draining the energy you'd need to change anything? All you want to do is lie down.

The way out is less dramatic than people expect. Think of pharmaceuticals: you don't quit them cold, you taper off with a doctor watching. Junk food works on the same principle. Since the food itself isn't the enemy, you don't have to swear it off, you just scale back. As you scale back, you naturally start reaching for the better options, more fruit, more vegetables. A handful of potato chips or a couple of Oreos now and then is fine. Moderation is the whole trick, and moderation happens to be the one thing humans are terrible at, usually because they're trying to plug some hole inside themselves. That's my issue with the Anonymous model of total abstinence. Strip away the drugs or the drink without touching the void underneath, and the void just recruits a new habit, so you end up at a second meeting trying to kick the thing you picked up while kicking the first thing. Life gets tangled fast.

Here's a question worth sitting with: what actually makes junk food junk? Most of the time it's the ingredients the manufacturer stirs in. Hydrogenated oil. The high fructose corn syrup swimming in your soda. If you want to cut the junk without going cold turkey, the cleanest fix is to cook the stuff yourself. Take potato chips. Strip away the marketing and what are they? Potatoes. A sack of potatoes costs a fraction of what a bag of chips does. Wash them, peel them, fry or bake them, and you're done. In my own kitchen that version comes out more filling and far more nourishing than anything in a foil bag, which is often half chips and half air anyway. Sometimes I wonder whether I'm paying for the food or for the nitrogen.

Granted, baking your own Oreos is a tall order. But almost any other sweet is fair game from scratch, and over months the savings add up. There's a second payoff that has nothing to do with money: making things with your hands is quietly good for your confidence.

Food on its own, though, only gets you partway. Without movement it doesn't amount to much, and that goes double if your job parks you at a desk all day with no reason to stand up. Eating homemade "junk" may lift your mood on its own, but stack a few hours a week at the gym on top of it and the endorphins put you somewhere close to euphoric, a kind of self-made high.

The cycle runs both directions. Feel bad about yourself and you'll feed yourself badly, which makes you feel worse, and eventually the chronic conditions show up. Drop the victim story, though, and something shifts. You feel capable of that first step, and when you keep at it, the confidence you build doesn't stay in the kitchen or the gym. It leaks into everything else you do.

E Bishop Wooten, The Liberal Conservative Blog