A month of eating a certain kind of food could change you.
This will be a familiar story to road warriors. Spend a week doing the conference circuit, eating hotel meals or pav-bhaji or hamburger snacks, and watch the weight pile on. A new study by scientists at the Linkoping University suggests that binge eating carries long-term effects: a month of eating junk food and exercising very little seemed to cause long-term weight gain in the subjects of their study. Here’s the scary part: two years later, participants in the Linkoping study were markedly heavier than the control group participants, who didn’t do the hamburgers-and-fries diet.
This raises all kinds of questions. The assumption many newspapers made when reporting the study is that the month of bingeing changed the metabolism of participants. But there’s no data on another, and key, factor: did the month of eating all the wrong things also change their taste preferences, and their willingness to exercise?
Ayurveda doctors sometimes discuss the ‘naturopathy effect’ — after a month or so on a strict, Ayurveda-friendly diet, some come back and dive straight into the pizza, but some find that their palates have changed. After three or four Ayurveda courses, I found this to be disconcertingly true; to be left with a lifelong love of bok choy, tofu, pui shaak and green tea feels a little less than hedonistic. (I’ll still eat the foie gras, though.)
Eating healthy has nothing to do with the specifics (low carbs, the coconut oil diet, the amount of fruit you consume) and a great deal to do with the way you handle stress, and the way you handle happiness. Let’s get back to the Linkoping study participants. Imagine a month of junk food. However happy the thought of being allowed to gorge on pizza, milkshakes and unlimited bedni-puri makes us, imagine being on this diet day after day for a month.
Anyone on this kind of diet would radically alter their body’s need for fats and sugar — and would accustom the body to a much higher proportion of refined and processed foods than any healthy person should eat. This is the metabolic change theory.
The key factor here might just be the length of the study. Thirty days is a marker in many different fields, from sports to happiness research. Many studies support the folk wisdom that it takes 30 days to build a habit. In this case, the habits that were being reinforced were laziness (no exercise) and terrible 21st century food habits.
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Think about how this applies to your life, though. One of the best pieces of advice offered by the diet books industry is also the least followed: keep a food diary for a month. That is your database: it tells you how stressed you are when you’re eating, how much of your food is healthy, whether you’re eating at the right time, whether you’re eating too much or too little.
And here’s the interesting takeaway from the Linkoping study. If one reverses what the researchers did, you could build a new set of food habits. This doesn’t have to be an austere diet, or a naturopathic one, or a raw food one. But for a month, try eating big salads with very little dressing, fresh fruit, good protein (tofu, fish, chicken), stay away from processed foods all together and listen to what your body really craves. Mine, perversely, often wants green apples instead of chocolate cake; yours might want a handful of almonds, or a clear soup.
Despite what we think, the body rarely craves fats and sugars on its own: we tend to treat our bodies like whining toddlers, shoving a junk-food lollipop at them instead of what they really need. It would be fascinating to see if the Linkoping study works just as well in a more positive, healthy direction.
[Nilanjana S Roy is a Delhi-based freelance writer]