Diet, food, weight loss, consumption, addiction, etc.

I lost a significant amount of weight over the last year. This isn’t an exceptional achievement, and a lot of what I'm about to say is clichéd or obvious, but the struggle of weight loss in general touches on many of the main themes of my philosophy, such as:

• Bodily existence/flesh is a problem

• Life is a struggle

• Voluntary suffering and self-denial is good

• Moving on from desire

• Capitalism is a desire-arousing, addiction-inducing, preference-creating system

Given these themes, I think the subject deserves some philosophical elaboration. I’ll begin with the trivial/practical points. I’ll put them under subheadings in case you want to skip over them and read the more philosophical component at the end of this essay instead.

The method: Calorie-counting

I counted calories, nothing else. I began with 1,200 calories per day. This meant the weight loss was quick enough and noticeable enough that my motivation didn’t expire. Every couple of days I saw results on the scales, which was enough to keep me going.

I didn’t take anything else into account other than calories. In fact, I kept eating junk food at first just to minimise the sense of privation involved in dieting. Skipping breakfast helped. After arriving at the horizon of my first goal, I then eased into a 1,700-calorie regimen.

The motivation: Vanity but also health.

I didn’t like how I looked and felt. This wasn’t a life-destroying sadness by any stretch, but it was sufficiently powerful for me to take advantage of. However, my awareness of this motivation also gave me a philosophical perspective on it, meaning I didn’t fall into false expectations of an idyllic life or lasting happiness upon reaching my goal weight. Still, I should be honest about this, because this selfish motivation is often concealed from the masses, such as for example when rich people pretend they were motivated by self-denial and sacrifice rather than by materialistic selfishness.

My real, long-term motivation is physical health. That means no longer being conscious of my body as a physical distraction and a source of unwanted sensations, namely pain (but also as a self-image, i.e. shame). As someone who is poor, I also worry about what my old age will look like. I get the sense that good physical health in old age can, to some degree, compensate for poverty. This is because wealth is comparable to a prosthetic limb, and if I don’t have the luxury of a prosthesis, I should preserve my own physical abilities as best as possible.

Another motivation: Distraction from depression.

My father died a few months ago. This initiated a heavy depression. I therefore filled every waking moment of my life with tasks—any task which would get me through this dark episode. I discovered that running—simply getting up and mindlessly throwing my corpse into a state of locomotion—was the one of the most effective ways of exhausting my mind and inducing a sort of stupefied sense of peace and resignation at the end of each day. Since then, I have gone for a run every day. I continue to feel the benefits of it.

In general, as you get older, you realise that doing nothing results in suffering just as much as doing something does. It’s just that productive suffering entails a more positive experience/outcome than unproductive suffering does. Voluntary suffering is better than involuntary suffering. One results in feelings of helplessness and guilt; the other results in feelings of self-empowerment and earned satisfaction. A willingness to exercise and do work stems from this realisation.

Make food inaccessible.

One of the things that makes weight loss so difficult is food’s abundance. The best constraint on food consumption is an actual physical constraint, e.g. a literal lack of access to food.

With abundance, we have to impose a ghostly, ineffective mental restraint on ourselves, and this is far too prone to failure to depend on. Therefore, I believe we should try to emulate an actual physical constraint, namely by not buying food unless it is necessary. That means not buying multipacks, but instead buying individual items of food on a daily basis and on a needs-only basis. That means walking to the shop and buying each day’s meals (e.g. bread rolls). This is less economical (although discount retailers like Lidl have good prices), but perhaps we need those constraints. Cheapness goes hand in hand with abundance, and maybe a slightly heavier cost is a more effective emulation of nature’s scarcity. It shouldn’t be so easy to eat as it is today. Physically obtaining your “daily bread” is, in my opinion, more psychologically consonant with a healthy attitude towards food than food being readily available and always at hand.

Make food boring.

Capitalism aims to provide consumers with the most desirable goods, and no better is this achieved than in the food industry. Food advertising plays on themes of addiction, i.e. the irresistibility of it—in other words: the addictive potential of their food. Whenever junk food is marketed to me, I now find myself shocked that this is deemed acceptable. Every day, food marketing promises us heavenly indulgence and it bombards us with heart-eye emojis (thus consciously trying to inspire feelings of lust in us). Food scientists do their best to make food addictive, and we should see their food in exactly these terms: an addiction—something to be overcome.

We should distance ourselves from capitalist preference-induction as much as possible. One way to do this is to make food boring again. I’ve slowly come to the view that food should be boring. By eating only boring food, your memory of exciting and excessively pleasurable food slowly fades into a distant memory. Food remains desirable in any case, but nowhere near as much if you eat just plain breads, meats and cereals and so forth.

This fading of memory is how we quit other addictions like drugs, smoking, pornography and alcoholism, and I believe it’s also how we should “quit” modern food. It’s how we get over things in general. It’s why, for instance, I have gotten used to not travelling abroad—I simply cannot afford to travel, so I have lost much of the desire to do so.

When we see overly-pleasurable food as an addiction, we might actually treat the problem with the seriousness it deserves. It sounds difficult at first, but it takes only a few days until your memory acclimatises to a new way of eating. All desires expire; it’s just a matter of time. Part of the pull of a desire is the wrongly-held belief that it will not pass unless it’s placated. The refutation of the desire is that you do in fact forget about it eventually.

Suffering as an end in itself.

Another thing which is on your side is a subtle hedonic reward inherent to self-denial and suffering privation. This is much easier said than done, but denying yourself the pleasure of food can result in a kind of low-level spiritual experience, which is why religions tend to put so much emphasis on fasting, even at the risk of placing too much of a demand on the masses who usually resist puritanical demands of this kind. There’s something so raw and real about the human experience when starving yourself. It also tends to result in some of the deepest, most profound and refreshing sleeps you will ever have. Even though it’s not sufficiently powerful of a hedonic reward to make you actively strive for it, it’s still enough of a silver lining that you can wilfully embrace it when it does happen.

But to experience these things, you cannot enter into this journey with the expectation of happiness. Life, in its usual paradoxical way, only grants this type of happiness to those who accept the sufferings as suffering, not as some cheat code to achieve pleasure.

This is also how I approached weight loss. I did not go into it with a feeling of joy and of new-beginning. I went into it ready to suffer, expecting nothing more than suffering. In the midst of it, one sometimes finds the opposite, but you cannot go looking for it. I’m always sceptical of the outcome if it involves glee and optimism from the outset, because it is really just that pleasant thought which people want to cash out on, not the actual hard work of doing it.

Philosophical reflections

I hesitate to write an essay like this one, because life-advice tends to give the impression of a final solution, when in fact life is a constant struggle to stay upright. It is a perpetual battle against materialistic temptation. I could very well fail at some point, and reading this back will then embarrass me. A struggle implies difficulty, which means the easier route will always be a temptation that I can fall back into. Not solutions, but guidance—this is all we can aim for. It’s a navigation problem, meaning it’s always possible to grow mentally complacent and become lost again.

The struggle of bodily existence is the whole problem to begin with. We are bodily creatures with bodily needs. We have been given a literal hole in our body which needs to be filled, otherwise the body starts eating itself. New drugs such as Ozempic show much promise in lessening this desire, but some other desire—some other feeling of emptiness in need of fulfilment—will continue to exist in other areas of our life.