Five words you should stop using when you talk about food

Thu, 14 May 2015 11:27:00 -0400
food, nutrition, weight

Words matter, perhaps more than you realize. How you describe something expresses your underlying attitude about it, but the words themselves reflect back at you, shaping your thoughts and actions and impacting your success. Alot of research has been done with athletes — they achieve better results when they talk to themselves with positive, motivational language.

But this wordplay goes beyond sports to everyday performance. One study published in Psychological Science revealed the effect a small turn of phrase can have. In the study, participants who were asked to write the words “Will I” during what they thought was an unrelated handwriting task did better later at problem-solving and were more motivated than those who wrote “I will.” So approaching a task with the mind-set of a question or challenge had a more positive impact than using a declaration.

The bottom line is that what you say and how you say it shapes what you do. As a nutritionist, I am especially keyed in to the words we use around food and nutrition, and I see many popularly hashtagged terms hurting more than they help when it comes to our health and well-being. Here are five words I’d like to see banished from the food conversation.

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Detox

While it is true that certain foods help your body’s detoxification systems do their critical work, the word “detox” mostly feeds the alarmist notion that our bodies regularly accumulate piles of harmful compounds and we have to do something about it fast. The treatment usually involves a special (and typically expensive) concoction or radical eating plan. In this way “detox” sets us up for a fear-oriented and extremist mind-set, where we think that we need something more advanced than regular healthful food to thrive and that some magic bullet can quickly erase the effects of partying, overindulging and generally not taking care of ourselves.

So scrap that word and strive for a balanced way of life that optimizes your liver, lungs and immune system, which thankfully are very good at consistently preventing toxins from building up. Eat plenty of vegetables and whole fruits, get enough sleep, exercise and water, and take it easy on alcohol. If you go off the rails one night or over the course of a weekend, you don’t have to do anything dramatic to repent. Just go back to normal the next day.

By Ellie Krieger