“Fruit is God’s Candy”

That is exactly what I tell my overweight diabetic patients. I also say “There may be more vitamins in fruit than in most candy bars, but unless you’re out jogging and need a quick calorie burst, fruit will raise your blood sugar and make you gain weight.”

“If you feel you must have dessert, and are already in the habit of eating pie, then switching to fruit may be a first step in breaking your dessert habit”, is another blunt statement I might use.

We can thank our dietitians for perpetuating the catastrophic EAT MORE FRUIT myth. People with sedentary lifestyles who are already obese or diabetic should not be told to ADD anything, even healthy calories, to their diet. Because for them, any additional calories will cause harm.

Instead of saying what to eat MORE of, I help my patients know what to eat LESS of. Then we work on adding back, or substituting, the right kind of foods.

It is simple psychology: When explaining a two step process, start with the big idea, in this case what to eat less of. That way, if your listener tunes out after the first part, they’ll still be on a better track than they were on.

But if people stop listening after EAT MORE FRUIT, and miss the second part (what to eat less of), your advice will have the opposite effect of what you intended.

We live in a culture that somehow can’t deny itself anything. It is as if we are recovering from a big famine and the thought of being hungry for a few minutes or not having exactly what we want induces PTSD. Our growing impatience and insatiable desire for more food, more entertainment, more convenience is causing many of our era’s current challenges – from lifestyle diseases to the environmental disasters plaguing us right now.