Last Week’s Check-In:
Did you reach out? Not "did you mean to" — did the message actually get sent?
If it did, notice how it felt once it was out of your hands. Usually the anxiety is all in the two minutes before you hit send, not after. If it didn't happen, that's fine — what got in the way? Often it's not the message itself, it's the fear that it'll feel awkward after time has passed. It rarely does.
Mesocycle: Connection
Microcycle 2/4: BUILD
This week, we go from a message to actual time together. A text is contact. It isn't connection yet.
This week's ask: schedule something real with someone — coffee, a call that's more than five minutes, a walk. Put an actual date on it this week, not "we should do this sometime." Keep last week's habit going too: one more person, one more message.
Stop With The Carb Shaming
I’m tired of seeing the same influencers talk about “cortisol” and “carbs” leading to “blood sugar crashes.” This echo-chamber of carb-phobia is making people afraid to eat, which leads to under-fueling and unrestricted compensatory bingeing later in the day, and cycles of self-loathing.
Rice is not a side dish in most of the world — it's the meal, with everything else arranged around it. Bread is old enough that 'breaking bread' became shorthand for sharing a meal at all. Tortillas are both the food and the utensil across an entire continent. Injera is the plate itself in Ethiopia. None of these cultures got it wrong for thousands of years. We just got scared of a macronutrient.
It’s not that carbs suddenly became obesogenic. It’s not because America went on a low fat diet starting in the 1970s (despite what opponents of Ancel Keys may argue, Americans didn't follow a low-fat diet, and absolute fat intake stayed roughly flat while total calories rose).
It’s because the food was expertly engineered to make you eat more of it while trying to make you feel less guilty for doing so.
It’s because the food was expertly engineered to make you eat more of it while trying to make you feel less guilty for doing so.
The Halo Effect
Here's the economics of it. Food has relatively inelastic demand — there's only so much a person can eat. So if a company wants to sell more, it has to make you want more of it. That means engineering cravings, not satisfying hunger, and giving the food a “halo effect” it doesn’t deserve.
Remember Hot Pockets? No one on the planet would call that a health food. But what about Lean Pockets? It’s still a Hot Pocket, just with 20 fewer calories, and in a green box. That’s the halo effect. It’s still ultra-processed junk food.
Here’s another one: SnackWell’s fat free cookies. It’s still a cookie. Cookies aren’t health food. Cookies are desserts. “But it says on the box…” You mean the green box?
How about yogurt? Probiotics, right? Sure, but why do we feel compelled to purchase flavored yogurt, where 75% of the sugar is not lactose, which occurs naturally in milk? It’s added sugar, all in the name of mainstreaming dessert.
Rate
It's also not just what you eat, or even how much. It's the rate — how fast calories get absorbed, and how much variety hits your system at once.
One of the most important predictors of a substance’s addictive potential is the rate at which it hits your system. This goes for alcohol, opioids, nicotine, and marijuana, too. Noticing a trend in substance use disorder over the past 20 years? Might the potency of our drugs and the speed of delivery have something to do with it?
High gravity IPAs—a beer went from 4.5% alcohol to 9%. Fentanyl only takes 2mg to kill a person. Vapes deliver so much nicotine that a smoker would blush. We now have strains of legal THC so potent that they are sending users to the emergency room with psychosis.
Food companies understand the "rate" problem better than most nutritionists do. Strip the fiber out of something, and there's nothing left standing between a chip and your bloodstream — the calories hit you like a firehose aimed at a daisy, not a slow, absorbable drip.
Variety
Variety keeps you eating past fullness in ways flavor alone doesn't: researchers have found that a wider range of colors in something like a bag of candy keeps people eating longer, independent of taste.
Your brain isn't weak for responding to that. It's being deliberately overridden. That’s why you feel compelled to purchase the sugar-sweetened colorful yogurts in key lime pie, strawberry, and peach flavors: variety, baby. You know what flavor yogurt comes in generically? Milk. It’s milk-flavored, with a sour finish.
So no — there's no simple "listen to your body" here. Your body isn't lying to you out of some ancient evolutionary glitch this time. It's being actively, commercially manipulated by systems built specifically to override its own signals.
So what’s the solution? Stop buying the junk. Any food product that is trying to tell you to buy it with “baked,” “fat free,” “probiotics,” or any other halo-effect claim is trying to get you to spend more money on basic ingredients. Broccoli does not sit on the chilled shelf screaming, “Fiber! Polyphenols!” It doesn’t have to, because it’s real food.
Imagine time a century ago — better yet, a French village today (there’s still plenty of ‘em). Food was food. Meat from the butcher, bread from the bakery, milk from the milkman, vegetables from the farmer’s market. Shoot, I just got a whole day of exercise just thinking about obtaining all those things.
Talk soon,
Dr. Stevens
DON’T FORGET this week's ask: schedule something real with someone — coffee, a call that's more than five minutes, a walk. Put an actual date on it this week, not "we should do this sometime." Keep last week's habit going too: one more person, one more message.
General health information only — not a diagnosis, not treatment, and not a substitute for care from your own physician. Talk to your doctor before changing your exercise, diet, or medication routine, especially if you have an existing condition.
