"Eat well, feel well, roll eyes*

I've been toying with the idea of signing off all my blog posts, lectures, and books with the phrase "eat well, move well, be well." It's a pretty compact statement of my beliefs regarding the only way to feel healthy and get the most out of your short time on the earth. It's not about fad diets and gimmicky exercise equipment, it's simple stuff like eating a ton of vegetables and working within your body's natural parameters.

I've dropped the idea of having a signing off statement like "eat well, move well, be well" because it's super cheesy and reeks of fitness guru schlock. I want you people to know I am down here in the trenches with you, I don't know anything you don't know and if it seems like I do it's only because I've made more ignorant mistakes along the way.

I'm glad I decided to kill the line because last week I walked into a Starbucks and was confronted with this framed advertisement on the wall. Sorry about the low quality, it was taken with my camera phone.

As you can see, it's a poster sized piece that features the phrase "eat well/feel well." That's all well and good, but the foodstuffs that they have chosen to represent this feel-good lifestyle are, clockwise from the left, a foamy (perhaps whipped cream?) coffee drink, a cupcake, a piece of marble poundcake, a lettuce, cheese and tomato sandwich, and a blueberry muffin.

What a pitiful example of "eating well." The cupcake, poundcake, and muffin are all essentially the same meal, enriched flour with egg, milk, and sugar in varying amounts. There is nothing nourishing about them. The sandwich appears to be rye bread which would at least be a decent source of complex carbohydrate, but the lettuce and tomato bring basically zero to the nutritional table. That leaves us with the frothy drink and the cheese, both of which are the very non-essential dairy group of foods. (But dairy is one of the four food groups you say? Not in the other half of the world where people never touch the stuff and live long and healthy lives.)

It seems that where Starbucks and I differ is the shading of the word "well." Their "well" seems to be that of momentary gratification. As in "eat well for tomorrow we die." Accordingly, their "feel well" seems to refer to the pleasure derived from the experience.

My view of the word well is "skillfully." As in "Well played old chap." In my scheme eating a big piece of poundcake would certainly be enjoyable, but wouldn't qualify as "eating well."

We seem to have a similar disconnect in the modern world. We so often confuse what tastes good, fills us up, and turns on our seratonin pleasure centers as a generally positive culinary experience. In fact, beyond the momentary pleasure on the tongue, that kind of diet will do anything but make us feel well. It will make us fat, clog our blood pipes, and give us diseases.

What I try to tell myself and anyone who will listen is that we need to recalibrate our sense of taste and what is a "good meal." A bowl of vegetables, lightly seasoned, simply will not compete in the taste arena with a Starbuck's mocha.

The truth of the matter is that the healthiest foods and meals are light, subtle dishes that accentuate the flavor of nature. Yet we have come to expect that every meal should contain something that really knocks it out of the taste stadium. Salty, cheesy, sweet, creamy, rich, savory, these should all be viewed as treats, not mandatory parts of a meal.

This Starbucks ad is just another voice in a choir of media that is based on the idea that to really eat well and feel well you must be experiencing amazing drinks and meals at every opportunity. Break out of the matrix and see that this expectation is ruining not only our palates but our health.

Steam some vegetables, eat an apple, and see what eat well feel well really means. In my world I'd say "eat skillfully, live gracefully."