What’s needed is a perceptual shift, Kessler said. “We did this with cigarettes,” he said. “It used to be sexy and glamorous but now people look at it and say, ‘That’s not my friend, that’s not something I want.’ We need to make a cognitive shift as a country and change the way we look at food. Instead of viewing that huge plate of nachos and fries as a guilty pleasure, we have to … look at it and say, ‘That’s not going to make me feel good. In fact, that’s disgusting.’ “
I’m not sure how you develop good eating habits. As a child, I wouldn’t eat a vegetable, or even something that had touched a vegetable, voluntarily. But in the last 3 days (since it’s gotten hot), I have eaten salads 3 times. I loved McDonalds as a kid (and I’m still pretty partial to Wendy’s), and presumably, the way you eat as a child sets patterns for how you eat as an adult, yet I wouldn’t say I have uncontrollable food urges. Is food really as dangerous to us as cigarettes? As I heard it said once, the hardest thing about changing the way you eat is you can’t go cold turkey.
