The Application of Will

Every day offers up a multitude of opportunities to exercise our will both in the avoidance of what is bad and the movement towards that which is good. With the new year, I am thinking of health and how I might apply my will towards its improvement. On the physical side, we can exercise and diet. On the mental side, we can work towards using our time to improve our minds so that we can see the world as it is. No easy task.

Since I am on this path to learn and use Stoicism to improve my mental health, it only makes sense that I use it to improve my physical heath. Exercise seems the easier of the two because it seems more straightforward. I can take walks, run, use my exercise bike, lift weights, etc. It's kind of a do or don't do each day as in: rode exercise bike for 30 minutes. It's simply a matter of doing it or not doing it. 

Diet feels like the more complex because whether I am dieting or not, if I even want to call it a diet, I eat every day. In other words, we are all on a diet however we want to construct that diet. Then there are the temporary diets we all have pursued to achieve some weight goal. I am going to control the types of foods I eat for three months until I lose 15 pounds. We know how that works. If we are dedicated, we lose the 15 pounds and then, if we are like most of us, we gain them all back and then some. A couple of years ago I read the Gary Taubes book, Why We Get Fat, and just this week completed The Case Against Sugar. I thought both of them were excellent. I also got to see a Gary Taubes' lecture based upon his study of the research on sugar and the sugar industry. I highly recommend both of these books. What am I getting at? In considering both of these books, I have decided to undertake a unique diet that I am calling the Stoic Diet. In thinking about this, I should mention a third book, Michael Pollan's Food Rules. Pollan's book perhaps offers the best guidance, but I mention Taubes' work because he is the one that got me thinking about this more deeply. He built up my anger towards the food industry and the way we eat today.

Farmers Market in Ecuador

In taking another look at Pollan's book: eat food that you can identify in just a word: chicken, broccoli, eggs, carrots, apples, onions, etc. Avoid all processed foods. Avoid sugar, which if you are avoiding processed foods should be quite easy. If you have to read a label to figure out what something is, don't buy it. In fact, if there is a label or brand on a food item, avoid it. I fully realize there are issues with our meat, but I am not going to insist on organic because I can't afford it. Here is what I am thinking, don't eat anything Epictetus would not have recognized. He lived from  50 AD to 135 AD. Based upon that, I think it's a sure bet he likely didn't eat 99% of the items I will find in a modern grocery store. This will not be about weight loss, although I suspect that will be one of the results along with simply feeling better.

This is about health. We simply weren't meant to eat the way we do today. We weren't meant to drink sugar water. We weren't meant to eat boxes of industrial food made with ingredients we can't even pronounce. The identifying of the things I should not eat will be easy: if there is a brand on it, if it was made in a factory, if it has an expiration date a year in the future, don't eat it. It's not food.

So the application of will here is to eat the right thing based upon a simple rule: What did Epictetus Eat?