Pillar 04: Diet
Everyone is on a diet. Whether you count macros, follow a plan, or just eat whatever is in front of you, you have a diet. The question is not whether you have a diet, the question is whether the one you have is intentional.
But somewhere along the way, diet stopped being about nourishment and became something else entirely.
It became an identity.
You are not just someone who eats a certain way. You are mediterranean, keto, vegan, carnivore, paleo, atkins, low-carb, high-protein, or some other type of eater from a myriad of different other word substitutes.
The way you eat has become a label, a tribe, and for some people, something dangerously close to a personality.
The moment your diet becomes your identity, you have a problem, because now any challenge to how you eat feels like a challenge to who you are. And that makes it nearly impossible to think clearly about food.
The Tribalism Problem
There is no shortage of people on the internet willing to tell you that their diet is the one you need:
Carnivore will fix your inflammation.
Keto will unlock your mental clarity.
Veganism is the only ethical path.
Paleo is how humans were designed to eat.
Some of these approaches work well for some people, and some of them have real benefits. The issue is not someone following one of these diet frameworks. The issue is when the framework gets elevated from a personal discipline to a universal prescription, and when the people promoting it have a financial or ideological stake based on your compliance.
If someone cannot eat certain foods because of digestion issues, allergies, or medical conditions, that is a legitimate reason to adjust what they eat. But that is different from vilifying entire categories of food because a podcast host or an influencer told you that bread is poison or that meat is murder.
The reality is simpler than the broader food industry wants you to believe, but that is part of the problem. Simplicity doesn’t sell supplements, it doesn’t build platforms, and it doesn’t generate clicks. But simplicity is where good nutrition actually lives.
What the Research Actually Shows
Here is where this gets tricky, and I want to be upfront about it.
Nutrition science is one of the most contested fields in health research. A lot of food studies are compromised by industry funding, poorly controlled variables, and conflicts of interest that make it difficult to know who to trust. If you have ever seen a headline that says "eggs are bad for you" followed six months later by "eggs are actually fine," you have experienced this firsthand.
But there are findings that have held up consistently across large-scale, independent research. And the most robust one is this: the more ultra-processed food you eat, the worse your health outcomes tend to be.
A 2024 umbrella review published in The BMJ examined 45 pooled analyses covering nearly 10 million participants and found that higher ultra-processed food consumption was associated with adverse outcomes across 32 health parameters, including increased risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, depression, anxiety, and all-cause mortality.
A 2025 updated meta-analysis published in Systematic Reviews looked at 18 prospective cohort studies with over 1.1 million participants and found that those with the highest ultra-processed food consumption had a 15 percent increased risk of death from any cause compared to those with the lowest consumption. Every 10 percent increase in ultra-processed food intake was associated with a 10 percent increase in mortality risk.
And a 2025 study published in The Lancet Regional Health analyzing data from over 420,000 participants across nine European countries found that substituting just 10 percent of processed and ultra-processed foods with minimally processed foods was associated with a measurably lower risk of death from multiple causes.
The pattern across the research is consistent regardless of which specific diet someone follows: eat more whole, minimally processed foods and less of the stuff that comes in packages with ingredient lists you cannot pronounce. That is not a diet trend. That is a principle that has held up across decades of research and millions of participants.
Discipline, Not Obsession
So what does this look like practically?
It looks like eating food made from single ingredients most of the time. Meat, vegetables, fruits, grains, eggs, nuts, dairy. Food that your great-grandparents would recognize. And then having the freedom to enjoy the things that fall outside of that without guilt or crisis.
I have been through plenty of dietary phases. Paleo, carnivore, intermittent fasting, and what I would now describe as an 80/20 approach where I eat clean most of the time and give myself margin to live. I still eat chips. I still eat cookies and candy. I still drink the occasional soda and enjoy alcohol. I am not trying to be perfect, I am trying to practice discipline and intentionality in my eating habits.
And that distinction matters. Because the all-or-nothing approach to diet is one of the fastest paths to giving up entirely. You eat one bad meal and the whole week feels ruined. You fall off the plan and decide you might as well wait until next week to start over. Sound familiar?
This connects directly to what we explored earlier this week about responsibility and control. You are responsible for what you put in your body, and yet you can’t control every health outcome. But you can make consistent choices that tilt the odds in your favor over decades.
Discipline says: I will make intentional choices about food most of the time because it serves the life I am building.
Obsession says: I must follow this plan perfectly or I have failed.
One is stewardship. The other is a prison. And too many people are living in the second one because the diet industry and influencers profit from their anxiety.
The Stewardship Question
Food is fuel. But it’s also pleasure, culture, and connection. A good meal shared with people you love is one of life's genuine gifts. I’m not trying to argue that you should reduce eating to a mechanical act of optimization.
Choosing what you eat is a daily act of stewardship because what you eat affects your energy, clarity, mood, longevity, and your capacity to show up for the people and purposes that matter most.
The question is not "What diet should I follow?"
The question is "Am I eating in a way that supports the life I am trying to live?"
You don’t need a tribe, an influencer, or a label. You need discipline that is simple enough to sustain and flexible enough to let you live.
