In part 1 we talked about moderation and how it’s a bad fit for humans (or living things in general) biologically. I don’t know about you but for me biological incompatibility is a pretty good compelling not to chase something, but I think there’s another good reason.

As previously discussed we can sort of characterize moderation when it comes to diet as eating a consistently appropriate amount of relatively good quality food. Appropriate amount isn’t defined by any subjective external judgement, we’re talking a quantity that is close or exactly at your metabolic rate.

From a practical standpoint what would need to happen for someone to be able to actually do that?

For one they would need to know how much to eat, what to eat, and in what proportion. If we’re coming from an ancestral perspective with deep cultural roots and rituals then you would have an almost universal intuition that you’d eat a meal about three times a day, have almost nothing in between, and the meals would consist of a small portion of meat, some vegetables, and some sort of starch.

Of course a modern human, especially in the west, has none of that cultural programming to fall back on. So now instead of an intuitive understanding you need a deep technocratic cognitive understanding of macronutrients and quantities. You need to know that you need (rough numbers, okay?) 150 grams of protein, 100 grams of fat, and 150 grams of carbohydrates.

You need to learn and understand that 50 grams of carbohydrates from Honey Nut Cheerios may not be qualitatively the same thing as 50 grams of sweet potato, even if quantitatively they’re the exact same thing.

Once you have a good understanding of the total quantities you need to eat, and an idea of how to break them up (it’s not at all self-evident and obvious that a normal portion of protein is only about 35 grams of protein) into meals you then need to know how to actually put those meals together.

Cooking isn’t hard, but like anything that isn’t hard once you know how to do it the idea of cooking a meal from raw meat, dirty vegetables, and dried starch grains can be pretty daunting. If your experience with cooking has more to do with packets and boiled water than sauteeing garlic until it’s fragrant you’re going to experience a pretty steep learning curve.

But wait, you can’t get on with your cooking until you shop for ingredients. Shopping for raw ingredients can be pretty intimidating. How much do you buy? What do you buy? Do you have a recipe you’re following? If not it’s a pretty tall order to send someone to the grocery store to just by raw ingredients and put together a meal when they have no experience doing so.

The fact is we could go on and on breaking down the skills that make up the ladder of being able to eat moderately. Maybe you have some of the skills, but do you have all of them? If you have all of the skills in a conscious competence sense, can you execute on them without thinking. Is it easy and automatic?

I would argue that most people who are getting the “everything in moderation” advice are probably lacking at least some of the core skills that you would actually need to eat moderately consistently.

Does giving them advice imbue them with those skills? No. Does it actually offer them anything they can act on what so ever? No!

Not only is “everything in moderation” a biological improbability (especially in modern times with engineered foods that are out of step with our biology) but it’s also a practical impossibility.

Acknowledging that there is a whole ladder of skill involved in complex functions goes a long towards helping you understand how to achieve those functions, or help someone else achieve them. It’s pretty poor coaching to tell someone “everything in moderation” and send them on their way to figure it out. It’s phenomenal coaching to give them bite-sized skills to work on and the framework with which to integrate them into complex functions.

Break it down, learn, act, do better.

Any time a conversation about food, diet, or nutrition comes up in a mixed group of people someone will inevitably say “everything in moderation” as if they have made the most profound statement that should immediately stop everyone in their tracks to marvel at the profundity that had just been revealed to them.

But does moderation even make any sense biologically?

Moderation is the avoidance of extremes or excesses, and could be either avoiding the extremes in the first place or attenuating them when they do occur.

So when it comes to diet you could say that moderation looks like a flat-line of eating right around your maintenance number of calories of food that we could all agree is real, good food. Spikes or extremes would be extremely low or high calories or foods that are many times lower or higher quality than what is normal for you.

Now, if we were to apply this same type of thinking to exercise we could create a moderation-based fitness regimen. You would never elevate your heart rate beyond, say, a walking pace because going up towards your maximum heart rate would clearly be an extreme, and likewise we’d really want to avoid any excessively low resting heart rates from being totally relaxed. Weight training would of course be done in moderation, but never with weights anywhere approaching your maximal 1-rep maximum capabilities. Using weights that you could do without any spikes of exertion would be better. By the same token, we’d never want to use very light weights because then you could do an extreme amount of volume and we want to keep that down.

Does that seem like it would be an effective training program? Does that even make sense biologically?

Do you even hormesis, bro?

The fact is this type of linear, static, regularity doesn’t exist in nature. We aren’t made for it.

By the same token, we also aren’t made for the profit-engineered hyperpalatable foods that make up the vast majority of the grocery store these days. Having these foods is moderation is probably less damaging, but I don’t know that there is any benefit or hormetic effect either. In other words, let’s call a spade a spade, having them in moderation is just less bad. Which is better than the alternative, but it probably isn’t a real rational philosophy to live by.

And if something is downright so toxic to you that even in low doses you are being harmed more than you are benefiting then it certainly doesn’t make sense to have them in moderation. This is much more common than you’d think, given the relatively completely vacant field of study in auto-immune connections to diet and food.

Finally, it’s worth noting that if someone is even capable of moderation then it’s pretty unlikely that “everything in moderation” is useful advice to them. Even if it did make sense biologically. It’s inherently “just do it” advice.

Just like you would with training it makes sense to have highs and lows, peaks and valleys. Sometimes you eat a lot more than normal, sometimes you eat a lot less than normal. Sometimes you eat something that is more an extreme in terms of your own tolerance, but it hardens you against future extremes. All of that is inherently biological and high variability is a sign of a healthy system. Tamping it down with trite advice isn’t good or healthy.

In part 2 I am going to discuss another, tangential, reason this advice is garbage.