Founder Notes
Why I Don't Call It a Diet
The word 'diet' has been wrecked. What we're talking about is a kitchen orientation — a way of thinking about what food is for, not something you go on and eventually come off.
Robbie Rensel
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The word "diet" has been wrecked.
It used to mean, simply, the pattern of food a person eats. Latin root: diaeta, from the Greek for "way of living." A neutral, descriptive word. It became a loaded one over the course of the 20th century, as the weight loss industry attached itself to it and the culture followed. Now "diet" means restriction. It means temporary. It means a thing you go on and eventually come off, usually feeling like you failed.
We are not doing that here.
What Simmerstate describes — what the nutritional psychiatry research describes — is a dietary pattern, a sustained orientation toward food that affects the biological environment your brain operates in. The Mediterranean diet is not a six-week plan. It is a way of eating that populations in Greece and southern Italy and coastal North Africa have practiced for generations, and which researchers have now studied rigorously enough to say: this measurably reduces depression, it reduces cognitive decline, it reduces cardiovascular events. The MIND diet is not a cleanse. It is a specific emphasis — green leafy vegetables, berries, olive oil, nuts, fatty fish — that has been associated with a 53 percent reduction in Alzheimer's risk in the highest-adherence group.
These are not diets in the modern sense. They are kitchen orientations. They are a way of deciding what food is for.
The distinction matters because restriction thinking produces restriction behavior. If you frame eating for your mental health as something you're doing instead of eating normally, you create a before-and-after structure that almost always ends in the after. If you frame it as an orientation — this is how I think about what goes on the plate, and it's adjustable depending on the day — it becomes something you can actually maintain, including on the days when maintaining it means opening a tin of sardines and calling it dinner.
We are not asking anyone to give up everything they love. We are asking: what does your brain actually need, and how can the food you already eat give it more of that?
The research has a clear answer to the first question. The kitchen has a clear answer to the second. Neither of them requires the word "diet."