by Scott Crawford
I have a confession to make, and it starts with something I recommended to you.
For the past year or so, I have been eating Rx Bars. If you are not familiar with them, they are one of the cleanest packaged snack options available. Simple ingredients, no added sugar, solid protein content. The kind of thing you can eat without the usual inner negotiation that comes with reaching for a packaged food. I liked them enough to mention them in my writing. I still think they are a good product.
Here is the problem: I have turned myself into a snacker.
It happened the way most habit shifts happen: gradually, reasonably, and without much notice. I was training more and working with multiple groups, so the extra caloric demand was real. An Rx Bar between morning sessions made perfect nutritional sense because my body needed the fuel. The food was appropriate and the timing was logical.
What I did not account for was the door it opened.
A morning that was previously just coffee became a morning with a snack. That snack, repeated often enough, became a pattern. As patterns do, it began to generalize. I started reaching for something between meals, not because my body needed fuel, but because there was a gap in the day and my hands wanted something to do. Boredom. Stress. The restless energy of a busy afternoon. Suddenly, snacking was on the table as a response to all of them.
The Rx Bar did not cause this, but it was the vehicle. What happened underneath was a habit formation process that I know well enough to teach, and apparently not well enough to notice while it was happening to me.
In Good Habits, Bad Habits, Wendy Wood explains that much of our behaviour runs on autopilot. It is shaped by context and repetition rather than conscious choice. Once a behaviour becomes associated with a cue, such as a time of day, a setting, or an emotional state, it begins to fire automatically. I had built a new cue-routine loop without realising it. The cue was no longer hunger, but simply a moment that felt unfilled.
I was somewhat insulated from this for years by my existing eating habits. I trusted my patterns. I ate meals, not snacks, and rarely felt the pull toward grazing. That trust, it turns out, was not a permanent character trait. It reflected a particular routine. Once the routine shifted, everything downstream shifted as well.
The Language Trap
This experience crystallised something I have been thinking about for a while. The way we talk about food is making us worse at understanding it.
We love binaries: healthy or unhealthy, clean or dirty, good or bad. These labels feel useful. They provide shorthand for navigating a bewildering nutritional landscape. The trouble is that they are almost always wrong, or at the very least incomplete.
An Rx Bar is not “healthy” or “unhealthy.” It is a food. Whether it supports your wellbeing depends entirely on context. Who is eating it? When? Why? What outcome are they trying to achieve? Without answers to those questions, the label is meaningless.
The same principle applies everywhere. A slice of birthday cake shared with friends at a celebration carries genuine social and emotional value that a calorie count cannot capture. Refusing it in the name of dietary discipline may cost more relationally than the minor nutritional lapse is worth. Even the most “unhealthy” foods can have prosocial benefits that outweigh a small deviation from protocol.
The reverse is also true. The “healthiest” food on the shelf, eaten when it is not needed, is simply extra calories. It does not matter how clean the ingredient list is if the body has no use for the energy. Context determines everything.
This is what reductive food language obscures. Calling a food healthy gives us permission to eat it without thinking. Calling a food unhealthy gives us permission to fear it without thinking. Neither response involves the question that actually matters.
A Better Question
Instead of asking “Is this food healthy?” try asking: “How is this food supporting the outcome I am trying to achieve?”
That question does something the binary cannot. It forces context. It requires you to know what you are actually working toward and to evaluate the food against that specific aim, in that specific moment, for that specific person.
Take the protein conversation, which is everywhere right now. “Eat more protein” has become one of the most common pieces of nutritional advice, and for good reason. Protein is essential for muscle repair, satiety, metabolic health, and preservation of lean mass as we age. The advice itself is not wrong.
The execution, however, often is.
For someone trying to lose weight, “eat more protein” can quietly become “eat more food.” More protein shakes added to existing meals. More snacks justified by their protein content. More total calories in a situation where the goal requires fewer. The protein arrived, and everything that came with it arrived as well.
A better paradigm is not “eat more protein” but “build your meals around protein”. Make it a focus rather than an extra. Structure the plate so protein is the foundation and other elements fill in around it. Total intake might not change much, but the composition changes significantly. That distinction matters enormously for someone whose goal is fat loss, and it disappears entirely when protein is treated as an add-on.
Food Is Energy. Food Is Structure.
There is a simple framework that helps cut through the noise. Food serves two purposes: it provides energy, and it provides structural nutrition, the proteins, fats, vitamins, and minerals that build and maintain the body.
Some foods are dense in energy and light on structure. Others are rich in structural nutrition relative to their caloric load. Neither category is inherently good or bad. What matters is which one you need right now.
If you are trying to achieve fat loss, foods that are high in energy and low in structural nutrition are genuinely unhelpful. They deliver calories without building anything. They fill the tank without maintaining the engine.
If you are exercising for hours at a stretch, the calculation changes entirely.
There is a photograph from the 2024 Barkley Marathons that says more about nutrition than most textbooks.
Jasmin Paris, the first woman to ever finish the race, is sitting in a camp chair, legs scratched raw and face resting in one hand. Scattered around her feet is the debris of a sixty-hour effort: juice boxes, Coca-Cola, oat bars, a camping stove, snack wrappers, and a tub of food. It looks like the aftermath of a very long, very difficult picnic. Every item on that ground was the right choice for her at that time.
The Barkley Marathons almost defies description. It consists of five loops of roughly twenty miles each through unmarked trails in Tennessee's Frozen Head State Park. The course includes over 60,000 feet of cumulative elevation gain, roughly the equivalent of climbing Everest twice. There is no GPS and no course markings. Runners tear pages from hidden books to prove they completed each loop. In nearly four decades, only twenty people have ever finished. Some years, nobody does.
Paris finished in 59 hours, 58 minutes, and 21 seconds. She had 99 seconds to spare before the 60-hour cutoff
Watch the incredible story of her success HERE
Coca-Cola, the drink that sits near the top of almost every “unhealthy foods” list ever written, is right there on the ground beside her. In the context of a sixty-hour effort through impossible terrain, it is liquid energy delivered in one of the most rapidly absorbable forms available. Sugar, caffeine, and fluid are precisely what a body pushed to its absolute limit requires. In that moment, it is arguably one of the most functional foods she could consume.
The same bottle of Coke, consumed absent-mindedly on a Tuesday afternoon by someone whose goal is weight management, serves an entirely different purpose. The food has not changed, but the context certainly has.
Noticing the Slide.
What I have learned from my own quiet slide into snacking is that even a well-chosen food, introduced for perfectly sound reasons, can become the seed of a habit that no longer serves its original purpose.
I do not regret the Rx Bars. They were appropriate when my training demanded extra fuel. What I regret is not noticing the moment when the behaviour stopped being about nutrition and started being about something else: restlessness, routine, or the simple availability of something that tasted good and required no thought.
The habit loop that James Clear describes in Atomic Habits works in both directions. It builds the patterns we want, and it quietly builds the ones we do not. The same cue-routine-reward cycle that helps someone establish a morning exercise habit is the one that turned me into someone who reaches for a snack whenever the afternoon feels empty.
The solution is not to demonise the food. The solution is to restore the question.
How is this supporting what I am trying to achieve right now?
Not yesterday. Not in general. Right now, in this moment, with this specific goal in front of me.
Permission to Think in Context.
We would benefit from retiring the language of healthy and unhealthy, at least as fixed labels attached to individual foods. It is childish and reductive. It makes us feel informed while actually making us less capable of thinking clearly.
A more honest vocabulary would acknowledge that food exists in relationship to a person, a moment, a purpose, and a set of circumstances. The same meal can be nourishing or excessive, supportive or irrelevant, depending on who is eating it and why.
This does not mean anything goes. It does not mean nutritional quality is irrelevant. It means that quality alone is not enough. Direction matters. Timing matters. Honest self-awareness matters more than any label on a package.
The question is not whether the food is good. The question is whether it is serving you well, right here, right now, in the life you are actually living.
I am asking myself that question more carefully these days. The Rx Bars are still in the cupboard. They just do not come out every time the afternoon feels long.
Go Deeper.
This issue only scratches the surface. If the ideas here resonated, these other sources are worth exploring:
BJ Fogg, Tiny Habits — how behaviours attach to cues (and why one snack became a pattern)
Gil Carvalho, Nutrition Made Simple — honest, non-tribal nutrition thinking
A video on emotional eating.
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