The one diet you won't crash out on: a steady dose of joy

Globe and Mail

17-05-2025

Sheila Das is the writer and host of Flow, a podcast about conversation, and a humanities teacher at Vanier College.
One thing I really like is ice cream. I should introduce myself like that at parties and in job interviews as a crucial fact that every person needs to know about me.
Years ago, when I made my first trip to Italy, my roommate Magali and I would invent reasons to go eat gelato every day. It's my father's birthday! Gelato. It's the patron-saint day of Florence! Gelato. It's Tuesday – and sunny! Gelato. The point is, I ate a lot of gelato, but Italian-style – about 20 millilitres, or six exquisite mini-spoonfuls, each one oozing with such intense flavour that by the last melting mouthful, I was floating.
I lost weight that summer.
Italian serving sizes and real, quality ingredients taught me something. Enjoyment matters. What I think we all can learn from Italians is that enjoyment can be part of a whole diet. 'The Joy Diet,' as I call it, calls for a daily dose of, yes, good food and drink, but also puts people and experiences back on the table. The key idea is to savour. This is not obvious, especially in a North American culture that starts each new year with calls to start a new diet and/or exercise routine right in the middle of winter.
Savouring good food and drink and striving for better health are often placed at opposite ends of a spectrum. But complete abstinence can have its own hazards. Remember last year's guidelines warning against any alcohol consumption? What's missing from the recommendations, for people in Britain at least, is the risk of losing social connection. In The Times of London, Zoe Dare Hall attests that having a local pub 'where you can pop in' is now valued as the key metric for a happy and healthy neighbourhood for Brits. Kim Samuel, author of On Belonging, drives home the point that gathering places, be it pubs, cafés or even gyms, bring us together and help us feel connection.
So savouring is not just about gelato or a pint, but about the other, greater pleasures of company. Whether I knew it at the time or not, the gelato in Italy surely tasted better because I was out with my friend. The origin of the word 'companion,' from the Latin con (with) and pane (bread), holds the magic of this age-old insight: the enjoying of bread, of sustenance, with another person.
Why then do I not savour more regularly? Is it that, just like so many Canadians, I am dealing with professional demands, family health concerns and a social life scattered over mountains and oceans? Or is it something deeper?
After all, the Joy Diet requires but two components: openness to joy, and attention.
As to the first, I'll posit that many of us feel we need to suffer. Why else would fasting as a health technique and elimination diets take off? In the face of constant threats and uncertainty, e.g. economic instability, natural disasters and/or political fears, many of us have taken the route of sacrifice to rebalance our lives by being 'good.' We're yearning for some measure of control, but we're moving in the wrong direction. Blame it, if you wish, on our evolutionary psychology, which primes us to assuage danger before desire.
Are we trying to find a replacement for religious penance, to 'cleanse' ourselves, even while purporting to live in a secular spirit? In this modern vernacular, we have come to equate the trim body with being 'good.' It projects visual evidence of moral qualities like restraint (avoiding temptations), intelligence (I know what to choose), and privilege (hello plastic surgery, costly meds and personal trainers).
It is true that the opposite – a lack of restraint – is also on the rise today. The disinhibition displayed by U.S. President Donald Trump, as noted by columnist Ezra Klein, may suggest a broader cultural embrace of pleasure in these uncertain times. Many of us certainly take great pleasure in mocking those in power these days, perhaps also as a response to a perceived lack of control. But much like eating an entire bag of chips, this only helps us to feel good in the moment, and the flavour quickly dissipates.
The Joy Diet is about rejecting sacrifice and cheap thrills and instead diving into deep contentment that makes us feel fully alive. What does make us truly happy? And how do we get there?
In his 2011 book The Swerve, literary historian Stephen Greenblatt recounts a resurgence in popularity of the Roman philosopher Lucretius during the 1400s. This era, later known as the Renaissance, had a cultural backdrop eerily similar to our own: After centuries of plague and war, people were terrified of the future and bent on sacrificing body and mind, thinking that a certain degree of self-flagellation might earn them mercy from God. A 15th-century humanist and Vatican bureaucrat named Poggio Bracciolini summed up humanity's collective mood at the time as being 'terrified of future catastrophes and thrown into a continuous state of misery and anxiety … always panting for riches and never giving our souls or our bodies a moment's peace.' Sound familiar?
In 1417, it was Bracciolini who rediscovered a dusty manuscript by Lucretius titled On the Nature of Things, in which the author wrote that enjoyment is a natural and logical desire of our human condition. Far from the medieval tendency to place divine purification above all other human needs, Lucretius argued for bringing delight back to the table.
Fast-forward to the present day, as folks try to be virtuous by eliminating sugar, or skipping a happy hour to keep up their workout routine, or even signalling virtue by proclaiming how essentially bad they are in being born 'privileged.' Original (i.e. inherited) sin is alive and well.
Now, while we should give full-throttled support to actions that are geared toward creating a more just society, it is unsurprising that there is pushback against essentialist sin. Most people do not want to live in misery as an inescapable, eternal condition. And rightly not.
As human beings, we are made to seek joy and should allow ourselves to feel it. I propose that we reawaken Lucretius's key insight, and update it for our modern world.
A caveat: Lucretius did remind us that true joy is not just found in sensual pleasure, but in exchange with others. The Joy Diet insists on societal values: making friends, and living justly and magnanimously. Others extend joy to having a dialogue with the past through reading, and by remembering good times.
Where were you the last time you felt deep contentment? Sometimes it is difficult to pin down because we confuse joy with simple pleasures, often purchased and always fleeting. As has been widely noted, pain and (simple) pleasure are opposites, but pain and joy are not. Usually, both occur through dedication to causes outside ourselves, as Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama remind us in The Book of Joy. Joy is there to be had in the view from a mountain, or the contemplation of a snowfall seen from your window. We can experience joy by feeling relevant, whether by volunteering on a project in our community, or by nourishing our relationships. Yes, that includes listening to the minutiae of boring stories from your grandmother, or holding the hand of your romantic partner. And by savouring – not quaffing – wine.
Some of you are already feeling guilty reading this. Don't! A friend of mine reminded me that even people in the midst of war, suffering real, debilitating trauma, fall in love. Even people who are ill or dying can cherish laughter. Joy does not minimize the reality of suffering. Neither does it merely provide a temporary reprieve. It is, rather, the pulsating raison d'être of life.
In a recent conversation with activist and author Kazu Haga, we talked about joy from the perspective of long-term civic engagement. Societal transformation, whether in the context of historical events like the abolition of slavery, or contemporary issues of the day like climate action, takes time. And working for it needs endurance. The crash diet of outrage poured into one protest, or a year of them, will not cut it. We need a diet that promotes lifelong habits. Here, Mr. Haga recognizes the need to 'pendulate' between the joy of our everyday life and the efforts of activism to keep us going.
Robert Reich, former secretary of labour for Bill Clinton, wrote the day after the countrywide protests against Donald Trump in April that we must be careful not to burn out. He urged activists to take 'time out for your loved ones. Time out for play. Time out for joy. Time out to dance or sing. Time out to do absolutely nothing.'
If you are aching for change right now in the state of the world, there is no reason to feel bad about joy. It is a psychic necessity.
But it is not just guilt that is stopping us. It is dopamine.
In September, New York Times columnist David Brooks lamented that we are unhappy and lonely because we are easily distracted. We eschew art and even entertainment because they are too demanding. The convenience of our phones devours all our attention, creating a dopamine dependency that hooks us into further scrolling. Yet, while these dopamine hits are easy to come by, they actually end up leading us away from enjoyment.
Reclaiming joy requires us to reclaim our attention. In Stolen Focus, journalist Johann Hari emphasizes that attention is not a personal failing but a structural problem of our modern lives, wherein our devices, our work-creep workdays, and fast-food options, are designed to blur our choices.
The Joy Diet is a conscious effort – not to browbeat ourselves for our existence or our addictions (that's just more guilt), but to open our palates to what is truly delicious.
We need to put the phone away and focus on replacing it with something else. Just as Indiana Jones replaced that golden idol statue with a bag of sand in Raiders of the Lost Ark, our system needs to feel full. Finding something sumptuous – a spoonful of gelato, a leisurely chat, or a book to get lost in – is not a bad place to start to reset our happiness and our health.
In turn, that fulfilment may lead us to resilience in an uncertain world.