1. The Strawberry Lesson: A Simple Thing That Explains Almost Everything
Let's start simply. With a berry. Dr. Saulitis often talks about food not in the language of dietetics, but in the language of relationships. Strawberries are a good example precisely because they are not harmful or dangerous in themselves. The problem isn't the berry. The problem is how we handle it.
You can eat a few strawberries — and feel pleasure, freshness, lightness. Or you can eat them with cream, with sugar, then with cake on top — and an hour later feel not lightness but a mood crash, fatigue, irritation. Same berry. Different outcome. The difference lies in the combination, the quantity, the context, and in why you're eating it in the first place.
"It has to be in combination."
This phrase sounds almost incidental, said in passing about strawberries, but it's actually the key to the whole theme of balance. No single food, no single pleasure, no single action is good or bad in itself. It becomes good or bad depending on what it's combined with, how much of it appears in your life, and whether you're listening to what happens afterward.
The mechanism here is fairly simple once you strip away the complicated language of endocrinology and metabolism. The body doesn't react to a single event but to the whole picture: what came before, what's happening now, what comes after. A sharp spike in pleasure — whether from sugar, the adrenaline of meeting someone new, or a dose of news on your phone — almost always drags an equally sharp crash behind it. And in that crash, a person often goes looking for another spike. Strawberries plus cream plus cake isn't really about strawberries. It's about trying to hold onto a feeling that is, by its nature, temporary.
You see this constantly in life, far beyond food. A person finds something that genuinely brings them joy — a new hobby, a relationship, an idea, a project. And instead of letting it take its natural place, they start overloading it: more, more often, more intensely. What was once a source of lightness becomes a source of exhaustion. Not because the thing itself is bad, but because the combination disappeared, the measure disappeared, the attention to what the body is responding with disappeared.
The doctor says: every person needs to work out their own rhythm — their own "food cycle," if we're talking about eating, but this applies to any area of life. There's no universal recipe for how much strawberry is okay, with what, or when. Some people can eat a whole bucket of cherries without consequences, and some only need a handful before mood swings begin. The difference isn't willpower. The difference is the individual tuning of the organism — something you need to actually get to know, not guess at from someone else's rules.
The practical step for today is simple: choose one thing you genuinely enjoy — food, an activity, a conversation — and the next time you bring it into your day, don't ask yourself "is this allowed or not," but rather "in what combination, in what quantity, with what intention." Try, just once, to consciously stop at the point where you'd usually say "and a bit more, and a bit more," and simply observe how your body feels an hour later. This isn't a test of discipline. It's the beginning of a conversation with your own body — a conversation many people have never had.