You need a nutritional love diet. Don't put the junk stuff in

In the sharp and soulful words of Joanna Coles, editor, visionary, and chronicler of modern life, there lies a wisdom that stretches beyond food and into the realm of the spirit: “You need a nutritional love diet. Don’t put the junk stuff in your body — it’s not going to do you any good.” At first glance, this may seem a simple admonition against unhealthy eating. Yet beneath its practical tone is a deeper revelation — a teaching about self-worth, boundaries, and the kind of love we choose to allow into our lives. For what we feed our bodies is but a reflection of what we feed our hearts, and both require the same sacred care.

When Coles speaks of a nutritional love diet, she does not merely mean a regimen of greens and grains, but a discipline of the soul — a way of guarding what enters the temple of one’s being. She reminds us that just as junk food poisons the body slowly, so too does junk love corrode the spirit. Empty promises, shallow affections, toxic relationships — these are the processed sugars of the heart, sweet in the moment but hollow in substance. They leave us hungry still, weary and diminished. True love, like true nourishment, must be rich in essence, not in glitter. It must sustain, not deplete.

This teaching is not new. The ancients, too, understood that the health of the soul depended on the purity of what it consumed. The philosopher Epictetus warned, “What we feed the mind, the mind becomes.” And so it is with love. If we feast only on flattery and illusion, we grow weak in character; if we nourish ourselves with respect, honesty, and kindness, we grow strong in peace. The nutritional love diet is thus not a call for austerity, but for awareness — to discern between what delights us and what sustains us, between the fleeting and the eternal.

Consider the story of Cleopatra, queen of Egypt, whose charm and beauty were legendary, yet whose life was marked by passions that burned too brightly. She sought love as conquest, indulgence as nourishment, but each encounter — with Caesar, with Antony — consumed more of her than it gave. Her heart, though grand, fed on excess, and her end came as swiftly as a flame denied oxygen. She reminds us that to live on junk love — whether it be flattery, lust, or self-deception — is to live on air. It dazzles, but it does not endure.

Joanna Coles, in her worldly wisdom, calls us back to the simple truths that modern life has dressed in complication: that self-love is not vanity, but vigilance; that caring for the heart begins with choosing what to allow near it. Just as a wise person studies the ingredients before eating, so too must we study the intentions of those who offer affection. Ask not how love makes you feel in a fleeting moment, but how it nourishes you in the long night. Love, like food, must leave the soul stronger, not sicker.

There is also power in her metaphor of junk. For junk, whether of body or heart, is easy — quick, cheap, and addictive. It tempts us because it asks nothing of us but our attention. Yet what is easily consumed is easily forgotten. The path of true nourishment — physical or emotional — requires patience, discipline, and the courage to wait for what is real. The ancients called this temperance, the virtue of balance. To follow a nutritional love diet is to live with reverence — to know your worth and to refuse what is beneath it.

So let this be the teaching: Guard what you consume, both in flesh and in feeling. Feed your body with purity, and your heart with truth. Avoid the junk that flatters the senses but starves the soul. Seek instead love that strengthens, challenges, and uplifts you — love that fills your life not with noise, but with music. Choose friends and lovers as you would choose food for your body: with awareness, gratitude, and respect for what is sacred in you.

For in the end, Joanna Coles reminds us that life itself is a feast, and we are the keepers of our own tables. What we invite into ourselves — through words, touch, food, and feeling — shapes who we become. If we fill our days with the empty and the artificial, we will live empty and artificial lives. But if we feed our souls with love that is honest, nourishing, and kind, we will grow luminous, enduring, and whole. Let this be your practice: a diet of love, clean and true, that nourishes not only the body, but the very soul that moves within it.