As we choose our foods every day, we have a lot of thoughts intertwined with those choices. Most people that I see everyday in my practice come in with ideas about what’s healthy and what’s not, but at the same time, they feel completely confused. They basically don’t have a clue what’s good for them and what’s not. Unfortunately, this seems to be happening as a result of the overload of information available to us. We forget what we inherently know about how to feed ourselves and end up following food trends.
One diet book after the next hits the shelves in bookstores, adding yet another layer of mystery about what to do, how to lose weight, what not to eat, and what to eat more of because it has been found to be a Super Food. Next, we have to add new research into the mix. This is what most “diet gurus” latch onto when they create yet another fad diet. However, often these studies have been paid for by companies looking for a health claim to use for their advertising campaign. The milk ads are a good example of this. Such studies are very one-sided in their viewpoint.
This is why those campaigns fail to truly inform us. They only give us part of the story and forget that as people, we are complex, integrated beings and not a mathematical calculation based on “all else being equal.” This is never true in life. That’s also one of the reasons why diet plans fail in my opinion. They don’t take the whole into consideration.
And what is this “whole?” It’s YOU—who you are, how you live your life, and how your emotions play into your food choices. A diet plan does not consider that our bodies need different food depending on the weather, the activities we’re engaged in on that particular day, and the amount of stress we’re facing.
We struggle through “being on a diet” because diets are designed for conditions of “all else being equal,” and for that matter, all people being equal too. Diets are based on the biochemistry of foods but they fail to take LIFE into consideration. They also tend to stop us from taking our emotions into consideration and expect us all to have a straightjacket in our wardrobe to wear whenever life gets in the way of our willpower.
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