Playing With Your Food: Making Sense of Diets
Is Diet a Dirty Word?
Diets and diet books are big business. More diet books are coming out every day, each one purportedly laying out the best eating plan. Titles follow the trend of society toward ever quicker-fixes; we used to have 30 or 40 day diet plans, now we’re down to days and minutes. Though we may shake our heads at some of the titles, they simply reflect our thinking; we want answers.
When we have a health problem or want to lose weight, it’s easy to fall into the pattern of looking outside of ourselves for the solution. Maybe a friend of ours goes on a new diet and tells us how wonderful it is, so we decide to try it. We hear about a new diet on TV that promises to give us our life back, so we buy the book. We try following it for some time, then slip back into our usual patterns, until the next idea comes along. Through all of this, what we eat feels like serious business. Whatever our reason for trying a different way of eating, a lot seems to be at stake with our choices.
I’ve tried different diets for health reasons. I’ve been a vegetarian and a chickenetarian (poultry but no red meat). I’ve tried Macrobiotics (briefly) and Ayurvedics. I’ve followed Sally Fallon’s principles in Nourishing Traditions and Donna Gates’ principles in Body Ecology. Each time, I’ve hoped that this approach will hold the answer; maybe this one will help me heal.
To make matters worse, if we decide to learn more, we run into the morass of conflicting dietary and nutritional information. Should we eat no carbohydrates or lots of carbohydrates? Is meat the original superfood or something we should avoid altogether? Is dairy good or bad for us? Should we cook our food or eat it raw? It is not difficult to find diets that come down, emphatically so, on either side. The more we try to learn, the more confusing it all becomes.
How can we play with the wealth of conflicting dietary information and change our thinking about nutrition from serious business to creative joy?
Create Your Own Diet!
Many of the hundreds of diet books were written by people who figured out what worked for them, and then decided it was the best thing for everyone else and wrote a book on it. But we aren’t all the same. So why shouldn’t you have your own diet?
When we can think about diets in terms of underlying principles and apply those principles to our own individual situation, we can bypass the problematic focus on what we “should” or “should not” be eating and create a diet that is exactly right for our individual physiology and psychology. Most diets can be broken down into their basic principles. Sometimes these principles relate to types of food to eat or not eat, such as vegan or vegetarian. Some principles have to do with the quantity of food or the ratio between the macronutrients of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. Some principles are more lifestyle related. Diets might focus mostly on one or two of these or combine different types of principles.
For example, here is a list of principles:
Consuming food in its raw and natural state for the enzymes that it contains (living foods, raw food)
Eating what can be harvested without killing any part of a plant/animal (fruitarian)
Avoiding processed foods (various)
Eating locally grown foods (various)
Eating foods grown organically, without chemical fertilizers/herbicides (various)
Eating whole foods (various)
Eating to maintain balance: eating foods that are balancing, with highly yin or yang foods used more sparingly (macrobiotic)
Eating and cooking in alignment with the seasons (3 season)
Eating and cooking in harmony with your climate
Eating smaller meals more frequently
Selecting a diet that fits your constitution (blood type, ayurvedic, ancestry, genotype)
Not consuming animal products, or only consuming animal products that take into account the environment and the health/welfare of the animal
From this list (or make up your own), create your own dietary principles plan: what are the five top principles that you already follow in your diet, or that you would like to shift your diet to follow more closely?
After picking your top principles, list them out and see if you can come up with a name for your diet. Perhaps a common theme will suggest a name to you, or you can see if the first letter of each principle will form an acronym. (Hopefully you will be luckier than I was; when I did this exercise, the only acronym I could come up with from my principles was FLABS, which is perhaps not the best name for a diet!)
Tuning in to Body Wisdom
You might still be wondering how to know what principles are right for you, and find yourself wanting to look outside of yourself for the answers. But no one else is living in your body; you must be your own expert when it comes to what works for you. You might consider any diets you have been on in the past, and what you learned from them. For example, I learned from trying to be vegetarian that it is not the best diet for me to follow; without some good quality animal protein in my diet I feel less grounded and focused.
Choosing principles to follow can be a very cognitive process, and we also want to make sure to take into account the knowledge and wisdom of our body. Learning to listen to how food affects you is a long-term process, but one that will serve you forever. If you are not as aware as you would like to be about how different foods and drinks impact you, try tracking how you feel after you eat for some time. Keep a food diary, where you write down what you eat and drink at a meal, and then how you feel immediately afterwards and a few hours later. It’s best to do this solidly for a week or two so you can really get a sense of what is going on. You might be surprised at what you find. The more you go into the process, the subtler your awareness can become. You will naturally stop looking outside of yourself for the answers, because you will already know them from within.
Of course, there is still a place for all the nutritional research, just as there is for getting advice from someone knowledgeable. Particularly if you have a health concern, you want to ensure that you are making dietary choices that will support you, so please discuss any changes with your medical professional. It can also be helpful to have support along this journey, whether from a health coach or a friend who accompanies you along the way.
When we can shift from looking for the next diet book to inquiring into what dietary principles we want to follow and how the food we eat affects us, we can create a playful exploration that leads us into ever increasing self-knowledge. Instead of trying to follow the diet that is right for someone else, you can create your own diet, the one that is just right for you.