Some of us have good relationships with food, and others bad ones. There are certain foods some of us avoid at all costs because of the perception they are bad for us, and then there are some foods that are praised as being the fountain of youth and you cannot eat enough of it (even though it tastes blahhh!!!).
Some diets call for us to stay away from certain foods entirely. Beware!!! Danger!!! These foods will cause this (usually the c word), these foods lead to this. It becomes very difficult in deciding what is healthy, what is unhealthy. I begin to question everything I eat. Sometimes to the point of stressing myself out (which is apparently is not good for me either). I also began avoiding entire food groups all together. Not suprisingly the weight began to fly off. I went from 230lbs down to 170lbs.
I am not afraid to admit I was once an avid Atkins dieter, I jumped from this kind of diet to a Paleo diet, to now I do not even know what kind of diet I am on. It somewhere between confussion and a mix of Paleo and Atkins. The point is whatever diet you choose to be on it all has to do with moderation and natural whole foods. There is no diet I am aware of that states, eat processed foods (hotdogs, packaged meats, canned veggies). When you begin looking for a diet that best suits you it is important that you begin looking at the similarities between other diets, many of them share the same similarities. While the types of foods that you moderate more closely (not avoid) change slightly, most of the time it comes down to learning moderation. The hard part is not eating the foods you can eat on the diet you choose, it is moderating the foods that are supposed to be limited on your diet.
When I was doing the Atkins diet I always thought it meant avoidance. When I switched to Paleo, again I practiced avoidance. You have to avoid these foods because they are not good for you! That is the message I was getting from anyone who was on the diet or any of the countless articles I was reading. While I lost weight years later I always gained the weight back. Why was this? I never actually learned moderation, I learned avoidance.
This got me to thinking, if I am going to salvage my relationship with food, and myself, how is avoidance going to help me solve this problem? If me and my wife have a fight, if I say nothing and go sulk off to some safe place to avoid the fight, the problem does not go away, it just builds and builds. It builds and builds until one day she just gets fed up with me and stops communicating with me. We grow further and further apart and we never understand eachother. This is exactly how our relationship with food is. I never could understand food because I was constantly avoiding certain foods.
It is not the diets that led me to avoid things, it is how I treated my relationship with food, and outside of food, that led me to read the diets as avoid these things. As I have grown through the years I am more confrontational with my relationships. Avoidance is not the answer I wanted to seek but it was the answer I found, a poor one if I must say.
So what is my diet today? It is hard to say really. I like to try a lot of things, I guess you can say it is balanced. It has some ideas I learned on the Atkins diet, some on the paleo, and some of my own personal tastes. I do not neccesarily avoid anything but I moderate certain food groups. That is what dieting is really about. It is about moderation and learning moderation. It is not about losing weight, it is not about avoidance. It is about building your relationship with food, understanding food and confronting your demons with food. It takes willpower, endurance, strength. It will eventually lead to an understanding of yourself and your body.
I leave you with this.
"Your mind is not a cage, it is a garden. And it requires cultivating." -Libba Bray
