Can I stop telling you how to eat?

As I’ve recently catalogued (The End of Overeating) I have struggled with food and eating my whole life.  Many years ago, I discovered that I needed to avoid foods that contained conventional flour, sugar, dairy and most animal proteins, especially beef and chicken.  For a while, I became one of those people who would tell you all about how I ate, full of recommendations for how you should eat.  Unfortunately, the Youtube video below, “How to Become Gluten Intolerant,” hits very close to home:

I am still (imperfectly) eating (mostly) this way and it is still working for me.  But I am, largely, no longer telling other people that this is how I eat (unless they ask) or, more importantly, implying that this is how they should eat.  In fact, imagine this if you will, to the degree that I have stopped talking about it and started actually just eating this way, the health and fitness I always have sought has been more mine than ever before.

One thing that I have been told in this struggle, and am now starting to internalize, is that what I can eat could kill you and what you can eat could kill me.  There’s no one size fits all to food.  Some people’s bodies thrive on animal protein.  Some do not.  Some people do great on legumes.  Some do not.  Some people can just eat anything and everything their whole life and smoke and drink and live healthily into their nineties.  Others do not.  

My need for control and certainty in the universe, for rules I can understand, combined with the mirror effect, drives me to assume that what works for me will work for you and that you need me to help fix you.  You do not.  You are whole and complete the way you are.  You are a hero on your own life journey.

For this reason, I am drawn to plans of eating that are not one size fits all.  I like Eat Right for Your Blood Type because the plan is by blood type and they are all different.  But even that does not work for many people.  What DOES seem to be universal is that our beliefs drive our experience.  If I believe something works for me, it usually does.  So that’s another reason not to preach new food ideas.  I don’t have the right to mess with other people’s beliefs unless they are hurting me in some way.  

Obviously, the American diet’s dependency on meat, dairy and sugar does have a global effect on land use and the environment.  So there’s some argument that it all affects me.  But I still don’t need to tell you how or what to eat.  We can all invite ourselves to learn more about how the choices we make with food affect ourselves and each other.