Like my primary business, the health, diet, and fitness industries spawn a LOT competing shamans preaching a lot of competing creeds.
My own considered (though possibly
completely incorrect) opinion as to why is simple: nutritionism. At
the point at which we let “experts” turn simple food into a complex bundle of
good and bad carbs, fats, amino acids, and micro-nutrients that none of us have
ever seen, we needed other experts to tell us what combinations of those things
we ‘need’ to [live longer, live healthier, lose weight, gain muscle, maintain
our brains…].
And whenever something is—or even
seems—more complex than we can easily understand, we need people who have been
imbued with the sacred knowledge necessary to guide us to the correct
principals for a wholly successful life, word play intentional. It’s this
combination of confusion on our parts over the apparent complexity of the path
to health and the willingness of some of our peers to stand up and
claim—through education, research, or, in some cases, simple overwhelming self-confidence
not backed by any rational evidence—that thinking creates a warm, welcoming
environment for the proliferation of shamans. (Yes, that plural bothers me, too,
but Wikepedia assures me that while shamasal is the
correct pluralization in the original language, shamans is the universally
accepted plural in English. Seems like it should be shaMEN. Or maybe
shapeople.)
In my primary business, they’re
called gurus, and while each is (apparently) certain that you MUST follow their
system in order to achieve success, they are typically NOT insistent that you
become a single-minded devotee who doesn’t also invest money and energy in
other studying other paths. I find very few people who ONLY follow so-and-so,
or who are slavishly devoted to the teachings of such-and-such.
But that’s not the case with the
diet/fitness shamans. In the world of diet and exercise plans, there’s an
industry-wide effort to convince us that the only effective, fast, healthy,
sustainable way to lose weight/get buff/roll back the clock is THEIR way, and
that we must adhere to the holy scriptures of that sect to a T, or we’re doomed
to the life we’re already unhappy with, forever.
And every single one of us who’s
struggled with our weight, or wanted to be in better shape than we are, has, at
some point or another, become not just a disciple but an apostle for one of
these shamans. An obnoxious, obsessed,
unable-to-stop-prosthelytizing-even-as-we-see-our-friends-eyes-glazing-over
devotee of a religion the tenets of which involve what it is and isn’t OK to
put in our mouths.
I can’t tell you how many times
I’ve done this. Anyone who’s known me for more than 15 years or so has heard me
insist that they probably weren’t eating correctly if they weren’t doing:
- Paleo
- Sugar-busters
- Atkins
- Juicing
- HMR (that’s one of those self-abusive all-liquid diets that peels the weight off of you like, well, like you were starving yourself on 800 calories a day for 2 months, and yes, I did it.)
Yep, while I was doing those
things, it wasn’t good enough to just be doing them. I had to preach to everyone
around me how great they were, how awesome the results, how provably poisonous
sugar/pasta/dairy/ legumes/solid food are to the body and how scientifically
positive bacon (Atkins)/grass-fed meat (Paleo)/fruits and vegetables, but only
when processed down to their constituent molecules (Juicing)/a box of
unpronounceable liquid chemicals carefully balanced to keep me from dying of
malnutrition while consuming a starvation-level diet (HMR) are.
So I totally get why, since I
started this project 7 days ago, I have literally been emailed/PMed/
called/texted more than a dozen times by people helpfully sharing which
diet/supplement/nutritional system that I can also make money by telling my
friends about is working really well for them. Really, I understand that you’re
honestly trying to help, and I appreciate it.
Everything I’ve observed about the
way people act tells me that that human beings are wired to want to find a set
of rules to follow that are clear, relatively simple to understand, and result
in spiritual/financial/personal/relationship/weight loss success. I myself am
on a seemingly-endless search for the perfect “system” for everything from time
management to de-cluttering to, yes, health and fitness.
Yes, I ideally want it to be
plug-and-play or, as it’s often called in my primary business, “turn key” or
“done for you”. I want a pill that fixes it. All of it. Instantly. Just like
everyone else.
And despite my incessant and very loud grieving
over the loss of ‘the work ethic’ in America, I think that this hardwired
desire to find an easy way to do everything has served humanity pretty well
over the eons. It brought us the lever (which I’m convinced was invented by a
woman who was sick of waiting for her mate to get home and move the rock).
Because of it, we have the engine. And the vacuum cleaner. And rule of law. And
tiny, portable dogs. And indoor plumbing.
But there are other ways in which
it has done us very wrong, and that’s when we fool ourselves into believing
that complex systems should be able to be reduced to a set of simple rules that
explain and solve everything. We’ve seen the hugely negative outcomes of that
mistake in our government (which constantly passes new laws to deal with the
consequences of previous laws that were meant to “fix” problems as complex as
poverty, greed, and dealing with people who didn’t mow their lawns often
enough); in our institutions of higher learning (where the very real problems
of sexual assault, suicide, and bullying have been reduced to a set of rules
that criminalizes thought and speech and make heroes of those who violently
suppress wrongthink), personal finance (where companies pretty consistently sell
the idea that they have a push-button system for massive financial success at
prices that would literally bankrupt the average person) and, of course, our
health and diets.
But one of the things I’m
consciously attempting to reject in this 100 days is falling (back) into the (weirdly
attractive) mindset that if I just eat certain things and avoid other certain
things like the plague, I’ll get what I want (which is, again, more the ability
to survive the zombie invasion than it is my 20 year-old body back). A food
sect is appealing—I should know, I’ve been a member of many—but I suspect that
the entire thought process around “All I have to do is find the RIGHT [diet,
fitness plan, time management software] and it will all resolve itself” is just
incorrect.
My intention, at least for the
next 93 days, is avoid all shamans and all nutritiono-religious texts, and to
do that hard thing that everyone KNOWS works: eat less and move more. To not
think of having a bite of desert as “cheating”, but as, you know, eating like a
normal person (Not like a normal ME, who would never stop at a BITE of desert,
but like what I imagine a normal person would do).
In other words, to not be rigid
about being healthy. Because that rigidity is satisfying on the inside (“I’m
following the holy scripture! I’m better than everyone else! I’m winning!) and
ugly on the outside (“Um, are you really going to eat that? You know that it’s
destroying your Islets of Langerhans, right?”) (I can’t tell you how impressed
I am with myself for pulling THAT little leftover from human anatomy class out
of my…pancreas).
And rigidity is, at least for me,
impossible to maintain for very long, EVEN WHEN IT WORKS. I did lose weight on
every one of those diets. The last time I was at my “ideal” weight, it was
thanks to drinking 5 means a day out of a box for almost 2 months. But none of
those sets of rules ended up being sustainable for me, so what I’m trying now
is exercising, as Oscar Wilde and a bunch of people before him said,
“Moderation in all things, including moderation”.
I worry, though, about my
seemingly-sensible approach becoming its own form of rigidity as I move through
the world.
I find myself wanting to mention
it, proselytize about it, correct others as to their approach.
I got the “Good lord, what was
that???” look twice yesterday from friends that I felt obligated to inform that
they were letting their Mind Monkey control their thoughts.
I’ve had two rather aggressive
debates with my ADD smartboy this week, one about whether happiness is possible
without success and one about whether thoughts exist separately from “me”, and
in both cases, I was very anxious to prove that I was right and he was wrong,
even though those are more philosophical than scientific theories. But to be
fair, he started it.
Over a carb-free dinner that I
was, rather hypocritically, participating in, I told that overweight friend who
gives me endless fitness advice that he was falling for nutritionism, and then I
gave him a 30 minute class on nutritionism.
I find myself constantly beating
back the urge to enlighten others about what would make their health better—and
I, myself, have only completed SEVEN SHORT DAYS of my project, and done so
pretty imperfectly.
Oh, and did I mention that I’m publicly
blogging every thought I have, and having a LOT of thoughts, about my health?
I think I know what this is: it’s
decades of being a member of various diet cults and listening to others who’ve
done the same, adding a layer of rigidity and fanaticism to what’s meant to be
an experiment in the opposite. Well, plus, I’m a control freak who wants other
people to do what I think is right for them, not what they think is right for
them, but that’s a problem for another day (and probably a degreed psychiatric
professional).
I don’t think that being rigid, or
attached to whether anyone agrees with me or does what I do or even bothers to
read about it, is helpful to my efforts. In fact, I suspect it’s probably quite
the opposite. So I’m going to do something that’s hard for me, and probably
hard for everyone who’s trying to stay a course that’s new and different and
high-stakes: relax. I can do what I need to do without convincing others to
like it. I can accept that other people’s food religions are just as valid as
mine without worrying about moral relativism or being sentenced to food Hades.
If I can let go of the impulse to
convince, maybe I can let go of the impulse to do other things, like eat the
whole cupcake. If I can relax about “the rules”, maybe I can relax about
self-flagellation when I “break” them. If I can let up on other people, maybe I
can let up on myself. If I can just enjoy the process of feeling incrementally better
every day instead of making success about being right or reaching the final,
end goal, maybe I can do the same in life.
That would be cool.
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