Keep Your Eye on the Prize(s)
The prizes are the seven success results everybody wants, and the desire to achieve them will drive
your food choices and many of your lifestyle behaviors.
There are hundreds of diet doctors and gurus who are ready and waiting to sway you back into
eating a nutrient-poor, food-addiction-based eating style. Such diets may be focused on weight
loss-only, or promise single-target outcomes (“spot reducing,” belly fat cures and the like), or
suggest healthier eating styles by using words like organic, farm fresh, grass fed, raw, and so on.
That’s how the industry works. Some of those facets of a healthy diet are worthy or laudable
factors to consider (organically produced food, for instance) but in itself is not a complete approach.
Distortions are common in the field of nutrition. You would be hard pressed to find a field of study
and an industry that is more subjective, personally biased, full of agendas and dominated by simple-
minded, single-variable ideas. Much of what the public continues to learn is based on what some
health guru or other tells them—and frankly, most gurus in the field of nutrition are half-baked and
aren’t telling you the whole story.
Gurus and authors themselves don’t always have a clear picture as to why they are successful. They
usually focus on some particular attribute of eating that has enabled them to lose weight and get
healthier and turn it into a dietary philosophy, often at the expense of the bigger nutritional picture.
Rarely is a full spectrum of understanding promoted.
Sometimes it is the guru’s own genetics that gave them an edge at an early age, and it’s not even the
diet itself that is effective. Many other diets only work short-term for weight loss because they are
calorie-restrictive, even though that’s not the element that the diet focuses on for marketing. Upon
close examination, however, the caloric restriction (often too restricted) is the only reason weight
loss occurred—not the hyper focused irrelevant gimmick used to differentiate the diet. Nutrition
and health were never the goal of these diets, and so they aren’t the result either.
People in your life, along with diet gurus, may attempt to capitalize on any first feelings of
discomfort or confusion you may have as you make the switch. Don’t let that happen. Others may
not know as much or much more than you do about nutrient-rich healthy eating. This is new ground.
Stay strong and confident. You have every reason to.
Thousands have traveled the path to nutrient-rich healthy eating before you, including me, and we
have discovered that when you allow your body to heal, get its needs met, and avoid being
overwhelmed by what it doesn’t need from food, it will function and perform well. And you’ll feel
good too, and enjoy food more.