Raw Food

Raw food diets are the new big thing, articles are popping up everywhere breathlessly reporting the advent of a new age.  I've avoided reading numerous blogs, ads disguised as blogs and first person accounts of the wondrous results one can achieve by simply not cooking.

Sigh.

I opened a sandwich shop during the height of the Atkins craze, everyone told me it wouldn't work, that evil bread was over, done and not ever returning.  It was a difficult thing those first few months to hold my tongue, but I knew that bread would never be 'over'.

Atkins was a fad, raw food is a fad and fads don't last.  Let me tell you what does last: human nature.  It's human nature to not want to eat less than tasty food at every meal every day.   It's human nature to invent a useless product in order to make money and it's human nature to lunge at every shiny new thing dangled before us.

Am I making us look shallow and dumb?  More human nature for you.

There is no miracle diet, there is nothing new under the sun.  Including raw food.  This too will pass, probably fairly quickly because there is just no such thing as an uncooked creme brulee.  But a few charlatans will amass great wealth because of it anyway, those who got their cookbooks in under the wire or have an amazing juicer for you to purchase.

Let me remind you that my definition of a charlatan is someone who sells you a lifestyle choice instead of food.  Food is not your life people, it is the fuel that sustains your life, and giving food all the power over how you live is a fool's errand.

Fad diets are just another way for people to relinquish responsibility for their own lives.  I see you bristling out there, go ahead and raise those hackles, I'm more than happy to duke this out with you.  But you hide behind these diets as though a fairy tale ending waits on the other side, because you will finally be happy once those ten pounds are gone.

As if.  Fat people and thin people are unhappy in equal, self-loathing has no calories or fat does it?  True happy doesn't need or want a fad diet, true happy understands balance so please quit hiding from the happy.

True happiness and peace start on the inside, they start with you not hating on yourself for having a doughnut.    Food is not the villain, it's not the enemy and it's not your friend.  Food is fuel, plain and simple; it only has the power you give.

I had weight issues for most of my life so I'm not unsympathetic to those who still do.  But I have been neither fat nor thin for a while now, I reside in that happy medium place and rarely think about my weight at all.  Would you like to know my secret?  Happy to tell you and I would be deliriously happy if everyone followed this simple diet plan.

Approach yourself in the mirror three times daily and say, "You are fine just the way you are, you are a beautiful person and I really like you."

In ten days, you just won't care about diets anymore.