an approach to nutrition

[Guest guest]

I don't currently share the focus on precision in diet, though I

understand that the needs of competitive athletes, for example, are

different from mine. For most of us, I don't think eating needs to be

so complicated, and for me, it's counterproductive to be obsessed with

getting it all perfect somehow. Diet can become a sort of religion, a

dogma that gives rise to infighting over the truth about the path to

perfect health and washboard abs.

One of the sources of information that helped to wean me

intellectually from vegetarianism or any other dietary -ism was the

Beyond Vegetarian site, www.beyondveg.com, I believe. It's very

science and research-oriented, run by both vegetarians and ex-

vegetarians who seek to present the best scientific evidence out

there. It's a strictly monitored site; not just anybody can add

articles to it. I read quite a bit of it a few years ago, and it

really got me thinking about how we sometimes become obsessed with

dietary purity and it can lead to, or perhaps reflect, a generalized

rigidity about life. I realized that was what I had intended to leave

behind in other areas of my life, and getting caught up in low fat vs

low carb, or vegetarian vs atkins, or fruitarian, whatever, was just a

waste of bandwidth. But I still didn't have all the answers I needed.

I was never good at restricting my diet rigidly, though I definitely

have made major positive changes over time.

I ran a Marathon in May 2003 and trained according to the run/walk

method, but the group I trained with bought into the runners-must-fuel-

with-carbs dogma that is still so dominant. I read trainers (ultra-

marathoner Stu Mittleton ? and his protege whose name I've forgotten)

who were anti-sugar and this appealed to me, but I wasn't sure enough

to stick with that philosophy completely. All along I've read

everything I could get my hands on about nutrition. Some of Atkins'

stuff is really good (the Vita-Nutrient Solution) but I just had a

hard time sticking with his approach (and I'm not talking about his 2-

week high-meat induction diet, which most people think is all he

advocated). During my marathon training I found Ross's work (The

Mood Cure, The Diet Cure) and went to her clinic for awhile but I

didn't have a car and it was expensive and hard to get there and it

was all in all too much for me at the time. Ross had warned me that

the marathon training was exacerbating adrenal stress that I could ill

afford, and she was right, but I did it anyway. After somewhat

recovering from the marathon (which put me off running pretty much) I

eventually got seriously into cycling, and repeated the whole

overtraining routine and ended up with fairly severe adrenal burnout.

Some time over the next few months, as best as I can remember, I

stumbled upon Nourishing Traditions and Weston A. Price. I haven't yet

read Nutrition and Physical Degeneration all the way through, but I

read part and I read Ron Schmid's Traditional Foods Are Your Best

Medicine, which aptly summarizes Price's work. I read Wise Traditions

regularly and have made heavy use of free articles on the WAPF

website. Over the past 5 years or so I've been trying to integrate

Price's principles into my life, with quite a bit of success. I won't

go into my own issues but suffice it to say I am basically very

healthy, with a few tricky and puzzling syndromes that are partly why

I delved into nutrition books from a young age.

I also felt from a young age (influenced by Diet for a Small Planet no

doubt) that diet was not a solitary issue; it had to make sense from a

societal and environmental standpoint. Again, it never made sense to

me that everyone had to eat exactly the same thing. I've lived and

travelled abroad fairly extensively, and there is so much variety in

human dietary habits, it would be absurd to think it could all be

reduced to the South Beach Diet or Zone diet or something. That's part

of the WAP appeal to me; it's derived from what was already out there,

working to build health, and not thought up in a lab or a publicist's

office.

-Jeanmarie