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If you’re breathing, it’s assumed you’ve been exposed to bad diet advice.
Growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, I lived through what some consider the peak of ‘crazy diet advice.’ From cabbage soup to grapefruit diets and liquid fasts, the ’90s were anything short of one wild idea to the next that might help someone achieve their desired outcomes.
Bad diet advice didn’t just emerge in the last few decades; history proves it has been circulating throughout different millenniums. It’s part of our history and still part of our culture.
Yet, under the surface, there is more to dieting than meets the eye. It may feel like an approach to reach a better destination, whether through weight loss or another metric, but dieting creates a sense of safety, no matter how artificial it may be.
It feels strange to combine dieting and safety—even contradictory. But if you dig deeper, you’ll find that people seek diets to create order in what feels chaotic or dysregulated. They seek a system that provides safety when they don’t feel safe.
Safety is a human need (not a wish), and diets provide just enough safety to keep people needing them.
In the podcast, I share a shift in understanding diet culture. I also share where it’s led us astray and how to use it to better your life. Bad diet advice is only bad because we misunderstand what we need. This is different from your average conversation about bad diet advice. It’s deeper and yet more profound.
Listen to the podcast to understand the full story.
Diets showcase your need for safety.
One of the greatest drivers of human behavior is the need for safety. Unconsciously and consciously, you take in information from your environment to determine your sense of safety. This information is responsible (at least partially) for how your biology responds, including the release of neurotransmitters that alter your mind.
However, it’s important to note that how you perceive that information determines what you do with it. Safety is just as much a perception as it is a reality. In many cases, this makes you a master of your own misery.
When it comes to health and the endless health propaganda that induces fear, it’s easy to feel unhealthy, which relates to feeling unsafe. The chaos of your internal enviornment leaves you running toward the opposite – systems, rules, and control.
Your lack of safety will make you crave or even cling to a diet because a diet signifies order, and order is safe.
Unfortunately, the path to achieving order often works against your biology. It can leave you more dysregulated and unsafe, leading to more extreme measures to find it. In the world of dieting, this creates the yo-yo phenomenon, which is the very reason you can’t leave the dieting world even if it has never worked.
You don’t necessarily believe in dieting but need what it brings.
The reason diets don’t work is not what you think.
The fascination with the dieting world and the 61 billion dollars we spend a year within it should be proof enough to establish how important the need for safety is, especially learning how to create it for yourself.
Deep down, most people are looking for inner stability, regulation, and a sense of control more than hoping to change how they look. When things feel uncontrolled or chaotic, whether in your life or eating patterns, it’s easy to turn to what might help it, which is often a new system or plan.
Unfortunately, we know these systems rarely work. One, because it leaves you hating your body or at least believing it is the problem. Two, it pushes your body to the extreme, in time headlining the lack of safety.
The reason diets don’t work is not that they don’t have great ideas or a solid basis for supporting your body, but it’s often the extreme nature. It’s how they push your body beyond its homeostatic balance, creating dysregulation and, thus, a lack of safety.
Your Need For Balance
As mentioned, in health, your greatest need is safety and energy. Both of those are determined based on the homeostatic principles of the body. Homeostasis is the process by which you maintain a stable internal enviornment to function properly, regardless of your external enviornment.
It’s the place of resiliency where you are relatively unaffected by life, allowing you to live fully.
Homeostasis comes back to balance.
The tricky part is that balance is often associated with maintenance. It will keep you stable where you are, but that doesn’t tell you how to change.
The question should not be, ‘What diet will work?’ but, ‘How do I create change without forcing my body into patterns of unsafety?‘ Honestly, this is not as complicated as we’ve made it.
The secret is learning the push and pull of life. It recognizes the movement, and the flow of health is not a stagnant place or perfecting the plan. It’s acknowledging that your body is constantly in motion, and the best way to support it is to work with it in both a push and pull form.
The difference between pushing and pulling:
Pushing refers to stressing the body, which is the place of change. Pushing the body could mean working out, doing a hard project, moving more, changing your diet slightly, fasting, etc.
Pulling the body is the process of resting and refeeding. It’s filling to help support what you lost while pushing.
It’s not that one state is better than the other, but both are needed for change. You need to push yourself, and you need to rest. Problems arise when you stay stuck on one end of the spectrum for prolonged periods.
As Newton’s third law of motion states, there is an equal and opposite reaction for every reaction. If you push yourself too far and too long in one direction, you will always fall back to the opposite extreme.
You can’t stop it. It’s a law of life. If you try to fight it, you will lose.
Instead, there is a better way. Use what you know based on what diets are presenting to create an internal balance balance. Your body was designed to work, but it needs the support to do so. Stop missing both sides of the equation because you’re living too far to one extreme.
Health is about building a foundation of healthy disciplines that offer both the push and the pull.
You need healthy discipline.
Healthy disciplines are the daily actions that challenge and nourish your body. They’re built from the understanding that a basic foundation for living well exists. Building the foundation gives you more flexibility and resiliency to live in a million different ways—living life without being affected by life.
Health isn’t a package. It’s not a size, a metric, or a box. It’s personal, and while that seems complicated, it offers immense freedom. It is the freedom to build something you love (because you won’t stick with it if you don’t like it) and the freedom to change and move with life. It’s the freedom to keep making changes that make health more exciting.
Don’t complicate it, but build a few healthy disciplines that keep you grounded and provide the structure that supports your safety.
The basic foundations of health include practices of nourishment. I’ve compiled a list of these healthy foundations in my health snowball. Start at step one and keep building healthy disciplines. When you have the discipline, you don’t have to choose. You just act. In time, that creates the desired outcomes you want from health.
Learn the secrets of living more self-disciplined here.
It takes energy to build anything! Do you have enough?
Energy produces structure. You can’t change if you don’t have the energy to change. But energy requires movement. You have to do something to feel energized.
How much energy are you working with? Take the quiz to find out.
Inside, I give you three life-changing (free) strategies to create more energy instantly.
Health doesn’t have to be complicated (Don’t let bad diet advice win).
Health Made Simple walks you through every structure and function of the body you need to know to live your best self. If you’re functioning below optimal levels – just barely getting through the day and chugging caffeine as if your life depends on it – Health Made Simple can help.
It’s a health course void of fear and full of just enough structure to help you create change, but so much so that it becomes its own stumbling block.
Health Made Simple will create health and live it out daily.
Click here to learn more about Health Made Simple and get started today!
