Last night, as we were sharing our days with each other, the hubs told me about being in a waiting room for an appointment yesterday. As he sat there, he noticed the magazines on the table. I can’t remember the name of the magazine, but its title had buzz words like natural, wholesome, wellness. Seeing this, he thought he’d kill some time by reading an article or two (since he’s not big on reading BH&G or Southern Living in waiting rooms…I, on the other hand, am an entirely different story). He picked up the magazine and started reading the titles of the cover articles, only to be quickly dismayed.
One of the main articles was, “The New Purge! Lose XX Pounds in XX Days!!”
I’m accustomed to hearing about these diet trends in infomercials and online sidescroll ads. You see them in Cosmo-style magazines and they have celebrity endorsements. But this was the first time I’d ever heard of purging in a magazine that claimed to center around the natural care of your wellness. And to be honest, I was disappointed.
The topic of purging or cleansing has come up with many of my clients. Here is my usual response:
It’s a good idea to purge junk food items from your diet. It’s a good idea to drink more water and less juice or soda. It’s a good idea to eat more fresh foods and fewer processed foods, and a good idea to learn to make more foods yourself if that is something you can do. It’s a good idea to clean your digestive tract by eating healthy, fiber-rich foods (which will act like a scrubber as it moves through your GI tract). And the result of doing that may lead to some initial weight loss: it decreases swelling and inflammation, and helps your gut and immune system work better in general. But “doing a purge” for the sole purpose of trying to lose a significant amount of weight in a short period of time isn’t a good idea. It isn’t healthy for your body, and it isn’t sustainable.
What I don’t agree with is using a product, no matter what plant it claims to be the all-natural extract of, to make your body sick to the point of dropping pounds (remember, not all all-natural things are good for the human body. Think deadly nightshade). That sounds dangerously close to disordered eating to me. When did we get so out of touch with our bodies and what they need that we believe calories are bad, and absorbing them is the thing that prevents us from looking like the model bodies we crave?
I’ll tell you what prevents us from all having those model bodies. The fact that photoshop doesn’t work in real time.
Okay, I’m going to reel myself in from the long-winded tangent that I could easily insert here. Instead of bashing a diet fad, I want to speak positively and plainly about what a diet “should” look like from my perspective.
The word diet means everything you feed your body, but it’s taken on another meaning as we’ve battled to align ourselves with an advertised image. This new meaning is somewhere along the lines of “that thing you do to deprive yourself of what you really want to eat; to eat the least amount of calories you can get away with; that thing where you only eat [insert crazy food item here] for a week in a desperate attempt to drop weight fast.”
Your diet is part of your self-care regimen. Instead of thinking of it as a hassle, it should be a way to show love to yourself. Love in the sense of giving your body what it needs to thrive, not giving your emotional state what it wants at that moment because you’ve had a bad day. There’s a line there, and we seem to have grown desensitized to it. Think of love this way:
What man is there among you who, when his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, he will not give him a snake, will he? Matthew 7: 9-10
In this perfect example of what love should look like, we should be taking a lesson in how to treat ourselves. If your body asks for fresh foods in the form of showing you deficiencies, don’t give it food that won’t help.
To truly show love to the body that carries us from the moment our life begins until our dying day, we need to understand how it works. Our bodies are designed to seek out calorie-dense foods, which helped us survive when hunting on foot was a full-time job. In our modern-day world we can easily obtain these foods without expending much energy, which means we need to rewire our way of thinking about food.
Nutrition is an extremely complex topic, which makes sense because it is for fueling an even more complex machine. I encourage you not to buy in to the idea that if you do such and such trick you will solve all the mysteries of your personal nutrition. I’m sorry but we just aren’t designed that way. Your diet should be a balance of fresh foods from many different sources to provide the vitamins and minerals that we need to survive. It should take into consideration the energy that your particular body needs. And if you look at nutrition from that perspective, you’ll probably start figuring out what you need. Remember, you aren’t alone in this. Every single one of us must walk this path to wellness. You have credible resources at your disposal, if you seek them out (scientific journals, not fad magazines). You can ask for help from a certified professional to help you set goals and point you in the right direction. This doesn’t need to be a chore, it can be an adventure!
With this perspective in mind, what are you going to do today to better care for yourself? As for me and hubs, farmer’s market here we come!
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