There is now a diet for everything and everyone. The market for this stuff is huge and there are people cashing in and buying up all over the world. Depending on what you want to do with, or rather TO your body, there is a diet that is specially tailored to help you achieve your “body goals”. If you want to build muscle and burn fat, there is high protein; if you are an athlete or something, you might go more for complex carbs and protein together. Most people who just want to lose weight are carb-sensitive so they go for something that has no carbs and, quite often, features a prevalence of a certain kind of food. There is, to my knowledge, a grapefruit diet, a whole range of juice diets, a cabbage diet, a baby food diet, an all meat diet (hello Dr. Atkins!), a “zone” diet (whatever the hell THAT is), a feast and fast program (where you eat like a pig one day and then starve the next), and any number of others.
I mean, some of this stuff might work, if it’s used correctly, and some of it may even be scientific. But, for the most part, the diet industry is a load of crap, because it’s all produced by companies who are just out to make a fast buck. They target desperate people who have been taught to think, usually by similar industries, that there is something wrong with the way they look. Let’s face it, no one in their right mind would actively choose to live on grapefruit for two weeks, or to “cleanse” their body with foul tasting kale juice unless they had been systematically taught to hate themselves for a good long time and made to believe that they needed help.
But, see, the thing is that there is now so much advice about what not to eat that we are all thoroughly confused to the point where we no longer know what to do. In order to decide what to have for breakfast, some of us have to lie awake agonizing over it because the world might actually end if we choose wrong. I’ve been through this myself, you start thinking that your whole body is going to dissolve into some sort of cancer riddled blimp on the spot if you so much as look at a bar of chocolate, and it’s ridiculous because yeah, ok, healthy eating is important, but it’s not medicine. You know? Food is just food. You eat it, it keeps you alive.
We’re all parasites on this earth – the food doesn’t grow for us to eat it, it just grows; we’re not even supposed to be here. So there is no “right” thing for us to eat, we can eat whatever we like – if you know it’s going to kill you then stay away from it, sure, but otherwise, you have to eat, so just eat what you want.
What annoys me though is not so much that the world is obsessed with diets, because that is what it is and has been for some time. What’s been annoying me more recently, is that now there are all these other people debating the necessity for diets and the problems that this multi-billion pound industry has caused for people all over the western world, and I’m just baffled by it. Because, I mean, surely it’s obvious that we don’t need all this stuff?
It’s a senseless argument to say, is the diet industry necessary? Because obviously it isn’t. And it’s an even more senseless argument to ask if it’s damaged people, because of course it has. Having your thinking twisted by faceless corporations who make you think you’re a bad person because you eat carbs, is not nice for anybody and OF COURSE IT’S DAMAGING! HELLO!
I was listening to a radio programme the other day where they had this so-called “expert” on to talk about this book that she’s just written which is, apparently, all about the need to scrap diets and just re-educate yourself about how to eat normally.
Well, ok, in the main, I’m on board with that. It’s a good message. But it just shouldn’t be necessary, because this is just common sense isn’t it? It wouldn’t be necessary for anyone to re-educate themselves about food if they hadn’t been confused to begin with. And I find it most irritating of all that, instead of just scrapping the whole system and forgetting all this crap about no-carb, low-carb, high-protein, green stuff, we are now living in a world where half the messages are about diets and slimming and the rest come from books about why you shouldn’t diet.
It’s just another way to cash in. The woman on the radio actually had the nerve to plug her book, openly on the air, after listening to a distraught listener who had called in to talk about her lifelong dieting hell and the psychological scarring it had left her with. Now, I mean, this woman was crying live on air about how awful her life had been because of all the teasing and bullying and dieting nightmares she’d had in her life and at the end of it all, all this “expert” doctor woman had to say was “Go and buy my book, it’ll help you sort yourself out.”
Newsflash people: We don’t need any more books about food or dieting! We just need to be left alone to eat like normal people!
I get angry now if someone tries to sell me a new diet book or, worse, if they tell me I need to go on some kind of diet to make me better or more acceptable, because, you know, I’ve had this all my life! I’m tired of it now. I just think, after years of dieting and obsessing about food and worrying that I might get fat, I just wish that everyone would leave me the fuck alone!
I was anorexic for a couple of years – well, actually, no I wasn’t anorexic all the way through – I have discovered quite recently that there is actually a term for what I started out as, which is “orthorexia”. If you haven’t heard of this, you might be forgiven because it’s quite a new term, I think, and it, also, would not be necessary if the world was not so fucked up – but I digress. Basically, “orthorexia” is an obsession formed by the constant teaching about healthy eating, whereby you become so obsessed with eating the “right” food, or the healthiest food for you that you can no longer eat anything without worrying that it might kill you or make you gain weight. It’s obsessive label reading, basically, but taken to a complete extreme so you have panic attacks in the middle of supermarkets because you can’t figure out if the 1 gram of salt in something is justifiable against the fact that it has only 12 calories in it. The result being that you then decide that you don’t want to risk it and leave said supermarket with nothing except an organic turnip and some bottled water.
It sounds ridiculous, but this a real thing, and people suffer from it. And it’s because, largely, we live in a world that gives us so much conflicting advice about what is good for us and about what will or will not make us fat and age faster. It’s everywhere and it is literally driving everyone nuts!
Now, here’s what I’m going to tell you. For free now, I’m not asking you to pay for anything here, this is free advice, you ready? Ok, here goes:
The world is full of crap. There is someone trying to sell you something you don’t need on every street corner and in every possible medium they can find in this world and the only thing you can do is recognize that when someone else gives you advice on what to do with yourself, your body, your diet, or anything else, they are probably full of shit. Nobody knows you like you do and what you look like is SO not important in comparison to what goes on inside you.
So fuck the lot of them. If you see an advert on TV for slimming aids, or Weight Watchers or whatever, just switch it off. If you see a magazine article about some celebrity who’s lost a ton of weight and made a DVD to show everyone else how to do it, just deface the picture. Skinny people who want to promote themselves as role models just BECAUSE they are skinny deserve nothing less than a pair of devil horns drawn on their head and a stupid black moustache scribbled across their top lip. It’s all crap. The media is full of images of seemingly perfect people but that doesn’t mean that that’s what WE have to look like. We’re humans! We just have to be what we are.
To quote a very old message: just say NO!!!
