Quote:
Originally Posted by sollyb
Thomas said
I think you are almost certainly correct. In addition, I have found over my dieting lifetime (over 50 years now) that if I dug deep enough into what ANY diet or nutritional "authority" believes to be good foods, or dangerous foods or foods that should never be eaten by any human, etc. it has nearly invariably turned out that they personally enjoy the foods they recommend as good, and healthful to eat, and dislike or even hate the foods they think are harmful.
sol
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You are probably to some extent right about this, but do you have any examples to share of cases in which you knew the person LIKED the foods and built a diet around them?
You know. I did not like the term "orthorexia" when it first appeared (probably because I am myself orthorexic...sort of like an alcoholic that doesn't like to be called such), but now I see it as a useful term. There is a very fine line between being interested in eating healthfully and thinking that there is a perfect diet that will fix all of your problems. My thought is that almost EVERYBODY who takes up the search for a healthy diet is orthorexic at one time or the other. It goes with the territory. Part of the process, as they say. Worst of all is to be a "diet guru". Then your identity is wed to your diet. Look at the ER4YT diet. Despite the fact that the so-called science behind it has been thoroughly debunked, Peter D'Adamo clings to it like a drowning man to a raft. Of course, the same could be said-to one extent or another-of all of these diets. I am not just picking on Peter D'Adamo.
What makes it very slippery is that there is often some or a lot of truth in these diets. The devil is in the details. In this case, I am not using that idiomatic expression as it usually is. What I mean is that usually these diets become problematic when you take the rules too literally, i.e. you apply them too rigorously, apply them to the letter as the Guru says you should. If you get bogged down in the details, the devil is there and he kicks your ass
Usually in the details you start to abandon listening to your body and replace your voice with the dogma of whatever the diet guru says.
Fundamentalism, that is to say "literalism", of all types (not just religious) seems to be a contemporary plague. It's a product of fear. I understand why people who have been ill for a long time are tired and afraid. I, too, would like
somebody to just give me five rules on how to eat and be well and be done with it. That, as it were, does not appear to be in the stars... for most of us anyway.