A Word on Diet
Its True Meaning
The word “diet” (from Greek diaita “course of life”) needs to reclaim its original sense of being what a person or animal usually eats and drinks to sustain life, a daily fare.
Rather, these days the word has taken on the meaning of a special or limited selection of foods chosen to lose weight (and implied here is “of limited duration”).
The whole problem with dieting—highlighted recently by an LA Times article reporting that a vast majority of all who go on diets, and lose weight, gain it all back within 5 years (many much sooner)—is the assumption that a diet is something transitory, and once the diet is “over”, what does the now ex-dieter do? As a rule, he or she returns to the habits that made the “diet” necessary in the first place.
Another, more deeply seated, problem, underlying the urge to go back to the “wrongful ways” of eating, is that (while much of the world is starving) we treat food and eating as one of our main sources of pleasure, much like casual sex, and if AIDS was the bane of casual sex, so should obesity be considered the bane of eating for pleasure.
However, obesity has still to live up to (or live down to) that job.
Eating has to cease to be something we look forward to a whole morning, a whole afternoon, or a whole week. Satisfying a craving for sugar, for pizza, for steak, or for whatever tickles our particular fancy, is not eating, it is victual debauchery. It is an apathy, an admission that we have no higher goals, no finer aspirations than satisfying this sensual need.
Conversely, when we do have higher aspirations, when we want our bodies to stay fit, slender and functional (healthy) so that we may reach our higher goals (not so that we may impress admirers of bodies), eating becomes the fueling of the system it was meant to be.
Today, billions of pharma dollars are spent on researching and developing the next heartburn reliever, the next anti-depressant, not to mention the next appetite depressant. How does this compare, I wonder, with honest research and development of the correct fuel for the human body? My guess is that the amount spent in this direction is but a small fraction of those pharma billions.
According to the CDC (Center for Disease Control), nearly 1 in 3 U.S. adults (30.7%) are overweight; more than 2 in 5 adults (42.4%) are obese while about 1 in 11 adults (9.2%) are severely obese. This leaves 17.7% in a weight range considered healthy.
Another way of putting this: overweight and obese is the new normal.
Of course, there are just too many vested interests in staying the new normal course: the medical industry, the fast-food industry, the meat industry, the dairy industry, not to mention the diet industry; for if we honestly, brushing aside sensual cravings and the like, took a long and in-depth look at the human constitution and looked for the type of fuel the body needs and thrives on, we would rule out meat almost instantly, all other animal product soon thereafter and we would before long settle on a vegan diet, simply prepared to provide maximum sustenance.
These days I live on a diet consisting of fruit, grains, rice, lentils, and salad stuffs. Wholly vegan. I am never hungry, I like (love, actually) what I eat, and I eat to fuel the body so that I may reach my higher goals within poetry, music and the spiritual unencumbered by weight, weakness, sickness, and sensual desires.
The obesity problem, I think, is more of a moral nature than anything else, sourced by the same spring that sees no good reason to get up in the morning—the general apathy underlying the suspicion that there is no meaning to all this earthly living. This, however, is too broad of a subject to tackle in a brief essay on food.
Bottom line: Find out what your body needs to stay fit and trim. Feed it. Don’t use food as a crutch for living.
Find your diet.
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