Customizing Your Personalized Eating Plan

There's lots of talk these days about how there's no one size fits all diet. Each of us can create our own personalized diet, to suit our health needs and personal tastes.

Planning with Integrity:

As an overall general concept, it's a good idea. However, it's one that's prone to becoming twisted. When we're building and adjusting our own personal diet, we want to be aware of some of the pitfalls.

Not everyone's diet they build for themselves will be healthy. And if that's how they designed it, intentionally, with full awareness, then that's a diet they molded with integrity.

The key to building a diet built on integrity, rather than on dogma, is that you sculpt it. You sculpt it with full awareness. You're the one who benefits from the positive aspects of the diet, and you're the one who is hurt by the negative parts about the diet. You need to take full responsibility for it, both good and bad.

Let's take a look at an example:

A person may choose to include beef in their diet. If you want to consciously choose this, and not just do it "just because," then you need to look at this choice from several angles.

• Positive reasons to include it.
• Negative reasons why it should be avoided.
• List out your personal beliefs about it, whether proveable or not, as to why it should be included.
• List out some beliefs you think others may have as to why you should not include it.

Making Informed Decisions:

When thinking about these reasons, it's not about "proving" that your diet is 100% accurate. That is a myth. It's about making informed decisions, based on the information you have on hand at the moment. It's about looking at some particular choice, weighing some information, and making a choice. A choice for now. Later on you're completely free to change your mind about anything.

Also, your choice does not need to be defended to the outside world. The outside world is not "directly" affected by your choices. You are. You'll reap the rewards, and suffer the consequences, of your choices. You'll be guaranteed to find someone who can "prove" your choice is "mana from heaven," AND someone who can "prove" it's "spawned in the depths of hell." So, don't fall for the trap of defending your choice like it's written in stone. That's what "dogma" is. The main reason for this is that it blocks you from being able to accept new information in the future about your choices.

You Are Affected by Your Choices:

Earlier, it was noted that the outside world will not be directly affected by your choices. I want to expand on this, so you're clear on what I mean by "directly." We live in a culture that is moving towards socialism / collectivism. It's often called "community," or some other wording referring to "the group." It makes it so that your choices become everyone elses business. And that you should only make choices that someone tells you is "good for the planet" or some other such nonsensical platitude.

Virtually everyone who makes these kinds of statements, that makes you feel guilty for some action, that makes it seem like it's your fault our world is falling apart, has fallen victim to some sort of dogma or agenda. They grab onto one idea, and only look at it from one point of view, and refuse to look at it from another angle. They've blindly accepted information that seems so logical, so scientific, so "proveable". And they refuse to even look at it any other way.

You're the only one directly affected if you eat something. It's you who will have measurable changes NOW based on what you put in your mouth.

The current way that food and health is marketed to us is that there's only one answer to everything. This is not true for just about everything. It's a great way for marketers to try and sell their food products, wellness programs, or medical treatments. But it's not an accurate view of how the world actually works.

Unfortunately it's also a method of control. If everyone has to approve everything you do, you lose the ability to make choices that suit you, that help you, and will improve your life and your health.

Solutions and Conclusion:

Choosing your own personal diet from the perspective of integrity, won't be the same as anyone elses.

The effort you put into your customized and ever evolving eating plan will pay off. That may be with better health, better taste, better variety, etc. Your goals are unique to you, and your results can be measured, to suit you. If health is a core goal, then pay attention to how you feel.

If you want to try some new food, or make more food from scratch, be sure to check out our Recipes section, where you're bound to find something that suits your goals, whatever they are.

Eat and enjoy!