On Intuitive Eating | Pt. 1 - A Short History Of Contemporary, Nutritional Confusion

Nutrition is one of those areas in life where everybody seems to have an opinion and strong convictions but rather rarely is anybody willing or eager to allow for counter arguments to their own belief system. It seems puzzling but as human beings we really have lost connection with our optimal nutritional strategy, although countless people claim to have the answer - and all those camps disagree in more points than they agree.

As a human being who loves to eat when the food tastes good I have long been amazed and puzzled by the range of opposing pieces of advice on nutrition, the fundamentalist type of eagerness in nutritional camps to convince the rest of society that their way to eat is the right way to eat and the apparentz lack of success when it comes to provably demonstrating that diet A,B or C will get you healthy for good...

So among this confusion and bitterness I want to introduce my own strategy for nutrition and living a fairly healthy life with food by using eating habits not strictly tied to morals or materalistic emphases but rather to intuition and our inner voice of craving instead of turning food habits into a moralistic conversion crusade against other people's sovereign choice.

The major modern camps of nutrition in opposition

You will be familiar: It wasn't long ago when eating meat was considered a standard in any traditional family. It used to be absolute common sense that the body needs meat to thrive and - if we go further still - there were times when a family did their utmost to have at least one meat-day in their dinner schedule for the week where the whole family would enjoy some beef or pork or something of the sort - long before mass produced meat started to become a thing and meat became less and less of a luxury and more of an everyday-thing in Western dites.

Then came the people who had rather strong points and vehemence pointing out that animals are alive too and that we as human beings have no right to kill them for our own benefit. Others came citing all sorts of health-related reasons as to why eating animals as a human being really isn't such a great idea to begin with, pointing to things like heart diseases, cancer rates and all sorts of other factors too various to name here. I'm sure you have hearb about them anyway.

Then came the vegans who went a step further yet, rejecting the idea of eating any animal or even any product that ever touched an animal's skin or that came directly from an animal - even if the animal itself was to live on. And they - the vegans - had rather good reasons themselves, it seemed to me. From a semi-materalistic YOLO perspective it did make a great deal of sense to me... For the time being at least...

I tasted some vegan foods and was surprised to notice that some of their dishes were not only amazingly creative (albeit desperately so at times) but also rather tasty. Who would've thought that vegan sushi could ever work, right? But it does ;)

Then a few years ago I stumbled upon yet another set of people who rejected any of the previously mentioned diets altogether. They reject vegetarian and vegan cuisine for the claimed reason that human beings "aren't supposed to only eat plants", that plant-based eaters are "missing out on essential building blocks for our body and our health" and that some of the alleged vegan health foods are actually "toxic for the human system".

I was amazed!

It had been a while since I had heard someone claim something so utterly unpopular in a world where a clear trend towards plant-based diets seems to be an ever-increasing phenomenon within the public discourse and supermarket shelves, and where good statistics exist pointing out that many countries in the West show changes in their meat consumption levels towards less and less meat craze.

But there was another interesting point about this fourth camp of people that I had never heard claimed before: They rejected all of the previously mentioned opposing nutritional camps mostly for the fact that they all agreed the food itself has to be cooked at all, arguing that "cooking our food was the main problem to begin with". I loved it because it was so radical and rarely ever talked about anywhere. People rejecting cooking, whazzzaaaam!

It looked like a promising area of research to dig into and while the jury for me is still out on where I stand with all these groups, I have since started to come up with my own nutritional strategy that seems to work very well for me and overlapses greatly with my general philosophy and experience on Earth. An easy philosophy I would like to share here for all those tired of acting against their inner compass and being labelled a heartless human... Eat what your intuition calls for.

More on that in the next part of this miniseries.

To be continued...

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