[ad_1]
RI received an email from a young woman who told me that even though she had an eating disorder, she had taken a liking to reading my reviews of restaurants. She said that she read and appreciated that enthusiasm for food made her feel normal. I'm sure yes. My critics gave her the opportunity to engage in a conversation about what we eat, without having to eat, which she finds difficult. She is not unique. Over the years, I have received many emails like this one from people with eating disorders who enjoy reading restaurant reviews.
It is literally a pathological behavior, but it highlights the huge gap that can open between the act of writing about food and the extremely human profession of eating it. This is most evident at this time of year, when we are bombarded with tips designed to help us find the new us. It does not matter if we are satisfied with the old us. We are promised to create a brilliant new version, one bite at a time.
It's easy to say how complicated this advice is. it does not mean it's a mistake to do it. Some advocates of plant-based diets like to ignore the real dangers of vitamin B12 deficiency. Spoiler alert: this can lead to intellectual disability. At the same time, supporters of the paleo and dairy-free regimes claim that modern humans were not designed for their current diet, as if evolution was a dead end. We are literally designed, through evolution, to consume cow's milk. Many of us adapted to it because it was an available food supply, and most of those who did not support dairy products, where it was a source of nutrition, died of allowing the gene to tolerate lactose transmit its genes.
The reverse argument is that you simply have to relax, stop pathologizing food and eat what you want. Do that, and everything will be fine. In the United States, there is even an encouraging day of what we eat This year is May 11th. The problem is that, while it is easier to follow, it is not really more useful than to be ordered to leave dairy products, to eat soup in abundance or not to live. that of a kitten diet jumped.
Unless you have the metabolism of a small hyperactive rodent or if what you really want is a perfectly balanced diet – in this case, it's time to enhance your desires – few of us can eat what we want without consequences. I certainly can not. It's the dietary advice that deserves your attention in January when everyone tells you how to eat: there is no single dietary advice, even if many health professionals would like the opposite. As Dr. Tim Spector's work on the intestinal biome says, the way our body treats the food we eat differs from one person to the other. But there are so many other problems: how much money and time do we have, for example, allowing us to go to the gym to mitigate the impacts; What kind of work do we do? health care to which we have access.
Where does this leave us all? Confuses. Diet books are written in crude slogans, but we live our lives in sinuous prose. We choose among the tips. We know that sugar is the enemy, but sometimes we have a biscuit. We understand the panic about drinking, but sometimes we open the bottle. We try to go to the gym and sometimes we do not do it. We call it being human. We are trying. Sometimes we succeed. Sometimes we do not do it. Please, do not worry.
Source link
