If you ask a room full of 100 adults about their experiences on taking Math in school, there’s a high likelihood that the responses will fall on the edges of the graph.
In other words, people usually either hate or love doing Math.
You would likely find the same trend with people who embrace a certain diet. Be it a low carb, high carb, vegan, raw food, or any one of the thousands of diets out there, you’d usually find the same sort of opposites in opinion.
That is, either, “This diet is the best! I feel invigorated and ready to take on the world!” or “This diet sucks and has done nothing for me!”. Of course, you can guess which one of these types of remarks designers of any diet choose to publish, but that’s a different topic.
So why do people fall into such camps?
It boils down to one fundamental concept: The individual is trying to embrace / learn / take up something completely unnatural to his/her current state of being.
What this leads to, is a barrier to adoption. In math, you have to know what numbers are, then you can graduate to the basic operators (-, +, *, /). At the high end of things, we can talk about completely abstract and seemingly inapplicable-to-daily-life concepts like Gaussian elimination and Hermitian Matrices.
Assuming that a person starts off like the typically person, eating ad libitum (basically, to whatever limit he/she naturally would), he/she would have to grasp the basics concepts of the diet. If it were the Atkins diet, they would be counting carbs. If it were the South Beach Diet, perhaps they would be sticking to the macronutritional ratios of the specific phase. In any case, the individual has to grasp some “rules” and “concepts” and then apply them directly to his/her life.
We can now easily see that the amount of effort, or the difficulty in adopting the diet is directly proportional to the gap between what the person was originally doing and the new task at hand. As simple as this sounds, failure to act upon it reflects a failure in understanding.
This isn’t helped at all, by the fact that healthy eating is such a debatable concept. Not to mention the tons of bad journalism and differing opinions being broadcasted in mainstream media. What results are people looking for a quick fix and not finding it.
Like doing math, I believe that healthy eating can be broken down into simpler equations. I think that one must do so, and have some personal rules to live by. If you have some sense of healthy eating, I’d encourage you to set some of your own rules. If not, start with some simple guidelines.
Just like doing math, it pays to have these guidelines written down. Be reminded of them constantly. A mathematician facing a problem has to work on it from the bottom-up, and therefore must have his fundamental principles ready on the tips of his fingers. So is true for dieting, at least in the initial stages when it is unnatural to you.
Unlike doing math, there is no perfect answer.
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