Show me your refrigerator and I’ll tell you who you are – or at least, who you think you are.
Take my friend Jane’s fridge. It used to be full of diet foods: low-fat this, sugar-free that, carb- and calorie-reduced, imitation everything. You’d be hard-pressed to find an actual, unadulterated food product on Jane’s kitchen shelves. If it didn’t scream “diet,” she didn’t want anything to do with it.
At that time, what I could have told you about Jane was that she was convinced that she needed to lose weight and that she didn’t trust her body to help her make wise food choices. She didn’t trust food, period.
She seemed to believe that the power to change her body for the better lay somewhere “out there” — with multinational food-processing companies and diet-smoothie producers that presumably knew a whole lot more about her health and fitness than she ever would.
Today, I’m delighted to report, Jane’s fridge says something entirely different about her. And that’s because Jane’s perspective on food has done a serious one-eighty — and her body has come along for the ride.
About a year ago, Jane and I had a heart to heart. She’d been reading the magazine’s advice about eating more whole foods, but she was convinced that if she traded in her fake-o diet fare, she’d start gaining weight. So I started in on a little impromptu pep talk.
I said, “Look Janey, you don’t need all this diet stuff. It’s not going to help you lose weight. In fact, it’s working against you, and it’s preventing you from making good progress with your fitness program.”
(Read the rest of this article, which first appeared in Experience Life magazine.)
