Diet, Schmiet. Bah.

Fast oxidizer, slow oxidizer. Vegan, vegetarian, Atkins, primal. Weight Watchers, low-carb, high-carb, Sensa. Oh. Fuck. You.

Why can't we just eat a variety of things in moderation with a treat once in a while?

Note: The following rant does not apply to those people who are vegetarian or vegan for ethical or environmental reasons. It also does not apply to people who avoid certain foods for religious reasons. Nor does it apply to folks who restrict diet in response to diabetes and/or heart disease and/or allergies. It does, however, apply to everybody else.

I work with a woman who is an ortorexic. She refuses to eat anything that isn't "healthy", and her definition of "healthy" has narrowed so substantially over time that she's down to eating a plum for breakfast, a small salad for lunch, and six ounces of white-meat turkey once a week. Not surprisingly, she weighs almost nothing, has little to no muscle mass, and obsesses about food all the time.

And yet nobody (except maybe me) sees this as an eating disorder. It is.

Restricting the amount or type of food you take in to the point that you are getting less than your body requires of nutrients is an eating disorder. It's not a diet, it's not "going raw". It's a psychological condition that will eventually harm or kill you unless you figure out what it is about your life and your brain that is making you want to exercise control in that area, and to that extent. It is no more healthy than bulemia or anorexia, and it's no more connected to diet than those conditions. It's a symptom of a larger problem that is expressed through dietary control.

And, may I say, just because you switch from one extremely restrictive diet to another (Pritikin, Atkins, raw, primal) for no other reason than to exercise more control over your body, that does not make you less eating-disordered. It just means you have a little more variety to your symptoms.

Restrictive eating is popular right now. Chicken fat is bad, coconut oil is good (no matter that your body sees them in essentially the same way). Eating high-protein is smart only if you're a Type X body or have Type Y blood. Everybody and his dog has a "food allergy" of one sort or another that usually has zero to do with an actual allergy or intolerance. I know some people who eat three freaking salads a day--and I love me some salad--because they automatically equate "salad" with "healthy". (Note: uncooked spinach can block the absorption of calcium. Uncooked broccoli can do weird things to your iron levels. Some veggies need to be cooked to be ideally processed by the human body. That's called science.)

And here I am, stuck in the middle. I know that for me, a high-protein diet works wonders. If I don't have my two-egg-white, cheese, GoLean breakfast, I'm hungry within an hour and have nasty sugar crashes. If I don't get plenty of vegetables, beans, and nuts, I'm grouchy and constipated and have no energy. Pancakes put me out and make my mood seesaw and my belly bloat.

I also know that a varied diet is the only way to go. If you eat the same damn plum every day for breakfast and the same damn peach every day for lunch, your bones will not thank you. Likewise, if you restrict yourself to high-fat, high-protein foods with few or no carbs, you'll get all ketotic and light-headed and ka-ray-zee within a few days.

Look: I'll be straight with you: the type and amount of exercise I do accounts for, at most, thirty percent of what I've achieved in terms of weight lost and strength gained over the last three years. Diet is responsible for 70%, minimum, of the changes I see. And the diet I follow religiously is this: eat less than is necessary to make you full. Eat when you're hungry. Eat protein in the morning (and this is personal, not a prescription) so you don't get hungry fast; otherwise, eat mostly plants. Stay away from shit with ingredients you can't pronounce or food that's pretending to be something it's not.

In short, to paraphrase Mark Twain, I eat what I like and let it fight it out inside.

Your diet is none of my damn business. It just makes me angry and sad to see smart people--mostly women, but a few men, too--spending so much energy on what they put into their bodies. Thirty years ago, it was all about how we looked--that took energy away from more important things, like personal development and political action. Now it's all about what we eat, with the same results.

If you spent even half the energy you spend on your freaking food doing something for somebody else, what would be the result? What could you accomplish by paying attention to something outside of yourself for the space of one meal?