I’m amazed I felt the need to write an article on this particular subject, but I find the attitude of a lot of people these days quite astonishing when it comes to researching a diet or learning about health related topics on the internet and elsewhere.
Let’s say you want to improve your diet, have some issues with your health, or you’d like to find alternatives to what the medical establishment is offering. How do you go about it? Where do you look for help?
It’s all very easy these days for folks to visit a specific Facebook group and ask a few questions to other members or post a question on Twitter and wait for answers to come; or simply watch a few health oriented videos on YouTube here and there and decide they are well informed to try a change of diet, right? WRONG! If you really serious about your health, that is NOT the approach you should take.
The internet is arguably mankind’s greatest invention, but it can be very *confusing* if you don’t know how to use it, especially social media.
Professor Noam Chomsky said on the use of the internet: “Internet is extremely valuable if you know what you are looking for. It has a framework of understanding where it directs you to a particular thing and let you side-line lots of others.
This can be a very valuable tool but you always have to be willing to ask if this is the right framework. If you don’t understand what you looking for and you don’t have some kind of conception of what matters, then exploring the internet is picking up random facts that don’t mean anything.”
I think this quote is especially accurate when discussing diet and health issues online. How many times have you seen headlines advertised on YouTube, Facebook, and other websites: “Don’t eat broccoli until you read this”, “6 food combination that are actually terrible for your health” and millions of other click bait titles?
And let’s even not mention endless collection of memes and gifs displaying a short health message that you’ll forget right the next minute right after you read them?
If you really think you can learn proper nutrition by being part of this social media circus of confusing, and generally misinformed, data flying constantly around, you would be deluding yourself.
Most of the time, all those eye-catching headlines and memes are designed to spark your curiosity just enough to click on those links and in this way, make a profit for the website involved.
Changing your diet and improving your health through natural health means studying biology.
So, how would you go about studying biology? Would you go to a Facebook group or YouTube to learn anatomy and physiology? Of course not, you would have to obtain the right material and books and put down the necessary hours to studying them, right?
There are many intelligent people out there who do the right thing and learn from books and well researched material, but also there is the large majority of the public, who foolishly think they can learn a natural diet by picking up random information here and there.
A well-known singer/celebrity eating a high fat vegetarian diet tweeted recently: “I am struggling to motivate myself to exercise.” My response was, Oh well, if you only knew that fats take longer to digest than simple carbohydrates, such as fruit; then maybe you would understand the reason why you don’t have energy, which can partly explain your lack of motivation to exercise.
Why would you expect to learn anything without putting in the effort? Have you ever heard the expression “no pain, no gain”? Without reading the necessary literature, no one can expect to succeed learning natural health; the same goes for learning any other branch of science.
Had I not studied Orthopathy for 6 years, I would never have managed to overcome every disease I suffered and quit every addiction that was crippling my body for so many years.
If you think about it, it’s no different from sending your kids to school and not expecting them to do the homework or study – but still perform well at school. It’s not going to happen, is it? It’s the same with your diet, if you don’t take it seriously and acquire the right knowledge; you are setting yourself up to fail.
When I first heard about the raw food diet, back in 2006, there was a popular internet forum called, “30 bananas a day”, where most people used to get and share information on the raw food diet. Even though I had an account on this forum, I never once asked a serious question about diet and health on this platform. I mean, do you really think it is wise to implement changes to your diet and health according to advice you receive from strangers, which, by the way, most of the time is totally incorrect information?
Anybody who uses social media regularly – and especially diet related forums, YouTube, and Facebook groups, knows it can be a complete madhouse out there – full of the craziest people talking often all kinds of nonsense, and frequently reacting and posting stuff without thinking it through or bothering to double check it’s accuracy.
You can find inspiration by reading stories on social media by all means or ask certain forums about which books to read and where to find good articles; but don’t use social media or forums for straight health advice, that’s crazy.
And I tell you what’s going to happen if you do follow the advice from strangers. Sooner or later, you will implement some changes to your diet according to what someone has suggested on Facebook or YouTube and you may start developing some imbalances, like losing or gaining weight rapidly, certain nutritional deficiencies, or other symptoms, which will make you feel scared because you are insecure about what you are doing.
Then you will change your diet back because you think your previous attempt didn’t work – while in reality some of those symptoms (however uncomfortable they may feel at times) might be perfectly normal detox symptoms of transitioning and nothing to worry about. But you wouldn’t know how to deal with those issues because you are not well informed. I’ve seen this happening all the time.
Some people have said to me: “the raw food diet is not for me” and I often ask: “have you read some books on natural health”? And their answer is “no”. And I say to them: “So, how do you know then?” It’s a bit like saying “I don’t like New York”, when you never been to New York.
In fact, I believe it is the constant changing of diets and experiments that end up putting so much strain on your body and damaging your health the most.
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One Response
Great one Ariel! 🙂
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