It was about 3 months into my vegan phase that I started to feel like a million bucks. I cheated occasionally with little bites of cheesecake I couldn’t resist — I was working at the Cheesecake Factory — but other than that, I wasn’t eating any foods that came from animals.

This is it! This is how I will eat for the rest of my life, I used to think — and tell my mother. My skin was super clear and I had the glow — you know, the glow that makes heads turn and people ask, “whatcha doin’? you look great!” Not only did I feel good and look good, I had also found a new culture: the “we do the right thing for the planet” culture. And I felt morally superior.

Three years later I was taking humongous bites of a salmon burger. I swear it felt like the first meal I had had in ages. I knew then, this was my turning point.

Ohmygod, I’m a carnivore! I am a bad person. What am I going to eat now?

In the 3 years plus that I was an (almost) vegan, I went from eating absurd quantities of salad and feeling great (more like… forever high), to thinking obsessively about food, drinking daily quarts of carrot/apple juice (ya know how much sugar one of those babies has?) and developing a wild case of candida. Not fun.

That salmon burger saved my life.

So if you’re confused about food, I get it. You start a diet hoping that it’s a marriage for life. It’s difficult to stick to it, but, by golly, you make the sacrifices, you do the planning, you make it work.

And sooner or later — a week, a month… three years later — you give up. The thing is, our nutritional needs and our lifestyle are ever-evolving. The way we eat needs to change and accommodate to our reality and diets are not flexible enough. It actually gets trickier when you start feeling good on the diet, because then you have this experiential proof that it works. So you try harder because your mind thinks that if it worked at some point, it must work again… and this is not the case.

No matter how long you go with the diet — and by diet I mean this regime that you follow without regard for your body’s actual needs and wants — you will fall off the wagon… unless you start using your common sense (translation: listening to your body).

You know, I used to have two friends, both equally obsessed about their respective diets. One of them is a long, long time vegan — he’s the one who got me to become one — and the other one a long, long time Atkins-dieter. Now that I think back and can judge neutrally, I realize both of them were equally unbalanced.

What I remember about my vegan friend is that he had an uncontrollable sweet tooth and was always sort of in the clouds, never able to make a decision in his life. This was NOT a junk-vegan. He had green juices everyday and made almost all his food from scratch… including the desserts he enjoyed so much.

The Atkins-dieter was a weight lifter. He had bulked up more than I consider to be attractive — hey that’s just me — but figure aside, he complained of feeling hot and he sweated ALL the time, he was totally stressed out and he had very noticeable pain in his joints.

Side note: I believe this diet conundrum is, in general, more difficult for men than it is for women because men are more prone to use their willpower over their intuition and common sense.

There are a few common factors to most diets:

1. Any diet worth its name teaches to eat more real food and less junk food.
2. Any diet worth its name teaches portion control. In other words, as long as you’re on the diet, you’re not overeating.
3. Any diet worth its name teaches to watch out for the sugar you eat.

Now, I ask you: Do you think that if you did these three things outside the context of the diet, you’d lose weight and feel better?

Heck yeah.

So, perhaps it is not the diet that makes the difference, but the common sense habits that you learn in the context of the diet. Those habits you can take with you. In fact, you don’t need to punish your body dieting to learn them. Whatcha think?

HEADS UP: I’m doing a teleseminar! We’ll be talking about the difference between dieting and a long-term, intuitive, common sense approach to eating. It’ll be right after Labor Day and free of charge. There’s no name for it yet, but keep an eye out for more information…

You see that box on the top-right corner of the page? If you don’t have the pleasure of receiving emails from me just yet, enter your name and email address there so I can let you know the details of the teleseminar.

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