Stop worrying about stuff and go do something. You can research the pros and cons of any decision you make, any product you buy, any food you eat, until the day you die. The internet bombards us with so much information that we’ve forgotten how to live without extraneous facts, opinions and data no one really needed a couple of decades ago to live their lives to fullest potential.
But now?
We’re so busy “looking up stuff”, we don’t have time to actually use those educations to improve the quality of our existence. We’re just addicted to the information chase.
Let’s talk about diet. I hate diets. The faddy ones, I mean – like `Werewolf Diet’, `5-Bite Diet’, `Cotton Ball Diet’, `Sleeping Beauty Diet’ — that arrive like nutritional epiphany on the horizons of social media. It’s sad that we’re so ready to believe all these trumped-up miraculous diet solutions, when the real ones have always been out there in nature. If only we’d step outside and look…
I went through a crazy diet phase myself. Victim of a bad body image – and why not, because I had packed 305 lbs on a 6 ft 7 inch frame – I wanted to regain confidence in how I looked with the help of wonder diets.
This was in 2007. I was slavishly following other people’s miracle diet journeys on social media. I was like a ferret on steroids, spending 10 hours a week sometimes on the internet, discovering diet gurus and reading up on magic food plans that will make me look slim and wonderful…
I lost 40 lbs on a soy-based diet. That success should have left me floating in a happy bubble of `dieter’s high’ and all should have been right with my world – except that it wasn’t. Emotionally, I felt unhinged and all over the place. Upon more research, I discovered that soy-based diets could wreak havoc on your emotional equilibrium. Infinitely worse, it could give you man boobs.
What to do? I didn’t want man boobs. So, I threw out hundreds of dollars worth of soy-based food, and started all over again, researching yet another miracle. And gained all the weight I had lost on soy in a short space of time.
This went on for a while, embracing and discarding one fad diet after another until I discovered Beachbody. With the help of this holistic fitness program, I managed to baseline my weight in the 240-260 lb range, where it still hovers today.
But no more faddy diets for me. And no more crazy researching of fruits and vegetables like a confused farmer. I am keeping my body in exercise, eating balanced, healthy meals, avoiding emotional stress, and saving hundreds of precious hours not researching useless stuff on the internet.
But my mother?
She is like Dr Livingston of the virtual world, and her tenacity when it comes to finding new – and often opposing – information on the internet is awe-inspiring. I am deluged with advice from her every day, via text messages, emails and phone calls that tell me cauliflowers are wonderful for my health one day, and to stay off cauliflowers because they will kill me the next.
No matter. I don’t care. I am done with obsessing about things that stop me from living each day in the happiest possible way. I strive instead to stay grounded and in the present, with grace and awareness of the great privilege I have been given to experience this time-space reality as a human being.
Scientists estimate the probability of our being born at about one in 400 trillion. A miracle in itself, the fact that we exist at all, but that’s another topic for another day…
