We spend our entire lives searching.
Searching for ourselves.
Searching for the perfect mate.
Searching for the best job.
Searching for happiness.
Searching for the perfect diet.
Unfortunately, we rarely search within ourselves.
From the moment we’re born, we fall prey to social conditioning. We start getting influenced by family and friends, by our environment, by the world.
We are taught to believe certain things and think certain thoughts, and have certain opinions, and feel certain feelings, just because that’s what you’re supposed to think, feel, and believe.
Before we realize it, we can’t really tell whether a certain part of our identity is genuinely who we are or is a result of social conditioning and circumstances.
When it comes to our eating behaviors and food preferences, it’s often the same.
Fad diets are where the fashion industry meets the industry of food.
Every few months, a new eating craze takes over social media and the world. There’s the latest diet that so and so followed and lost X amount of pounds in Y number of days and that’s so exciting and so contagious, and everyone goes nuts.
People start sharing their progress on social media, they support each other, give each other advice, trends arise, hashtags start trending, it’s all a part of a certain cult like tendency to fixate over something that to everyone on the outside looks absolutely pointless.
A few months later, nobody’s talking about that day old diet anymore, because, guess what, it was indeed a fad, it was all total bullshit, it did work wonders while people were religiously following it, but sooner or later 90% of the people who tried it gave up because it was absolutely unsustainable.
And then the next eating craze comes around and everyone gets nuts all over again.
We spend our entire lives searching. And searching for the perfect diet is a huge thing for many of us.
The thing is, just like there’s no one perfect thing – perfect job, perfect home, perfect mate, for two different people, there can’t possibly be one perfect diet that can work wonders for everyone, everywhere in the world, at every point in their life.
Our bodies are our best teachers. They have different needs and preferences, they absorb nutrients differently, they metabolize ingredients differently, they burn calories differently, and take different amounts of food to feel satiated.
If we’re firmly convinced that the latest fad diet is the best diet for all of us, the weight loss industry will keep growing and, ironically, the number of overweight and obese people will grow alongside it. The healthy eating and weight loss industry is estimated at over 700 billion US dollars. Yet, the number of overweight people globally has almost tripled since 1975. Something’s clearly not right. Yet, we keep doing the fad diet madness over and over again.
To what end?
For how long?
When do we realize that it’s just never going to work?
We spend our entire lives searching.
Let’s finally start searching in the right place. That way we at least get a chance to move one step closer to finding what we actually need and getting where we actually belong.
Sofia Yotova
Inspiration.Passion.Humility.
I am the CEO & Founder of Foodie Boulevard – a disruptive organization that explores the role of food beyond the plate as foundational long-term strategy for personalized healthcare and wellness.
Our mission is to develop solutions that help our audience use food as an interactive educational tool, a powerful epigenetic factor, and a healing mechanism for people struggling with eating disorders.
I am a published author, blogger, lecturer, and workshop organizer. I am a certified Eating Psychology Coach by the Institute for the Psychology of Eating in Colorado and Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution Ambassador.