PHILOSOPHY
I find the word “sustainable” to be thrown around a lot these days, but it is a relevant concept to my philosophy of nutrition. My philosophy is simply this: if a diet plan cannot be sustained for a lifetime, then it isn’t worth pursuing. I have talked to so many people over the years who have worked with nutritionists/dieticians and who have been advised to follow this or that diet, which inevitably includes counting fat grams, carbohydrate intake, calories, or all of the above. But something else was inevitable: namely that not a single individual was able to follow any such plan for any significant amount of time. My goal is to provide my clients with a super easy-to-follow healthy lifestyle plan, and to assist them in their transition to it. My goal is to provide them with the knowledge and support to get them to the point where, for them, living healthily is as easy as it was to live unhealthily. When they are at that point, my work is done.
All my studying on the subject of nutrition has led me to some simple conclusions:
- That each individual does not have as different nutritional requirements as is accepted in the field today. There are more similarities in everyone’s needs than not. In other words, people are not as biologically different as everyone assumes. It is possible to fashion general diet plans that fit most people’s needs (there are exceptions, of course, but they are not the rule), incorporating smaller adjustments tailored to the individual rather than drastic differences.
- That the closer we get to our natural states (in all regards), the healthier we become. What this means nutritionally is that the farther our food gets away from the state at which it emerged from the earth, the less healthy it is for us to consume. (Think about the journey a beet takes from when it was picked from the ground to when it was shipped, grated, cooked, canned, shipped again, and placed in a bucket in a salad bar for hours…)
- If any food is not pleasurable to eat, people will not continue to eat it.