No diet is bullet proof and each one of us must find the diets that makes us feel best and which, in our view, gives us the best shot at health and happiness. We can greatly reduce our risk of heart disease, diabetes, cancers and other ills with diet, but we can't eliminate these risks. Will we live longer if we eat better? It's impossible to know.
Given these truths, here are some suggested guidelines for finding the right diet for you.
- Your diet is good if it is helping you achieve normal blood sugar, decent cholesterol readings, low triglycerides and a good blood pressure. If you already have some of these problems, your diet is a good one if it is lessening these markers or allowing you to decrease your medications.
- Your diet is good if it is allowing you to stay a a good weight. That weight doesn't have to correspond to a perfect BMI, but it should be as low as you can comfortably maintain and should stay relatively stable.
- Your diet is good if your energy is good. If you are sluggish or have no energy to get out and move around, look at making a dietary change.
- Your diet is good if it exposes you to the fewest carcinogens. We get enough exposure to cancer causing chemicals in our air, plastics, x-rays, and modern products. Avoidance of processing and additives is the basis for every healthy diet.
- Your diet is good if you can believe in it and stick to it. If you are simply eating reflexively, without any specific thought, it's unlikely that your diet is healthy. The reason is simple: we are presented with few good choices. In order to eat well, we have to eat mindfully.
- Your diet is good if you wake up without guilt.
- Your diet is good if eating it makes you not only healthy, but happy.
This is the best we can do. But even this is a lot. In the meantime, don't waste your time feeling badly about the fact that you don't eat perfectly. Find your own way.
This article was by Barbara Berkeley http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2013/09/waste-time-finding-perfect-diet.html