Obsession with vitamins, minerals, protein, fat, and carbs is silly

[waxamillionpehhgasus]

CLAIM: Only focusing on protein, fats, carbs, vitamins, and minerals is like only using prescription pills to manage your health. You are majorly handicapping yourself with an incomplete approach to diet.

Pharma is the mainstream, institution-approved approach to healing and medicine. Pharma focuses on chemicals. Chemicals exist, and they are a facet of health, but they aren’t everything. A healthy body will reflect a sound chemical balance, but only focusing on chemicals is too narrow of an approach to healing and medicine. For example, pharma does not address our breath, which is an important part of wellbeing. Thus, as many know, relying solely on the incomplete concept of pharma to manage your health is not optimal.

The modern approach to diet has been similarly corrupted in a subtle, foundational way, to the point where most people are completely missing the forest for the trees. Mainstream diet focuses on micronutrients and macronutrients. We need the right balance of proteins, fats, and carbs (macronutrients) to have energy and maintain a healthy weight. And we need to not be deficient in any vitamins or minerals (micronutrients) so that our internal processes function properly. This is a chemical-based approach. And a healthy body will in fact reflect an abundance of energy, a healthy weight, and not be deficient in any vitamins and minerals.

But it stands to reason—if there were an optimal amount and balance of macronutrients and micronutrients for the human species, there would be an ideal diet for everyone. Yet this is not the case. Humans eat a huge variety of food, even if they live in the same climate and have similar lifestyles. For example, the carnivore and vegan diets are diametrically opposed, yet you could find individuals who thrive under each in any city.

The question is—if macronutrients and micronutrients are the key to dietary health, why do we prefer different foods? There are a few obvious reasons that come to mind:

Taste preferences. Different individuals have a different genetic makeup of taste buds, which presumably leads them to preferring different tastes. Taste is certainly a part of it. But people also react differently in an energetic sense to different foods. Some people cannot live on ground beef, whereas others swear by it. If you gave two people a ground beef diet, one might thrive, and one might become close to useless, even if they both enjoy the taste. Same with any food. So it’s not just taste.

Lack of nutrients. If someone is deficient in a vitamin or mineral, they will presumably gravitate towards foods on an instinctual level that will fill those gaps. This certainly happens. But if someone was deficient in a certain nutrient and naturally started craving a food that would fulfill it, they would eat a lot of that food, hypothetically get a lot of the deficient nutrient quickly—and then change their preferences towards something else they are deficient in. This doesn’t usually happen; we change up our diets slightly every couple of days due to taste, but we usually keep coming back to the same core foods over time. If we naturally gravitated towards foods that meet our presumed nutrient deficiencies, we would not keep going back to a core diet which had those deficiencies, except presumably in the case of:

Natural urges, habit, and/or addiction. One person might have allowed themselves to drink soda every day for a decade, and they now prefer sugar more than someone else because they are addicted to it. One person might wait longer in between eating, leading them to the urge for fatty foods. One person might eat oatmeal for breakfast because they started doing it when they were five years old and never considered stopping. All of these are fair points, but if we look at two people who eat only whole foods that are generally considered “healthy”, and actively manage their diet and try new things, and eat at the same intervals throughout the day, they will still have drastically different food preferences.

With all that we’ve covered so far, a purely nutrient-focused approach to diet is difficult to reconcile. If two people with similar lifestyles “swear by” drastically different diets, there are only two ways we can explain this:

1. Either one of the two people is lying, or thinking they have more energy, strength, mental acumen, or spiritual development than they do.
2. Different people react better or worse to certain foods.

For #1, there are mentally sharp, emotionally balanced, highly athletic people who follow vegan and carnivore diets. The proof is in the pudding. You can’t in good faith argue that certain foods are, on a grand scale, “good” or “bad” for everyone. Sure, leafy greens are generally considered good for you, and ground beef bad, but only because most people lack any sort of green vegetable or vegetable in general and eat way too much ground beef, and most people will presumably thrive off of a balance between them (vegan and carnivore diets being extremely niche long-term). Just because the mainstream diet shifts away from a certain food doesn’t mean that it is inherently good for you.

It seems we must go with #2 —different people thrive under different diets.

That was a whole lot of talk just to arrive at a conclusion that most people instinctively agree with: eat foods that make you feel good on a wholesome, non-urge-addict level. This is the right brain approach. Ideally, you eat the foods that feel good to you, and if you experience health problems, you can use the left brain approach to find gaps or overindulgences in your nutrition by looking at micronutrients and macronutrients.

Here’s the problem. Many people do exactly this, and spend a ton of time and effort on nutrition, but fail to arrive at a diet that works perfectly. By “works perfectly”, I mean results in them having perfect, consistent bowel movements every single day, no uncomfortable bloating or gas ever, tons of energy all of the time, not over- or under-weight to even the slightest degree, and other things of that nature. In fact, many people with health conditions such as IBS try everything—yes, they eat whole foods, get plenty of fiber, and drink plenty of water—but nothing works to fix their digestion. On a less extreme scale, many people will simply ignore minor digestion issues because they don’t seem to have that much of an effect on overall wellbeing—but I’d personally argue that they actually do, and much of our negative thoughts and emotions are very directly linked to our gut.

If we exhaust the left brain approach to its absolute capacity and still don’t get perfect results, we need to start using our right brain more. But there are a litany of issues with trying to simply vibe out which foods agree with you. For one, trial and error is a long process because of the sheer number of foods we have available to us. Two, we often eat many different foods and spices in conjunction with one another, which makes testing variables very difficult. Three, other things affect our health besides food, so it’s not always easy to tell what the effect of certain foods even was. Four, it’s difficult to tell if we crave a certain food in a wholesome sense, or if we are succumbing to addiction, habit, or temporary urge.

In a grand sense, because everyone is different, there is no framework. You can approach diet from a left brain only perspective and make good progress. If that doesn’t work, though, you’re usually left guessing in an endless and frustrating saga of trial and error, operating on a suboptimal level across the physical, mental, and emotional planes.

Here is the point of this post. There actually is a right brain framework to follow. You input subjective traits about yourself and what you struggle with physically and mentally. Then you get food suggestions, and if you follow these suggestions, your digestion becomes perfect. You are a healthier weight, have far more energy, and a slew of negative emotions simply disappear from your daily life—because the problem was always with your body, not your mind, even though you didn’t make the connection because there was no clear feedback mechanism.

These are bold claims. Frameworks, especially for diet, are a dime a dozen. Truthfully, I have no idea why this framework works. It’s very old and a lot of people use it. All I know is that it sounded plausible, so I tried it. It fixed my literal digestive issues instantly and I also feel as though I have a brand new lease on life due to the terrible effects less-than-perfect digestion was having on my mental and emotional health without me realizing it. I would bet that the same is happening to you—unless your digestion is literally perfect already and you feel you are thriving as your best self for every single hour of every single day.

Again, this framework can help everyone, from the IBS sufferer to the person who just curiously seems to fall victim to negative emotions at a higher rate than others despite seeming to have far higher emotional intelligence. So let’s get into it.

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Everything is made up of the four elements, including humans. Due to nature or nurture, most humans tend to be out of balance—either one or two of the elements is present in excess.

The foods you eat can balance this excess element. Once you’re balanced, your body functions properly in all areas, and especially digestion. Perfect digestion leads to a far better life. It’s that simple.

The three classifications are:

• Vata (air). You likely have an excess of vata if you suffer from: dry skin, constipation, anxiety, chaotic thoughts, underweight.
• Pitta (fire). You likely have an excess of pitta if you suffer from: oily skin, anger/rage/hatred, diarrhea, heartburn, workaholism.
• Kapha (earth). You likely have an excess of kapha if you are: sad, overweight, sluggish, lethargic, slow, too reliant on a routine, struggle to do new things.

There are, of course, benefits to any one of the three classifications. However, the benefits come to the surface when you are balanced. If you are not balanced, you experience the negative effects of an abundance of that particular element, which is why it makes sense to focus on the negatives when determining which imbalances you have.

Most people have two imbalances, with one imbalance being more extreme than the other. Seasonal changes are a factor in which imbalance affects you. A particular season can balance out one of your imbalances and bring the negative effects of the other imbalance to the forefront. For example, vata (cold, dry) is balanced by the hot, humid summer. So if you are primarily vata with some pitta, the negative effects of your pitta imbalance will likely surface during the summer because the vata imbalance is subdued.

Give yourself an honest assessment, look up foods to balance your imbalances out (just search “vata diet” etc. and cross reference different lists), then build your diet around only those foods. Simple as that. The effects will be nearly instantaneous.

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Personally, I am extremely vata, so in the cold, dry winter, I need to take extreme care to maintain balance. In the summertime, my pitta imbalance comes to the forefront. If out of balance, instead of feeling anxiety, I feel anger and hatred. Instead of struggling to get anything done because I switch between tasks so quickly, I get hyper fixated on a goal, usually exercise, and try to overachieve, usually in the form of working out multiple hours per day and usually getting injured.

Full list of things that this approach has fixed for me:

• Literal digestion—perfect scheduled BMs like clockwork, no more discomfort
• Lower back pain—I could do as much stretching, foam rolling, yoga, and strength training as I wanted, and my lower back would still be an issue
• Rampant anxiety—this made no sense, because I’ve done a ton of work on my mental and emotional states, yet sometimes it seemed to be completely out of my control—body imbalances were overriding mental effort
• Drug habits—nothing extreme, just needed a combination of coffee/weed/tobacco if I wanted to get work done or think consistently pleasant thoughts—this is no longer the case
• Focus is vastly improved—I am always at my peak level of meditation “skill”
• I feel and am smarter, because I was experiencing brain fog from poor digestion, ranging from mild to severe and exceptionally frustrating and debilitating
• Sleep is deep and fulfilling—I can go to bed whenever I want and wake up after 7.5 to 9 hours feeling completely refreshed, no longer need to religiously wear a blackout eye mask and ear plugs
• More clean energy due to all of the above—which I can direct towards anything I want without getting off track

I would highly, highly recommend looking into this unless your digestion is literally perfect all of the time. I would especially recommend looking into this if you still have mental and emotional problems despite putting a lot of effort and thought into healing trauma and managing your emotional wellbeing.

The exact term for this framework is Ayurveda.

It is the most amazing feeling to realize you have been fighting an invisible enemy all along, and the enemy decided to give up the second you adopted Ayurveda.