Have you ever seen the movie, The Mask of Zorro?
If not, there’s an early scene in which Anthony Hopkins’ character (an aging Zorro) teaches Antonio Banderas’ character (a thief who later adopts the identity of Zorro) to become a better swordsman.
He accomplishes the task by teaching basic attack, defense, and maneuvering abilities to his protégé within the confines of a large circle carved into the floor. As the student becomes more proficient with the techniques, the master gradually makes him fight within smaller circles.
The specific attacks, defenses, and maneuvers don’t become any more advanced themselves, but they still become significantly more deadly due to the finesse with which they’re applied.
In other words, the student starts out by learning principles and then learns how to apply them with progressively greater proficiency.
This is, in fact, a fantastic way to learn and master almost any skill.
It’s also, unfortunately, often the opposite of how we learn to improve our diets.
Case in point. Below is a picture of the Diet & Nutrition section at the Barnes & Noble in Brookfield, WI.
While a section of testimonials can be found somewhere in each of these hundreds of books—meaning that the programs contained therein have produced positive results for a number of people—the selection of books, as a whole, contains a variety of conflicting advice.
It’s probably only a slight exaggeration to say that trying to implement the advice from all of them would leave you with a diet that looks like this:
In other words, the books don’t really teach principles of nutrition. Rather, they teach the application of specific details with little regard to how those details may be useful in specific cases but detrimental in other cases or contradict other factual nutrition details.
The result is that practitioners (i.e. dieters) often become very good at following the specific set of rules in everyday situations. But without learning principles, they fall off the wagon or experience feelings of missing out or being too restricted when facing situations that aren’t specified in the rules (e.g. working late and not having dinner prepped, eating at a restaurant, co-workers’ birthday treats).
Experiencing long-term nutrition success—much like sword fighting—involves learning a few basic principles, implementing the principles with ever-greater proficiency, and, perhaps most importantly, remembering…
There’s no such thing as “the best diet”!
Putting it into practice
I’ll elaborate on some basic nutrition principles and methods to practice them in upcoming weeks.
For now, think about diets you’ve tried in the past, and consider the following questions:
- What, if anything, did you like about them?
- What, if anything, did you dislike about them?
- What advice was similar between diets?
- What advice was seemingly contradictory?
- Did they restrict certain food groups? (e.g. dairy, fruit, grains, nightshades)
- If so, did you miss eating them? Or was it fairly easy to avoid them?
- What type of results did you experience?
- Why did you stop following them?
- Are there pieces of each/any plan that you do still follow?
Did you notice any patterns—particularly ones that elicit positive feelings—in your answers to the questions above? If so, you might be dealing with a helpful principle. Record those patterns somewhere. I’ll offer suggestions on refining them soon.