I was talking to my very wise, healthy 84 year old Dad over the weekend who quoted Earl Nightingale. “The opposite of success is not failure but conformity”. It really hit home to me as so many times we conform and fail with health, rather than stepping out of what everyone else is doing and going against the grain despite opposition from family, friends,  critics and being different.

There is a change happening and people realise that doing what we have been doing for the last 4 decades is creating a wave of lifestyle sickness that is now at epidemic proportions.

Only early last century our biggest health issue was plagues and sanitation, we soon learnt to combat that by cleaning up our external environment.  Then midway through the century  and up until the last decade, lifestyle diseases reigned supreme like; heart disease, cancer, and diabetes.   Now the tide has turned, autoimmune disease ( a disease where the body sees itself as the enemy and destroys itself) such as multiple sclerosis, Hashimotos, dementia, osteoporosis, type 1 diabetes and many more are now in the number two position for deaths and number one position for health problems.  We are no longer fighting the enemy  (plagues and infection) we are fighting our own bodies. And perhaps it is not about looking at cleaning up our external environment (we’ve done that) but rather to look to our internal environment.

A health statistic or any other one for that matter is because everyone is doing the same thing and getting the same result.  If you don’t want to be the latest in a long line of health statistics in the nation let alone your family then don’t do what they are doing.  Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result, so change for a new result.

Low fat, high fibre, whole grains, long life foods, packaged tick of approval foods, breakfast cereals, modified milks & margarines are foods that are in most peoples fridges and pantries, but what if all the marketing and advertising and science has been wrong and that a whole nation has been duped into eating food that not only contributes to childhood obesity, but adult illness and the eventual destruction of the body by itself.

When somebody tells me that they have been to their GP and they have been told that diet has nothing to do with their condition, I turn my head on the side like a confused puppy and wonder what they think makes every cell in the human body.  It is the food you eat.  Put good food in and you’ll get good results, put bad food in and you’ll get bad results.

But what is a good food and what is bad, it has become very confusing, everyone tells you something different and then you just throw up your hands in horror and do what you want anyway?

Common sense is not common anymore and intellectually I believe deep down we all know exactly what we should be eating, but there is a complacency and perhaps even some laziness that prevents us from allowing the truth to be whispered in our ears by our own common sense.

The reason why many diets don’t work is that people see them as a diet for 6 weeks, I hear it all the time, “I can’t eat that because I’m on a diet”.  If you do an eating program or shake program for 6 weeks, lose all your weight then go back to your old ways and expect to keep the weight off then you are delusional.  Common sense screams at you that what you have been doing all along has got you to the weight and health issues you have then going on a six week program and going back to your old ways is not going to work. DOP!