Inner Voice

                            
The world is full of dieting information.  Some is valid, and some….is not so valid, and even the seemingly valid information is often more applicable to certain types of bodies and personalities than to others. 

It is easy to outsource our food decisions and dieting beliefs, because there is no shortage of fitness experts, diet gurus…including medical doctors, and lifestyle designers, who are ready to turn us into Diet Converts, or true Believers. 

It’s intoxicating to stumble across some diet book or some website that appears to have all the answers: a single guide you can faithfully read and follow to achieve your wished-for-goal. It often feels comfortable to listen to someone else tell you how it is.

But it’s important to avoid falling into a pitfall that’s a common trap.  Because these diet gurus or medical experts mostly make sense, we can easily take their word as gospel …swallow each and every thing they say….and stop relying on our own instinct and experience.
In life we are deluged by other people’s opinions on how we should live; how we should think; how we should eat and not eat; exercise and not exercise; how we should look; how much we should weigh.  But when we stop examining our lifestyle choices critically by using our own personal and individual judgment,  it can become more and more difficult to think for ourselves. We need to be intentional about the choices we make, letting our own inner voice guide us in making decisions.  Life is all about finding out what works for each of us, individually; how to increase the things that make us happy, and decrease the things that don’t.

If I become interested and intrigued by someone’s argument for a particular diet, lifestyle, or technique, I like to try it out with a neutral mindset for a while, then I abandon any part of it that doesn’t work for me personally. In this way I can find out if it works for my purposes right now,  or whether it might be useful at some later time.  Some of it might get indexed as a potentially useful item in my own diet toolbox, …. or not.    
                             
ADOPTING  too many voices and BELIEVING in too many “right ways” or  “only ways” of doing things can make for a really noisy head.  It can cause a person to live in a perpetual state of feeling like they’re letting themselves AND all those inner gurus down.  That can wind up as one big disappointment fest all the time, no matter what you do, you hear the nagging of some disappointed inner guru.

When dealing with conflicting voices and conflicting beliefs, ….my own key solution is to work to develop a strong sense of who I am, and what I’m doing, and what are my own basic non-negotiable beliefs,…. before I listen and accept the beliefs of others…including those who are “experts”.  There are a lot of “experts” around these days, who will do a fabulous job at convincing us to adopt their own viewpoints, and dieting lifestyles. What I do is listen to their advice; hold that advice up to be judged by my own individual life standards; and either say:  “Yes, I can add that in” or “No, sorry that’s not a specific fit for me right now.”
I believe it is important to continue developing my own inner voice.   I listen deep down inside myself.  This is where the good stuff comes from.  Even if I make huge mistakes and rediscover something that people were pushing on me in the first place, that wisdom will then be mine - because I’ll have earned it.

There is no substitute for first-hand experience. I involve myself in various dieting experiences; pay attention to my own personal experiences;  and then listen, with honesty and sensitivity, to what personally results from those experiences.

Diet and other self-help books, the internet, and statistics are great things to generate ideas.  But ultimately it’s up to me to test how well MY life tolerates and incorporates each and every specific belief and practice. Despite how easy the “experts” make it to think otherwise,  I’m the only person that can do that for me, and you are the only person that can do that for you.