Perfect is the Enemy of Good

Most people sometimes feel a strong inner drive to be “perfect” despite the fact that perfection is an impossible and often self-defeating goal.

Just like in every area of life, whatever diet, food plan, or way-of-eating, that one chooses can never be followed perfectly. Each of us makes many independent daily food choices based on what we feel best fits with our own lifestyle and personal eating philosophy. We aren’t all the same, and I believe that we shouldn’t try to be. However, there are a few helpful things that we might want to keep in mind while making those daily food choices.

Perfect is the Enemy of Good.

Everywhere we read conflicting information about what foods we should eat, which micronutrient or chemical contained in food should-we-choose-to-eat-or-not-eat to make us normal weight, and keep us from illness or death (i.e. healthy).

Our modern world will never be perfectly free of contaminants.

Okay, it’s the collective fault of society, but there is no going back. Also, life-spans here in the modern world are longer and more disease free … overall for more people … than life-spans were in our recorded past. So since we can't have perfectly pure food, the operative question in the real world is: Which of the available food choices are acceptable for me to realistically consume in my own life? What won’t make me fat, sick, or kill me?

Risks outside our control tend to get exaggerated.

We are frequently told that we should not eat this or that food substance, AND we are frequently told that we should eat these specific food substances.

People tend to get very worked up over what is perceived as the latest “chemical threat” in our food. Instead, we need to focus on the large risks that are within our control, … like focusing on the AMOUNTS of the readily available food that we eat … rather than exaggerating the smaller threats of what specific foods contain, just because the way that these micronutrients or other chemicals are handled often appear to be outside of our personal control.

New in the news is not new in the world.

When the news media highlights a “chemical threat” the tendency is to think the threat itself is new; that the consequences are unknown, and in the future. But if some chemical in foods does actually contribute to the risk of disease, it’s been doing so for years. That risk isn’t something looming in our future, it’s already in the present, and already part of the life we now live.

Perfectly pure food is not available on this planet. Instead of focusing on the latest news media hype, we need to do the best we can with the food supply we've got.

So lets focus on eating readily-available food in ways that will provide us with a personally satisfying lifestyle while understanding that EVERY person cannot achieve a slim, shapely, fit and toned body; that most diseases are simply a risk of life; that our bodies are designed to wear out; and that death will eventually arrive for everyone.