The Best Diet For You
September 13th, 2005 by Y.G.He usually doesn’t write about dieting, but I found Steve Pavlina’s approach to finding a diet that works for you interesting: he applied to it the principle of his “30 days to success” method, which basically consists in adopting whatever change we want to make for a 30-days period only, much like we’d do for the trial version of a piece of software, instead of immediately get overwhelmed by the crushing feeling that “it’s forever and our lives will therefore be miserable forever too because it just seems so hard”.
Experiment. Try different ways of eating. Use the 30 days to success method for each type of diet you want to try. 30 days is about the minimum because during the first week or two after any dietary improvement, you’re bound to experience some detox effects, which can make you feel lousy before you feel better. Headaches, back aches, and mood swings are common.
When you test each new diet, take written notes on your experiences. Note the effects on your level of energy, mental clarity, and feeling of well-being. I use my regular journal for this (on my PC), so I can do a quick keyword search to pull up my notes and observations of all the diets I’ve ever tried.
It’s all about experimentation and tinkering with your own body, in a way. I’m not sure that 30 days are necessarily enough to find a way of eating more healthily—I’m talking of appropriate diets here, not the fad stuff with eating cabbage only for two weeks and other mumbo-jumbo things—and I know from experience that one can stumble and fall a few times after having gone on a different lifestyle for much more than one month; the experiment approach nevertheless is an intriguing way of considering things.
