Do you have balance and grace in your diet?

The most important things missing from our modern diets are not macronutrients, micronutrients, or even probiotics. In fact, they have nothing to do with food at all! Instead, they are crucial elements lacking in our approach to food.

They are: balance and grace.

We have far too little space for compromise, mistakes, and the human experience of truly enjoying food in the modern dietary world. One of the largest contributors to this unfortunate situation is social media and the way in which health and diet influencers portray themselves to the outside world as exemplary models of a particular dietary approach in polarizing, alienating, orthorexic and unrealistic ways. All too often they convey an overbearing message that in order to reach health goals you must follow someone else’s approach exactly as they depict themselves online. To make matters worse, their online presence is often not entirely reality.

Most of these orthorexic approaches provide relatively quick, powerful health benefits and, often those health benefits are not realized unless the dietary change is adhered to religiously. Therefore, strict adherence makes sense for short term applications. However, solutions that have the ability to last for a lifetime are something different altogether.

Hard core, short term dietary approaches that maintain strict control over something you need out of your diet or must have in your diet are very important for healing and getting on track. I have used them myself and am thankful I did. But, long term solutions that provide the nourishment needed for a lifetime of health make space for balance and grace. Whatever it is that works for you, well, works for you. Identify it, evaluate it, and if it works for you embrace it, and own it.

I have spoken and written extensively on the unique human requirement for meeting our biological AND cultural AND emotional AND ethical AND religious AND political requirements for ultimate nourishment. Dogmatically adhering to a lifelong diet that provides biological nourishment at the expense of the others is not sustainable nor certainly not as powerful as it could be.

Brianna made Bill's scratch made birthday cake (2017) and all the kids made his homemade sourdough pasta dinner

This blog post is by no means a license to cheat.

In fact, it is the exact opposite!

Using stringent, orthorexic adherence to a particular diet simply creates the opportunity to fail. Living a life full of genuine nourishment means creating a dietary perspective that is balanced and provides the space for grace. This means we do not define ourselves from our dietary approach (if your approach has a label then it probably isn’t the right lifelong diet for you because it is not yours).

Instead, define your dietary approach based on an honest inventory of yourself, your lifestyle and what you truly value.

That is an approach that is not only nourishing but has the potential to last a lifetime.

And that is what we are trying to accomplish at the Modern Stone Age Kitchen.