Autumnal Equinox: Find Your Balance
“On the Fall Equinox, Sept. 23, day and night are approximately equal everywhere. The Sun rises and sets exactly due east/west. The Earth’s axis is exactly aligned with the sun. How about that for profound possibility to harness inner and outer balance?”, opened a piece recently published in the Huffington Post[1].
Religious and spiritual beliefs aside, considering balance as one of the fundamental components of a lifelong approach to healthy living can be one of the single most important factors which determine whether or not someone opts to stay their course with healthy eating, exercise and wellness habits or vacillate between two extremes.
Yo-yo dieting, the repetitive loss and regain of body weight, also called weight cycling, is prevalent in the Western world, affecting an estimated 10 percent to 40 percent of the population[2].
Can you imagine that nearly half the population feels that it’s a choice between eating healthy food versus eating food that tastes good, is easy to find in social situations and doesn’t leave them feeling deprived?
With two-thirds of the U.S. population currently overweight or obese and nearly half of American women are currently dieting to lose weight, something clearly isn’t working.
But at the same time, something else is.
In fact, it’s working so well that $20 Billion annually is grossed[3].
Sounds like a figure indicative of a successful business, doesn’t it?
That’s the annual revenue of the US weight loss industry, which includes diet drugs and weight loss surgeries.
And the market to which this industry is catering is no small one; an estimated 108 million people in the US are on diets and will fail, then reattempt again four more times in a single year.
Some will pay between $11,000 – $26,000 for bariatric surgery[4].
And how many will learn that if they were to stop eating refined grains and increase their intake of good fat that they might discover the ‘secret trick’ to permanent weight loss?
Or that if they cut their calories too low and buy into the ‘diet food’ charade, they’re only one step closer to gaining more weight and making themselves a candidate for Type-2 Diabetes?
To regard this as a tragedy doesn’t even begin to do the state of affairs justice.
It’s not balanced in any way.
The industry is thriving on people’s failures.
People are not being educated about how detrimental the foods advertised to them truly are as that would violate the more important factor- the bottom line- pardon the pun, but that’s the financial bottom line of the processed food industry…not your bottom line!
Profit is number one for the diet industry.
Profit is number one for the processed food companies, as we see in a statement from the CEO of GM, “Bottom line being, though, that we need to ensure that our products taste good, because our accountability is also to our shareholders. And there’s no way we could start down-formulating the usage of salt, sugar, fat if the end result is going to be something that people do not want to eat”[5].
Sift through all misinformation.
Go back to basics.
Eat real, fresh food, which tastes good, and makes you feel good.
It is that simple.
It is this principle upon which a real paleo-inspired diet is based.
Not deprivation. Not being good or bad. Not being so strict and cruel to yourself that you deprive yourself of nourishment (different than depriving yourself of cake…come on, now) and cause yourself to go so far past being hungry that you end up going for anything and everything…until the next round.
Take a breather and today, on the autumnal equinox, allow yourself to find your own balance.
Whether or not you feel there’s a significance to you personally in terms of the position of the sun, the moon, the planets or whatever your guiding lights may be, one thing’s for sure; if the approach isn’t balanced, it’s not going to work!
[1] Barkataki, Susanna. “A Yogi Celebrates the Fall Equinox.” The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, n.d. Web. 23 Sept. 2015
[2] “Yo-yo Dieting Does Not Thwart Weight Loss Efforts or Alter Metabolism Long Term, Study Finds.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, n.d. Web. 23 Sept. 2015
[3] Staff, Abc News. “100 Million Dieters, $20 Billion: The Weight-Loss Industry by the Numbers.” ABC News. ABC News Network, n.d. Web. 23 Sept. 2015
[4] “The National Weight Control Registry.” National Weight Control Registry. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Sept. 2015
[5] “How The Food Industry Manipulates Taste Buds With ‘Salt Sugar Fat'” NPR. NPR, n.d. Web. 23 Sept. 201
