The third diet is the one that is going to work.

The third diet is the one that is right for you.

The third diet is the one that will last you the rest of your life.

Provided you have your head screwed on right, the third diet is the one you get to when you start thinking about diet, stop panicking, and start, finally, listening to your body.

Let me explain.

The first diet.

The first diet is the one you grew up with. It’s what you have always eaten. It is the diet you know, and what you have grown used to eating. This diet is what your family ate, or at least gave to you to eat as a baby, as a small child, though you may have thrown tantrums about what you were given, you will have eaten and liked most of it. Or you mistrusted all food given to you and developed absolute hatred for certain foods. As you grew up you started choosing within the allowable and available foods, if there was any choice at all, luckily for most people there is choice.

Since you started choosing your own food, your diet has shaped you. The first diet has two stages, the second stage is when you become capable of buying your own food, making your own food choices, cooking your own meals. Eating just exactly what you like all the time. now for most people, this leads to healthy sustainable food choices.

Or it used to.

Nowadays it doesn’t always lead to a good healthy diet, and we know it. We are led astray by food marketing, advertising and promotions. Whether we know, or care about it, or not – we choose from the food marketed to us, and this becomes our daily diet. This is the first diet – most of us do well, some of us do very badly, we develop illnesses caused by bad food choices, diabetes or heart problems, we become overweight or have deficiencies which lead to disease. The first diet may not be healthy, but it is what we know, what our families know, what our culture knows. If we are lucky, it is a great diet, most of us are not so lucky and most of us do not make good choices.

So now we get.

The second diet

The second diet is what happens when we become aware of what we are eating and start thinking about it. The second diet happens when we try to change our diet, when we discover how sick we are making ourselves, when we are unhappy with our appearance our health, our longevity.

This is the mad panic reaction, the shock reaction to our bodily state. We start dieting. The yo-yo dieting reaction starts up. The fad dieting, there are so many restrictive diets of all varieties, some good, some not so good, some so unhealthy they are downright dangerous. The GI diet, the keto diet, the south beach diet, the Aitken diet, the apple diet, the 5-8 diet, the fasting diet, I could go on and on there are so many. The restrictive and often unhealthy way we use the same food products and marketing and dieter restriction to try to change how we eat is truly concerning. We rapidly try to change how we look and how we feel about ourselves. This can lead to all kinds of other problems, bulimia, anorexia, diabetes, deficiencies of all kinds. So, we aren’t doing ourselves any good. The second diet takes us to the other extreme of trying to control every little thing about our food intake. The point is not to be extreme but look at yourself, your life, your lifetime habits, the diet of your family, your culture and your country. It is not to force change on the body and hate yourself while doing it. Most people live inside of the second diet all their lives without ever discovering there is another choice. But sooner or later we do start to think again.

And this leads to

the third diet.

The third diet is when you start being sensible about it. The third diet is when you start asking and answering the right questions, without demanding that the answers be what you want. It is when you allow science to answer the questions accurately. We hope that we can rely on the media to provide independently researched good quality science with no money, backing, promotion or government subsidy to screw up the answers. Believe me the answers can be totally screwed.
It happens! It happens so much you wouldn’t believe it. Always check and double check that what you are reading or prepared to try out is accurate. On the diet front, follow the money, if it is not good independently funded research it’s probably promoting a diet that may make you seriously ill.

So, what do you seek in the third diet?

When you finally make your way to the third diet, you will be eating for you and your body at last. You will be taking care of your health and be alright with what you personally can and can’t achieve. You’ll ease up on things and have what is workable in your life, with, what is available in your area, your climate, your culture. You will be able to change any part of it for yourself, whenever you need to, so you’ll feel good about yourself at all times. You will be able to ignore the advertising, the lies, the sickening foods.

This is where health starts.

The third diet.

It’s what you choose to eat once you take stock of where you are and what you know. When you understand the food fads and advertising, when you are no longer swayed by programming even by your own government or culture. They may not have your health at heart but be more interested in, say, the meat marketing board, or the dairy industry than they are in your health.

The third diet is where you learn to make the choices best for you. So thought you are in the same environment you can, for instance, say no not the hamburger but I do want the  side salad or say not the milkshake but I’ll have the juice – see for yourself, make the choices that are right for you.

The third diet is when you ask, how poisonous is this, exactly? And you are prepared to look it up. But you allow yourself, just sometimes that mouthful of chocolate, which is fine, a little bit of what you fancy does you good.

Just occasionally that is the right thing to do, not all the time.

The third diet is when you are prepared to teach your body what to eat, what to like. It’s when you teach it to metabolise foods that are better for it. It is when you listen to what your body really wants and likes, all the way to your microbiome. When you consider more than the mouthfeel or taste, the balance and texture of a food or dish. It is when you are prepared to look at what your food actually consists of, and what it does to your body.

The third diet isn’t just a change of perspective, it isn’t for ‘getting thin’ it isn’t even just for health.

The third diet is a personal revolution.