Diet Inspirational Quotes

The individual who says it is not possible should move out of the way of those doing it.

People tend to be generous when sharing their nonsense, fear, and ignorance. And while they seem quite eager to feed you their negativity, please remember that sometimes the diet we need to be on is a spiritual and emotional one. Be cautious with what you feed your mind and soul. Fuel yourself with positivity and let that fuel propel you into positive action.

Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?

No one wakes up in the morning and says, 'I want to gain 150 pounds and I will start right now!

Many of us are slaves to our minds. Our own mind is our worst enemy. We try to focus, and our mind wanders off. We try to keep stress at bay, but anxiety keeps us awake at night. We try to be good to the people we love, but then we forget them and put ourselves first. And when we want to change our life, we dive into spiritual practice and expect quick results, only to lose focus after the honeymoon has worn off. We return to our state of bewilderment. We're left feeling helpless and discouraged. It seems we all agree that training the body through exercise, diet, and relaxation is a good idea, but why don't we think about training our minds?

Inspiration is external and motivation is internal. It is up to me to provide the switch and you to flip it on!

All worries are less with wine.

Do something every day that is loving toward your body and gives you the opportunity to enjoy the sensations of your body.

Children should have a balanced diet. They should only consume sugar, salt, and fat in equal quantities.

The elimination diet: Remove anger, regret, resentment, guilt, blame, and worry. Then watch your health, and life, improve.

Hunger gives flavour to the food.

Your health is what you make of it. Everything you do and think either adds to the vitality, energy and spirit you possess or takes away from it.

If I don't eat junk, I don't gain weight.

Some people when they see cheese, chocolate or cake they don't think of calories.

Your life does matter. It always matters whether you reach out in friendship or lash out in anger. It always matters whether you live with compassion and awareness or whether you succumb to distractions and trivia. It always matters how you treat other people, how you treat animals, and how you treat yourself. It always matters what you do. It always matters what you say. And it always matters what you eat.

Stop wasting so much energy hating your body; it makes you weaker. Everything good in your life begins from the moment you begin accepting, understanding, respecting, and loving your true self.

Stop and reflect on what your diet is doing for you.

Eliminate blame, guilt, and worry from your diet and watch your health improve.

Enjoy losing weight. Enjoy eating healthy, delicious food. Do not wait until you reach your destination to feel good. Take as much happiness and joy as you can from your weight loss journey.

What we see in the world around us is just a reflection of what is inside of us.

People are so obsessed with that these days. As long as you're healthy, what difference do a few pounds make? Crazy diets. Thirteen-year-old girls on magazine covers who wind up in hospitals because they're so anorexic. Real women don't look like that. And who wants them to? No one wants a woman who looks sick or like she;s been from a refugee camp.

Your current body is the only body that can take you to your new body—so be kind to it.

Excess of happiness and excess of sorrow, both are hazardous. Emotions require a balanced diet too.

If you concentrate on small, manageable steps you can cross unimaginable distances.

While your ego is always trying to figure out its place in the world, your true self knows that your place is always right here, right now.

We may not be able to control life’s circumstances, but we always have a choice about how we use our minds to respond to them.

There is no style in dieting but we become beautiful when we change our style of living.

Some people who have been working out regularly for months or even years are still out of shape because the number of cheat days they have in a week exceeds six.

And dieting, I discovered, was another form of disordered eating, just as anorexia and bulimia similarly disrupt the natural order of eating. "Ordered" eating is the practice of eating when you are hungry and ceasing to eat when your brain sends the signal that your stomach is full. ... All people who live their lives on a diet are suffering. If you can accept your natural body weight and not force it to beneath your body's natural, healthy weight, then you can live your life free of dieting, of restriction, of feeling guilty every time you eat a slice of your kid's birthday cake.

There you are. A simple commandment. Not ten of them, just one: 'Thou shalt not eat.' (Personally, I wish the very first edict from God hadn't involved dieting, don't you?)

Break the rules and make up your own rules.

Happiness is a state of mental,physical and spiritual well-being. Think pleasantly,engaged sport and read daily to enhance your well-being.

Our mothers were largely silent about what happened to them as they passed through this midlife change. But a new generation of women has already started to break the wall of silence.

the man i went on a date with did more than try to "cure me" of my asexuality it's funny because i never thought someone's penis would be considered an antidote of any kind and i don't think that's what my doctor meant when he told me i needed more Vitamin D in my diet but apparently my sexuality was enough of a diagnosis for him to decide to play doctor with me maybe he should’ve put his stethoscope up to my mouth instead of between my breasts maybe then he would’ve heard me when i told him to stop it

One of the characteristics that laymen find most odd about zoologists is their insatiable enthusiasm for animal droppings. I can understand, of course, that the droppings yield a great deal of information about the habits and diets of the animals concerned, but nothing quite explains the sheer glee that the actual objects seem to inspire.

We can only bring about change in our lives when we clearly see two truths: that the pain of remaining the same is greater than the pain of fighting our toughest battles, and that by taking the biggest risks, we gain the most valuable rewards.

While most people are playing it safe and doing everything they can to avoid pain, successful people know that they must face their fears and do what needs to be done regardless of how they feel. They don’t necessarily like the hard work, but they’re willing to do it because they like the results.

Eating a can be the weight that pulls you under or the life raft. It's your choice.

The flowers are so beautiful, but God's love is infinitely stronger for us than the beauty of ALL flowers and all beautiful things combined!

You're so good at what you do, keep pushing, success is on the table at all times!

Hemingway never said any of this. It's all AI-generated bullshit. The hardest lesson I’ve had to learn as an adult is the relentless need to keep going, no matter how shattered I feel inside." This truth is both raw and universal. Life doesn’t pause when our hearts are heavy, our minds are fractured, or our spirits feel like they’re unraveling. It keeps moving—unrelenting, unapologetic—demanding that we move with it. There’s no time to stop, no pause for repair, no moment of stillness where we can gently piece ourselves back together. The world doesn’t wait, even when we need it to. What makes this even harder is that no one really prepares us for it. As children, we grow up on a steady diet of stories filled with happy endings, tales of redemption and triumph where everything always falls into place. But adulthood strips away those comforting narratives. Instead, it reveals a harsh truth: survival isn’t glamorous or inspiring most of the time. It’s wearing a mask of strength when you’re falling apart inside. It’s showing up when all you want is to retreat. It’s choosing to move forward, step by painful step, when your heart begs for rest. And yet, we endure. That’s the miracle of being human—we endure. Somewhere in the depths of our pain, we find reserves of strength we didn’t know we possessed. We learn to hold space for ourselves, to be the comfort we crave, to whisper words of hope when no one else does. Over time, we realize that resilience isn’t loud or grandiose; it’s a quiet defiance, a refusal to let life’s weight crush us entirely. Yes, it’s messy. Yes, it’s exhausting. And yes, there are days when it feels almost impossible to take another step. But even then, we move forward. Each tiny step is proof of our resilience, a reminder that even in our darkest moments, we’re still fighting, still refusing to give up. That fight—that courage—is the quiet miracle of survival.

If you avoid the killer diseases and keep the degenerative ones under control with sensible diet and exercise and whatever chemotherapy you need to stay in balance, you can live nearly forever.

I don't eat healthy because I'm trying to avoid death. Death does not scare me. I am, however, terrified of dying before I am dead. I have a strong desire to make the best of the time I have here. Living foods straight from the Earth help my body thrive, my imagination soar and my mind stay clear. It's about quality of life for me. I feel the best when I eat a diet free of pesticides, chemicals, GMOs and refined sugars. Growing herbs and making my own medicine helps me stay connected to the Earth; hence, helping me connect with my true purpose here. I have work to do here! I choose to leave this planet more beautiful than I found it and eating magical foods gives me the energy and inspiration I need to do my work.

Believe it or not, your body has nothing but unconditional love for you. The proof? Without any effort on your part, your heart is beating, your lungs are breathing, and the rhythm of life is graciously flowing through you every second of every day—unconditionally.

The reason we have such a difficult time losing weight permanently is not because we are making bad choices, but because we are not stopping our automatic subconscious programmed behaviors in their tracks.

Men and boys are constantly portrayed as predatory, sexist, their sense of humour is vilified and their behaviour is regarded as unacceptable. Factor in the constant diet we are fed of men as perpetrators of rape, murder and domestic violence. Boys must wonder whether they will ever be able to do anything right. This must make it painfully difficult for young men and women to build up relations based on honesty, love and trust.

If your golf instructor were to insist that you shave your head, sleep no more than four hours each night, renounce sex, and subsist on a diet of raw vegetables, you would find a new golf instructor. However, when gurus make demands of this kind, many of their students simply do as directed.

I trained. I punished myself. I thought making myself suffer on a day-to-day basis would prepare me for climbing hard at high altitude. I slept on the floor. I carried ice in my bare hands. I beat them against the concrete just to see if I could handle it. I never missed an opportunity to train. I ran stairs until I vomited, then ran more. I ruined relationships to get used to the feeling of failure and sacrifice (it was much easier than holding on). I trained in the gym on an empty diet to learn how far I could push myself without food or water. I imitated and plagiarized the heroes who lived and died before me. I spoke only strong words and ignored weakness at every turn. I subdued my fears. I was opinionated and direct. I became a man either well loved or truly hated. I was ready for anything.

Most people think I'm crazy—I'm in a cult called happiness, I practice the religion of kindness, I'm a quack in the pseudoscience of love, I work in the field of unlimited possibilities, my diet is that of knowledge, my orientation is irrelevant, my purpose is growth, my entitlement is freedom, my motivation is joy, my evidence is my success, and my race is humankind—I still haven't figured out the crazy part.

Find Your Balance.

Your body is your body. Learn about it.

Whether it be training, dieting, working out, or work ethic, for every great excuse "Not" to do something, there are 100 "better" reasons for you to do it.

Saying "Oh, I've already ruined my good eating for today. I'll just eat crap." is like saying "Oh, I dropped my phone on the floor. I'll just smash it till it breaks.

I love to strengthen myself with a healthy diet, plenty of exercise and maintaining a strong connection to myself.

It shouldn't take a life-changing event for you to change your life.

You’re absolutely right. You’re absolutely right. It’s staggering how you jump straight the hell into the heart of a matter. I’m goosebumps all over… By God, you inspire me. You inflame me, Bessie. You know what you’ve done? Do you realize what you’ve done? You’ve given this whole goddam issue a fresh, new, Biblical slant. I wrote four papers in college on the Crucifixion—five, really—and every one of them worried me half crazy because I thought something was missing. Now I know what it was. Now it’s clear to me. I see Christ in an entirely different light. His unhealthy fanaticism. His rudeness to those nice, sane, conservative, tax-paying Pharisees. Oh, this is exciting! In your simple, straightforward bigoted way, Bessie, you’ve sounded the missing keynote of the whole New Testament. Improper diet. Christ lived on cheeseburgers and Cokes. For all we know he probably fed the mult—

The written word is an attempt at completeness when there is no one impatiently awaiting you in a dimly lit bedroom--awaiting your tales of the day, as the healing hands of someone who knew turn to you and touch you, and you lose yourself so completely in another that you are momentarily delivered from yourself. Whispering across the pillow comes a kind voice that might tell you how to get out of certain difficulties, from someone who might mercifully detach you from your complications. When there is no matching of lives, and we live on a strict diet of the self, the most intimate bond can be with the words that we write: Oh often have I washed and dressed And what's to show for all my pain? Let me lie abed and rest: Ten thousand times I've done my best And all's to do again. I ask myself if there is an irresponsible aspect in relaying thoughts of pain as inspiration, and I wonder whether Housman actually infected the sensitives further, and pulled them back into additional darkness. Surely it is true that everything in the imagination seems worse then it actually is--especially when one is alone and horizontal (in bed, as in the coffin). Housman was always alone--thinking himself to death, with no matronly wife to signal to the watching world that Alfred Edward was quite alright--for isn't that partly the aim of scoring a partner: to trumpet the mental all-clear to a world where how things seem is far more important than how things are? Now snugly in eternity, Housman still occupies my mind. His best moments were in Art, and not in the cut and thrust of human relationships. Yet he said more about human relationships than those who manage to feast on them. You see you can't have it both ways

The longer I have been on the raw food path, the more I tend to come full circle and return to where my original ideas and inspiration of wanting to eat raw food come from - and that’s natural hygiene and its principles.

You stop accepting yourself and stop connecting three realms of the triangle of awareness within you. You fail to realize that this is mistaken notion that "a lighter you is a happier you" isn't making you happier at all.

Whatever you are thinking, your thoughts are surely about something other than the word with which this sentence will end. But even as you hear these very words echoing in your very head, and think whatever thoughts they inspire, your brain is using the word it is reading right now and the words it read just before to make a reasonable guess about the identity of the word it will read next, which is what allows you to read so fluently.4 Any brain that has been raised on a steady diet of film noir and cheap detective novels fully expects the word night to follow the phrase It was a dark and stormy, and thus when it does encounter the word night, it is especially well prepared to digest it. As long as your brain’s guess about the next word turns out to be right, you cruise along happily, left to right, left to right, turning black squiggles into ideas, scenes, characters, and concepts, blissfully unaware that your nexting brain is predicting the future of the sentence at a fantastic rate. It is only when your brain predicts badly that you suddenly feel avocado.

Detoxing is nonsense, it's a complete fallacy that the body needs to detox. Removal of waste products and toxins is a continuous process and we don't need to periodically flush them out. The body does a perfectly good job of eliminating any substances on its own. The entire concept of needing to detoxify, purify, or cleanse your body with these regimes is literally made up by the diet industry to sell us more shit (that doesn't work) to fix our bodies (that don't need fixing).

If we could only live on good food like that, he said to her somewhat loudly, we wouldn't have the country full of rotten teeth and rotten guts. Living in a bogswamp, eating cheap food and the streets paved with dust, horsedung and consumptives' spits.

Creating a home that makes you feel wonderful is a gift you give yourself that echoes through the rest of your life. A bedroom you love is one in which you want to have an organized, well-cared-for wardrobe, which means less money spent replacing your battered items. A happy, practical, smartly appointed kitchen is one you actually *want* to cook in, which means much less money spent eating out or ordering in. A chic and comfortable living room means more entertaining at home and embracing the lost art of dinner parties (always cheaper than doing drinks and a restaurant dinner!). Even a Zen, candle-filled, clean bathroom is one in which you want to spend time doing home spa treatments instead of feeling like you have to go somewhere expensive to feel beautiful. If you create a home that is most attuned to your life and somewhere you really enjoy being, everything benefits.

You can do ANYTHING you put your mind to!

Avoiding temptation is much easier than resisting it.

A daily diet of God’s Word is guaranteed to bless.

Sports is equivalent important in life along with education and healthy diet to have peaceful mindset and a positive approach towards life.

With the right kinds of energy, every disease is curable.

Delicious, nutritious recipes inspired by a plant based diet. Amazing clean and light feeling foods. All recipes are… Vegan, Gluten Free, Low Sugar, Guilt Free with a variety of raw recipes

Follow an exercise routine in which there is no routine. Whenever something becomes routine, you don't pay attention to it anymore. I rarely do the same routine twice which keeps me interested and focused.

The group of overweight nine- to twelve-year-olds randomized to the water intervention was told to increase their water intakes to the point their urine became straw-colored (pale yellow). Once again, not every kid complied, but those who did lost significantly more weight.3856 Inspired

Just as we diet for a better body, we must also diet for a better mind. The things we look at, read, hear, and the people we associate with, shapes us into the person we currently are. Do you like the mental shape your are in? If not, it's time to get on a mental diet. Reference: Philippians 4:8

To illustrate toaster righteousness, let’s say God decides to use toasters to spread His messages. He incorporates his love into an LLC called God’s Toasters, LLC. Toasters are now the legal and spiritual messengers of God. Different toaster brands are made all over the world. It doesn’t matter where the toasters are introduced in the world, some people support them and others oppose them. It is God’s will to have different toasters made in different countries. Toaster Righteousness comes into play when people start believing that if we do not eat a specific bread recipe and shaped bread, we cannot receive authentic holy toast. Exceptions are made with pita lovers, but everyone else in the world is doomed to live in eternal burnt-toast hell, not golden-brown toast heaven. Throughout history, bread is a staple of peoples’ diets. The introduction of toasters is supposed to support show us how to eat bread better, being grateful for the bread we are given, sharing toast with one’s neighbor, and not killing in the name of bread.

At a certain age, I come to understand all roads led to my vagina. I have no idea why this is the case. It’s subconsciously, telepathically, and consciously added to my diet as a chastity pill. The energy of the chastity pill follows me wherever I go, like an invisible dog fence. I suppose in Arabic this would be known as the anti-sharmoota pill, which seeks to protect you from natural urges of prostituting yourself. Remember, sharmoota has several meanings – it’s a one-stop shop term that aims to degrade a female or male, but mainly a woman.

All the world’s major religions have their own form of the Golden Rule that teaches kindness to others as the essence of their message. They all recognize animals as sentient and vulnerable to us, and include them within the moral sphere of our behavior. There are also strong voices in all the traditions emphasizing that our kindness to other beings should be based on compassion. This is more than merely being open to the suffering of others; it also explicitly includes the urge to act to relieve their suffering. We are thus responsible not just to refrain from harming animals and humans, but also to do what we can to stop others from harming them, and to create conditions that educate, inspire, and help others to live in ways that show kindness and respect for all life.

Even though deaths were lower among the rich who lived more spaciously and moved residence more easily, the plague reduced their control, creating a shortage of manpower that raised the status of ordinary people. The wool-processing workshops of Italy and Flanders, England and France were short of workers. The rise in wages and the fall in inequality led to higher spending power which doubled per capita investment, leading in turn to higher production in textiles and other consumer goods. Fewer mouths to feed meant better diets. Female wages – once half those of men – were now the same. Workers formed guilds. The new confidence felt by ordinary people empowered them to launch a spate of peasant revolts. The shortage of labour necessitated new sources of power – hydraulics were harnessed to drive watermills and smelting furnaces – and new unpaid workers were obtained from a new source altogether: African slavery. Demand for silk, sugar, spices and slaves inspired European men, bound by a new esprit de corps, to voyage abroad, to destroy their rivals, in the east and in Europe itself, so that they could supply these appetites. The competition intensified improvements in firearms, cannon, gunpowder and galleons. The paradox of the Great Mortality was not only that it elevated the respect for humanity, it also degraded it; it not only decimated Europe, it became a factor in Europe’s rise.

In Tokyo, ramen is a playground for the culinary imagination. As long as the dish contains thin wheat noodles, it's ramen. In fact, there's a literal ramen playground called Tokyo Ramen Street in the basement of Tokyo Station, with eight top-rated ramen shops sharing one corridor. We stopped by one evening after a day of riding around on the Shinkansen. After drooling over the photos at establishments such as Junk Garage, which serves oily, brothless noodles hidden under a towering slag heap of toppings, we settled on Ramen Honda based on its short line and the fact that its ramen seemed to be topped with a massive pile of scallions. However, anything in Tokyo that appears to be topped with scallions is actually topped with something much better. You'll meet this delectable dopplegänger soon, and in mass quantities. The Internet is littered with dozens if not hundreds of exclamation point-bedecked ramen blogs (Rameniac, GO RAMEN!, Ramen Adventures, Ramenate!) in English, Japanese, and probably Serbian, Hindi, and Xhosa. In Tokyo, you'll find hot and cold ramen; Thai green curry ramen; diet ramen and ramen with pork broth so thick you could sculpt with it; Italian-inspired tomato ramen; and Hokkaido-style miso ramen. You'll find ramen chains and fiercely individual holes-in-the-wall. Right now, somewhere in the world, someone is having a meet-cute with her first bowl of ramen. As she fills up on pork and noodles and seaweed and bamboo shoots, she thinks, we were meant to be together, and she is embarrassed at her atavistic reaction to a simple bowl of soup.

The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. Oh, what a pleasure that was! Mollie Katzen's handwritten and illustrated recipes that recalled some glorious time in upstate New York when a girl with an appetite could work at a funky vegetarian restaurant and jot down some tasty favorites between shifts. That one had the Pumpkin Tureen soup that Margo had made so many times when she first got the book. She loved the cheesy onion soup served from a pumpkin with a hot dash of horseradish and rye croutons. And the Cardamom Coffee Cake, full of butter, real vanilla, and rich brown sugar, said to be a favorite at the restaurant, where Margo loved to imagine the patrons picking up extras to take back to their green, grassy, shady farmhouses dotted along winding country roads. Linda's Kitchen by Linda McCartney, Paul's first wife, the vegetarian cookbook that had initially spurred her yearlong attempt at vegetarianism (with cheese and eggs, thank you very much) right after college. Margo used to have to drag Calvin into such phases and had finally lured him in by saying that surely anything Paul would eat was good enough for them. Because of Linda's Kitchen, Margo had dived into the world of textured vegetable protein instead of meat, and tons of soups, including a very good watercress, which she never would have tried without Linda's inspiration. It had also inspired her to get a gorgeous, long marble-topped island for prep work. Sometimes she only cooked for the aesthetic pleasure of the gleaming marble topped with rustic pottery containing bright fresh veggies, chopped to perfection. Then Bistro Cooking by Patricia Wells caught her eye, and she took it down. Some pages were stuck together from previous cooking nights, but the one she turned to, the most splattered of all, was the one for Onion Soup au Gratin, the recipe that had taught her the importance of cheese quality. No mozzarella or broken string cheeses with- maybe- a little lacy Swiss thrown on. And definitely none of the "fat-free" cheese that she'd tried in order to give Calvin a rich dish without the cholesterol. No, for this to be great, you needed a good, aged, nutty Gruyère from what you couldn't help but imagine as the green grassy Alps of Switzerland, where the cows grazed lazily under a cheerful children's-book blue sky with puffy white clouds. Good Gruyère was blocked into rind-covered rounds and aged in caves before being shipped fresh to the USA with a whisper of fairy-tale clouds still lingering over it. There was a cheese shop downtown that sold the best she'd ever had. She'd tried it one afternoon when she was avoiding returning home. A spunky girl in a visor and an apron had perked up as she walked by the counter, saying, "Cheese can change your life!" The charm of her youthful innocence would have been enough to be cheered by, but the sample she handed out really did it. The taste was beyond delicious. It was good alone, but it cried out for ham or turkey or a rich beefy broth with deep caramelized onions for soup.

In the early 1680s, at just about the time that Edmond Halley and his friends Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke were settling down in a London coffee house and embarking on the casual wager that would result eventually in Isaac Newton’s Principia, Hemy Cavendish’s weighing of the Earth, and many of the other inspired and commendable undertakings that have occupied us for much of the past four hundred pages, a rather less desirable milestone was being passed on the island of Mauritius, far out in the Indian Ocean some eight hundred miles off the east coast of Madagascar. There, some forgotten sailor or sailor’s pet was harrying to death the last of the dodos, the famously flightless bird whose dim but trusting nature and lack of leggy zip made it a rather irresistible target for bored young tars on shore leave. Millions of years of peaceful isolation had not prepared it for the erratic and deeply unnerving behavior of human beings. We don’t know precisely the circumstances, or even year, attending the last moments of the last dodo, so we don’t know which arrived first a world that contained a Principia or one that had no dodos, but we do know that they happened at more or less the same time. You would be hard pressed, I would submit to find a better pairing of occurrences to illustrate the divine and felonious nature of the human being-a species of organism that is capable of unpicking the deepest secrets of the heavens while at the same time pounding into extinction, for no purpose at all, a creature that never did us any harm and wasn’t even remotely capable of understanding what we were doing to it as we did it. Indeed, dodos were so spectacularly short on insight it is reported, that if you wished to find all the dodos in a vicinity you had only to catch one and set it to squawking, and all the others would waddle along to see what was up. The indignities to the poor dodo didn’t end quite there. In 1755, some seventy years after the last dodo’s death, the director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford decided that the institution’s stuffed dodo was becoming unpleasantly musty and ordered it tossed on a bonfire. This was a surprising decision as it was by this time the only dodo in existence, stuffed or otherwise. A passing employee, aghast tried to rescue the bird but could save only its head and part of one limb. As a result of this and other departures from common sense, we are not now entirely sure what a living dodo was like. We possess much less information than most people suppose-a handful of crude descriptions by "unscientific voyagers, three or four oil paintings, and a few scattered osseous fragments," in the somewhat aggrieved words of the nineteenth century naturalist H. E. Strickland. As Strickland wistfully observed, we have more physical evidence of some ancient sea monsters and lumbering saurapods than we do of a bird that lived into modern times and required nothing of us to survive except our absence. So what is known of the dodo is this: it lived on Mauritius, was plump but not tasty, and was the biggest-ever member of the pigeon family, though by quite what margin is unknown as its weight was never accurately recorded. Extrapolations from Strickland’s "osseous fragments" and the Ashmolean’s modest remains show that it was a little over two and a half feet tall and about the same distance from beak tip to backside. Being flightless, it nested on the ground, leaving its eggs and chicks tragically easy prey for pigs, dogs, and monkeys brought to the island by outsiders. It was probably extinct by 1683 and was most certainly gone by 1693. Beyond that we know almost nothing except of course that we will not see its like again. We know nothing of its reproductive habits and diet, where it ranged, what sounds it made in tranquility or alarm. We don’t possess a single dodo egg. From beginning to end our acquaintance with animate dodos lasted just seventy years.

Life Path # 11: You are highly intuitive and you are gifted with amazing psychic abilities. Without any effort you become a source of inspiration for other people. You have this innate ability to connect the subconscious and the conscious and the higher and the lower realms. You are a natural psychic. Eleven is the life path of many prophets, inventors, historical leaders, religious leaders and artists. They usually don’t progress early in life but they are destined to accomplish more than other life paths. When they reach the age of maturity (35-45) their success starts to bloom. Confidence is the key to success for the Eleven. Your tremendous potential needs equally tremendous confidence for you to realize your dreams. Without confidence, you are reduced to nothing. As a higher vibration of the number 2, you have many characteristics, talents and tendencies inherent to the Twos. You have to guard your nervous system from stress. Seek out peace and harmony and you will find it in nature. Exercise and diet is necessary for you. Just like the number 2, you love harmony and peace and you possess a refined taste for beauty. You are best suited to anything that requires healing like physical therapy, acupuncture, massage and counseling. As a partner, you know what your partner needs and desires.

From a book Hearty Land: A tale about a journey into a land of abundance; “Hearty Land has a protective layer built of merit from consuming kinder, compassionate, plant-based diets, from the merit of following heaven’s higher way, the Awakenings, from being the golden embodiment of kindness, love, and wisdom, and from their every thought and deed,” Mom continued.

To understand how revolutionary Pasteur’s contributions were, consider the previously popular ideas that attempted to explain why people got sick. For nearly two thousand years, the medical profession believed that four different bodily fluids—blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile—dominated the health and moods of people. When they were in harmony, all was right with the world. When they were out of sync, people fell ill or into “bad humor.” The theory was known as humorism. Doctors were never quite certain what caused imbalance among these humors—ideas ranged from seasons to diet to evil spirits. So they experimented by trial and error to restore the necessary harmony of fluids—often with now seemingly barbaric methods such as bloodletting, which at the time was said to remedy hundreds of diseases. Sometimes, people got better. But most of the time, they got worse. And doctors were never sure why. By the nineteenth century, people began to blame disease on “miasmas” or “bad airs” that floated around dangerously. As hare-brained as it sounds today, “miasma theory” was actually an improvement over humorism because it spawned sanitary reforms that had the effect of removing real disease agents—bacteria. For example, in 1854, when cholera gripped London, the miasma explanation inspired massive, state-sponsored clearing of the air by draining cesspools. A physician of the time, John Snow, was able to isolate the pattern of new cholera cases and to conclude that new cases correlated to proximity to a specific water pump on Broad Street. Disease, he concluded, correlated with that pump—and therefore cholera was not transmitted through miasma, but likely through contaminated water. Snow’s work saved countless lives—and he has subsequently been recognized as one of the most important physicians in history. But while an improvement, Snow’s analysis still didn’t get to the root cause of what actually made those people sick.

A Family That Eats Together, Grows Together.

Letting confusion get in the way of changing your diet and lifestyle will deter you from facing the reality of how hard it is to give up sugar. If you’ll forgive the expression, I am not going to sugar-coat it: sugary drinks, donuts, cake, cookies and candy are out. And there’s no “okay in moderation.” What does that mean: once a week, once on the weekend, only on holidays? It probably doesn't mean Friday after work until Monday morning!

Sugar is A problem in the average diet. But it's not THE problem.

The separation of mind and body that informs medical practice is also the dominant ideology in our culture. We do not often think of socio-economic structures and practices as determinants of illness or well-being. They are not usually “part of the equation.” Yet the scientific data is beyond dispute: socio-economic relationships have a profound influence on health. For example, although the media and the medical profession — inspired by pharmaceutical research — tirelessly promote the idea that next to hypertension and smoking, high cholesterol poses the greatest risk for heart disease, the evidence is that job strain is more important than all the other risk factors combined. Further, stress in general and job strain in particular are significant contributors both to high blood pressure and to elevated cholesterol levels. Economic relationships influence health because, most obviously, people with higher incomes are better able to afford healthier diets, living and working conditions and stress-reducing pursuits. Dennis Raphael, associate professor at the School of Health Policy and Management at York University in Toronto has recently published a study of the societal influences on heart disease in Canada and elsewhere. His conclusion: “One of the most important life conditions that determine whether individuals stay healthy or become ill is their income. In addition, the overall health of North American society may be more determined by the distribution of income among its members rather than the overall wealth of the society…. Many studies find that socioeconomic circumstances, rather than medical and lifestyle risk factors, are the main causes of cardiovascular disease, and that conditions during early life are especially important.” The element of control is the less obvious but equally important aspect of social and job status as a health factor. Since stress escalates as the sense of control diminishes, people who exercise greater control over their work and lives enjoy better health. This principle was demonstrated in the British Whitehall study showing that second-tier civil servants were at greater risk for heart disease than their superiors, despite nearly comparable incomes. Recognizing the multigenerational template for behaviour and for illness, and recognizing, too, the social influences that shape families and human lives, we dispense with the unhelpful and unscientific attitude of blame. Discarding blame leaves us free to move toward the necessary adoption of responsibility, a matter to be taken up when we come in the final chapters to consider healing.

95 percent of us are not even getting the minimum recommended amount of fiber in our diets...We are the mot fiber-deprived society of the modern era, and there are no signs of that letting up.

There's nothing like martyrdom for bringing people together. It's an exalted feeling to be persecuted for righteousness' sake. As Christ remarks, theirs is the kingdom of heaven . . . Without Rome's inspired persecution, Christianity would have been just another cult from the East. But Rome fed us to the lions, and made saints of us. People want to be saints, if it can be done without dieting." Peter at once retaliated with his own pointed observation. "It's a nice theory, but I don't notice that you ever put yourself in jeopardy of arrest. You don't lie down in front of the police cars. You don't handcuff yourself to the clinic's front door. Is martyrdom a privilege reserved for the laity these days?" "The Bishop hasn't required such a sacrifice of me yet." "And you just follow orders?" "That's how hierarchy works . . ."

That was the place to start. Jane Austen. A quick Internet search confirmed what I assumed: a diet full of fricassees, puddings and pies (savory and sweet), and stews, but few vegetables and a strong prejudice against salads until later in the nineteenth century. I looked up a Whole Foods nearby---a haven, albeit an expensive one, for fresh, organic, and beautiful produce---and then jotted down some recipes I thought would appeal to Jane's appetite. I landed on a green bean salad with mustard and tarragon and a simple shepherd's pie. She'd used mustard and tarragon in her own chicken salad. And I figured any good Regency lover would devour a shepherd's pie. I noted other produce I wanted to buy: winter squashes, root vegetables, kale and other leafy greens. All good for sautés, grilling, and stewing. And fava beans, a great thickener and nutritious base, were also coming into season. And green garlic and garlic flowers, which are softer and more delicate than traditional garlic, more like tender asparagus. I wanted to create comfortable, healthy meals that cooked slow and long, making the flavors subtle---comfortably Regency.

Eating is important for your survival. But eating as a passion is a matter of a choice.

Eat healthy foods. A healthy diet eliminates the expenses of doctor visits and the gym.

Truth on social media can offer hope in tragedy. It can also offer solace for a plethora of quiet insecurities that plague our daily lives, the ones that hover in our minds but go unspoken,

A lifetime spent merely enduring your body squanders your power and forfeits your capacity for contentment. 

Mohandas K. Gandhi went to South Africa and saw oppression there. Suddenly, he found a higher purpose: the liberation of the oppressed everywhere. With this new singleness of purpose, he eliminated everything else from his life. He called the process “reducing himself to zero.” 1He dressed in his own homespun cloth (khadi) and inspired his followers to do the same. He spent three years not reading any newspapers because he found that their contents added only non-essential confusion to his life. He spent thirty-five years experimenting with simplifying his diet.2 He spent a day each week without speaking. It would be an understatement to say he eschewed consumerism: when he died he owned fewer than ten items.

Meantime, I underwent another echocardiogram and a CT test with dye. Turns out, my condition had zero to do with diet or behavior. I was born with a congenital heart defect known as a bicuspid aortic valve, the valve that transports blood flow from the heart. It’s an inherited form of heart disease in which two of the leaflets of the valve fuse together in the womb. It is the most common cause of heart disease present at birth and affects between 1 and 2 percent of adults. The walls of the aorta are typically strong enough to tolerate the stress of blood flow from the heart. Aneurysms—which develop in about half of all patients with bicuspid valves—occur when the walls weaken. As the weakened wall deteriorates, it leaves behind damaged tissue that grows in size, heightening the risk of a serious tear. The aortic valve is supposed to be three centimeters. Mine? The size of a can of Coca-Cola. So that’s why time was of the essence.

Brenda Ueland, the famed writing teacher, recommended a habit of walking for inspiration “alone and every day.” She believed that walking revved the engine of inspiration. Novelist John Nichols walks daily. So does writing teacher Natalie Goldberg. The British Lake poets were all great walkers. (Is it an accident that poetry is divided into “feet”?) Their hours on foot were surpassed only by their output on the page. All of us can increase our out-flow by walking. Walking is a surefire path to creativity.

I think back to what inspired me to ditch Diet Culture. I simply wanted to accept myself the way that I am. To be happy, despite what others may think or say. How did that morph into a hatred for those who are living their lives differently than I am? All this hatred is making me tired. Is this really the way that I want to live my life?

Decisions that lead to no action, like a decision to start a new diet tomorrow, are no decisions at all. That's why is so easy to make New Year's resolutions.

Never count calories, never go hungry, only exercise if you want to!

A balanced diet” is not so much about protein/fat/carbohydrate ratios. The real ratios to consider, at least for the typical American or European, are energy consumption/expenditure, pleasure/actual need, food/everything else.