I just came back from spending midsummer in Finland with my girlfriend out in the heart of the wild woods.  On a weekend when most Finlanders are out getting drunk out of their skulls and drowning out on the lakes, we were stone cold sober and camping out while zeroing out.  In the meantime, we had a great discussion about something as simple as diet.

Point blank, people don’t know what to eat anymore.  As a personal trainer, I try to give my clients the best advice I can using plain old common sense, but the fact is there are a shitload of diverse and adverse pitches out there as to what to eat in order to live right.

Ah, the elusive search for the truth, even in something as rudimentary as diet.  Let’s take a look anyway, even though we are all so paranoid we don’t know who to believe anymore.

HELLOWEEN had the right idea, read the lyrics to this song.

Take the Warrior Diet for example: eating only once a day.  The problem with this dietary approach is that there are no more Roman Legionnaires around who live the traveling foot soldier, marching army lifestyle.  That in itself my friends speaks volumes against anyone in our western world copying the said approach.  If you aren’t marching 12 hours or more a day and fighting a few bloody battles in between then the only person you are fooling following a Warrior Diet is yourself.  If your lifestyle does not complement the warrior way of life for real, complete with body armour and lifelong battle scars, then move on to something more realistic.  (Sorry, playing Dungeons and Dragons doesn’t count for qualification.)

The Paleo Diet cancels out all dairy, beans, legumes, grains and moderates fruit intake based on sugar content.  First of all, who the hell among us were around to ever record how early man prepared his food, and what texts of the like are there to be found of the said period’s food preparation?  I can well understand eliminating processed foods which are stock full of unhealthy fats and manipulated sugars in addition to gluttonously starchy carbs, but I cannot fathom the thinking behind skimming out sugars that stem from fruits that nature produces as such.

Simple reasoning says nature produces all food nutrients and elements for a said purpose, and we are idiots to screw with the universal and natural code – – and it can be argued that we are paying the price with our health and allergies nowadays for doing so, at least in part.  Everything that God has put into the food that nature produces is there for a reason and none of it is bad, period.

BOTTOM LINE: behind every single dietary school of thought there is an entire industry waiting to cash in.  It’s a big scam and it’s making somebody very rich.  It’s time to wake up.

The entire superfood industry has boomed astronomically in the last couple of years, as people are turning out in droves to buy anything from Maca to Chia seeds to plankton and beyond.  Some of this stuff is founded, some of it is clearly filled to the brim with innuendo and heresay.

Who is guaranteeing that your Goji berries are organically grown without artificial fertilizers somewhere out in China?  Who is guaranteeing that your Brazilian beef products haven’t been produced using a little steroid enhancement?  Do you take everything the authorties tell you as absolute truth?  Whose agenda is the “truth” serving?  Just look at politics and I need say no more.

Seriously, who is the all-seeing eye who can guarantee that anything that is on the label holds to be 100% true and accurate?  We all (should) know that the sports supplement industry alone is full of all kinds of bullshit products that promise you the look of Lee Priest but deliver mostly just empty pockets and nervous systems brought to the edge.

You wanna become a superman?  Sorry, but sports supplements won’t get you there.

To be honest, I have been an active weight-trainer for 23 years of my life and I have tried all kinds of sports supplements promising the moon.  Most of the stuff I have used, I have to say that I really cannot point out any real benefits from its use.  After 23 years of testing out the market I am finally starting to smarten up, and I have to admit that I am very, very disillusioned.  For every serving of valid and working creatine powder there are a truckload of products that can’t pass laboratory inspection.

Hey, if I had the cash I’d test every single product bought from either a sports supplement center or a food store.  I would love to know what actually IS – – or ISN’T – – in the stuff that we ingest.

When I was a kid, I ate rocks from my back yard and chowed down whatever was put on my plate, and for years upon years I was healthy and without allergies of any kind.  Only once I started trying out different diets and messing with various sports supplements did my body start telling me something was wrong.  Over the past 10 years I have developed lactose-intolerance and negative bodily reactions to certain grains.  I am not sure how much of this is due to the overall “doctoring” of our food industry on a whole, and how much is due to just fucking with nature a tad too much.

We have been lied to, time and time again.  Many God-given basic food products have been demonized to the point that we question where eating bananas will make us fat.  How fucking absurd is THAT?  Show me one single case study of a person who has gotten fat off of eating bananas, I dare you to produce such evidence anywhere!

The rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting foiled, over and over and over again.  I guess it’s like P.T. Barnum so aptly said: “Never give a sucker and even break.”

Maybe we all need to get back to basics.  Maybe we all need to break out our forgotten, dusty Bibles and find some old-school Truth.

The least we could do is start looking.

For the TRUTH, that is.

First, we could start off with me selling you the only thing I have: common sense (a good place to start).