Your Diet is a Process

Your diet is a continually evolving process. I'm not necessarily talking about a weight-loss diet, although a good, healthy way of eating should put you close to where you need to be on the scale.

Your diet is customized to your frame, your genetic make-up, and your lifestyle. Your diet must evolve because your body and the hormones that control its peak performance change over time. You'd never feed infant formula to a teenager and neither can a senior citizen eat like a teenager.

Your diet is a process but none of us wants it to be a process. Everybody wants it to be a pat, universal set of absolute laws: You HAVE to do the Mediterranean Diet to be really healthy. You HAVE to go low carb. You HAVE TO shun red meat. You HAVE TO do raw foods as often as possible. You HAVE TO go vegetarian...or better yet...vegan. You HAVE to go gluten-free. You HAVE TO, you have to, you have to.

Depending on your body and your physiological needs, you may be compelled to do one of the above-mentioned "have-to's". Then again, you might not.

We're all wired a little differently. Some people can eat pot roast all week long and never feel sluggish or see a spike in their cholesterol. Some people feel positively polluted unless they are eating a vegetarian diet. Some people cannot metabolize any sugar at all, not even fruit. But drop-dead gorgeous Dylan Lauren (fashion designer Ralph Lauren's daughter) practically eats candy for a living promoting her candy store chain, "Dylan's Candy Bar", yet she somehow stays as healthy and lovely as one of her pop's models.

The contradictions are dizzying. So how do you begin to figure out your optimum diet?

Obviously, if a food item makes you break out in hives, upsets your stomach, bloats you, causes you to belch, or interferes with your sleep, you need to severely limit your intake of that item. If you are honest about listening to your body's response signals, you may be disappointed. There are going to be items that you love that just don't love you.

People who are trying to figure out if they have a food sensitivity, separate food into groups and eat only those items in a particular group for one day, while taking notes about how they felt. For example, they'll only do fruits one day, only dairy products another day, only wheat and grains for a day, and so on. This takes a lot of work, but things that don't fully work for you show up pretty readily in this process of elimination.

When you think you've got it...when you are finally eating the way that makes you feel like a well-tuned machine, enjoy your optimum diet to the fullest but do continue to pay close attention. You may cross an invisible threshold in the growth/aging process and what worked for you in your eating habits last year might not work for you this year. Get involved in your own health regimen and never let anyone sell you a bill of (absolute) goods.