A Little About The Fashion For Healthy Food

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

The modern fashion for all kinds of diets, vegetarianism, veganism and a raw food diet has taken over the vastness of the Internet, has grown new specialized restaurants and has firmly entered our daily life. We tirelessly try all dietary options on ourselves, refuse meat, stop eating food that has been cooked, exclude gluten, chocolate and sugar …

Why do people nowadays experiment so much with themselves and their nutrition?

Of course, there are many possible answers to this question:

- ethical side (do not eat animals);

- the issue of ecology (when keeping livestock, environmental pollution occurs at the same level as chemical factories);

- the theory of healthy eating (the exclusion of certain foods should improve the quality of our life);

- an abundance of food (if we lived like some modern peoples with difficult access to food, hardly anyone was worried about the issue of ethics or ecology, the survival instinct would come first).

But let's look for the psychological underpinnings of these modern trends

Scientists have long established that one of the causes of eating disorders is a feeling of lack or complete lack of control over one's own life. But, what if eating disorders are counted as the last stage on the continuum of eating habits, in the beginning of which we will be our preoccupation with diets?

Our world is now so fleeting that we do not always have time to master technological innovations as new ones come out; the flow of information is so huge and versatile that it is difficult to filter it and assess the reliability of the data; we only have time to learn to become specialists in a certain field, as new discoveries occur, so we need to learn constantly. In a world where the boundaries between states, cities and people have blurred, where we easily cross continents in a couple of hours, it has become very difficult to keep our attention.

People living in warm parts of the Earth live "here and now". This is due to history. They did not need to stock up on food, you can always pick fruits straight from the tree, there was no need to build houses with thick walls and prepare brushwood to protect themselves from frost. But on the other hand, it was always important for them to be on the alert, because suddenly a tiger may come out or a poisonous snake can crawl … Therefore, the southern peoples developed the ability to "be present."

The culture of the northern peoples, or even those who live in a temperate climate, to which ours belongs, is developed backwards. Our ancestors have long stocked up on food, learned to cook them on fire, dry and salt. They built warm houses and fortifications. Therefore, we are more focused on planning.

And how can we survive in this uncontrolled world with such a planning orientation ?!

This is where fitness and diet programs come to the rescue. After all, if we cannot control the external environment, then things are easier with our own body. We lose weight, work out the press or preoccupy ourselves with the selection of food products. This is a way to organize your life. A whole culture is formed around a carefully seasoned diet with its own rituals. We observe the daily routine, eat food at certain hours, there are permitted and prohibited foods, a system of rules and postulates.

Food systems perform similar functions as religion performed in ancient times and continues to perform to this day. These functions include compensatory, therapeutic, communicative, worldview and ideological. Food cultures systematize the world, in a sense, bring some certainty and unite their adherents into groups of interests - all this gives us a sense of support and reduces the level of neuroticism. Some idea and purpose appears. A certain way of eating brings new meanings to life, or allows you to stand out from the general group of individuals.

In any case, whatever we strive for, it is important to understand why we are doing it. Having discovered the hidden motives of our actions, we can open a variety of ways to achieve the goal, and sometimes they are shorter, much more pleasant and useful.