This is Not a Diet, This is a Way of Life

You’ve probably noticed the word “diet” has become a dirty word. ‘Diet’ books are one of the top selling book categories, with dozens and dozens of new titles on a big seller like Amazon.com at any one time. But over the past few years, they’ve almost all gone out of their way to say that what they recommend is not actually a diet.

“This is not a diet, this is a way of life!”

In other words, the quick fix is out. This is now the mantra for eating plans everywhere. “This is not a short-term, quick-fix, gain-it-all-right-back kind of plan,” they all say. What the new trend in diet books is now, is being very clear they are, in fact, not a diet. They are “a new way of life.” In other words, a ‘diet’ plan (that’s not a diet!) that provides good results over the long-term, and is the right mix of effective yet attainable (ie, still allows some fun, not crazy amounts of work, etc etc).

How does this apply to chiropractic? Short-term gains are great. Even in diets, everyone likes to feel good about getting great results from a short burst of hard work. But what the dozens and dozens of best sellers in the health category have found, as well as the millions of people that have implemented them, is that it is frustrating to make progress, stop doing the activity that delivered the progress, and then lose it again.

That yo-yo, up and down, aspect of your body is consistent whether it is diet, fitness, or chiropractic care and the health of your spine. Our bodies are dynamic, meaning that they are always changing, and always evolving in one direction or another. They are getting stronger or weaker, fitter or less fit, healthier or less healthy.

So the ‘diet’ book craze has actually uncovered a simple truth for us. That many aspects of our modern lifestyles are badly out of whack, and returning to our regular lifestyles can quickly re-create problems that we are not happy about having.

What the ‘diet’ books figured out was that what we are as people is what we consistently do, and this is true for almost every area. Work put into a system or area of our life means that area will get better than without that work. Without that work, energy, and attention, that area will slide back to a level that is determined by all of the external forces in our lives, rather than the forces that we control. And those forces we control are the only ones that are able to respond to this idea of “this is what I want to have happen in my life.”

So chiropractic care, like everything else, works best when it has consistency over time. And the specifics of how that happens can depend on our lifestyle, and the strength of our spine, and the length of time we have been getting care. But the health of our spine and nervous system is something that does better with the right regular energy and attention to it, both inside and outside of a chiropractic office, something that chiropractors have been saying for decades. Glad the ‘diet’ books are starting to figure it out, too.