Client Matters: “Is It OK to Eat . . . ?”

Image courtesy of Southern Living

Is everyone ready for a long weekend? I know I am. And I thought I would kick off this last golden weekend of summer with a post I’ve been hoping to write for a long time now.

What I’m starting to notice more and more in my work with clients is the emergence of trends. It’s not unusual for a number of clients to start asking me the same question all at once, or voicing the same concern, or even reporting the same health experience. Sometimes, this is because a certain article or event in the news has sparked interest. Sometimes, it happens because I happen to be working simultaneously with a number of clients who share similar health histories. But when a single question seems to be asked again and again—regardless of how diverse the clients asking me are—I know that it’s an inquiry I should give some real thought to.

Lately, I’ve been hearing a whole lot of “Is it OK to eat _______?” from my clients who are on high-raw protocols. The _______ tends to be one of a few favorite things: Greek yogurt, oatmeal, hummus, oat bran, egg whites, and English muffins are all popular contenders. And the sentiment underlying the question tends to be, “I’m eating mostly raw and vegetarian/vegan and I feel really great. But there’s this one food (or a few foods) that I really crave sometimes. Is it OK to eat, or does it blow my high-raw lifestyle altogether?”

My answer to clients who ask me this question is always the same. What is your intention behind pursuing a raw or high raw lifestyle? What’s your intention in trying to maintain a vegan, or a mostly vegan, diet? Because the set of foods that are and are not “OK” in your lifestyle is far more contingent on your personal goals than it is on my judgment of the health properties of that particular food.

If you’re pursuing a high raw or vegan lifestyle for ethical reasons—such as animal rights or the environment—then the answer may be relatively simple. Clearly, foods like yogurt and egg whites are neither raw nor vegan, and they don’t fit into the ideology that you espouse. If this is so, it won’t be hard to avoid them.

If you’re pursuing a high raw or vegan lifestyle because of your health history or an acute health concern (like obesity, a digestive disorder, an immune condition, and so on), then it also shouldn’t be hard for you to answer questions about what you should and shouldn’t be eating. Clearly, you’ve done some research and feel confident that raw or vegan (or mostly raw or mostly vegan) will heal you. This was and still is my own motivation for the lifestyle I choose: the way I eat is the healthiest for my body, and it has helped me recover from a long history with digestive illness, respiratory infections, low immunity, and other health complaints.

If you are simply looking to eat a cleaner, better, and more vibrantly, or if you’re currently exploring what a “healthy diet” might mean for you—and this describes the vast majority of my clients—then things get a bit more complicated. In many ways, it’s easy to draw distinctions when you hew to a particular ethical system, or when you have an immediate health complaint. For the many of you who reside in the gray area of “I want to find a way of eating that is healthy and works for me, without sacrificing all of my sanity it he process,” it can be hard to say what is more or less ideal for your body; what is or isn’t “OK” to eat.

What I’ve noticed with clients is that many who approach me about a high-raw or vegan lifestyle are motivated not only by curiosity or the desire to live healthier, but also by a sense of pressure. Some of these clients are blog readers who have spotted the raw lifestyle in blogs and started to wonder if they “should” be trying it. Dearly though I love so many things about the blog world, I do worry that reading food blogs does tend to provoke a sense of obligation to try new lifestyles. And why shouldn’t it? When a blogger announces that some particular way of eating has made her (or him) feel great, it’s inevitable that readers will find their curiosity piqued. But what begins as curiosity can also become an unnecessary sense of pressure to follow suit, or a sudden questioning of foods and habits that are held dear.

I realize as I write this that my own blog must contribute to this sentiment among some—after all, I make no secret of the fact that the way I eat has healed health problems and has enriched my life immeasurably. And I wouldn’t write my blog if I didn’t feel that I could inspire others to heal and feel better by taking something away from the raw lifestyle—be it an errant tip here and there or inspiration for some major changes. This said, I hope I always make equally clear that raw foods are suitable for me in particular based on nuances of my complicated health history, my lifestyle, and my needs. The necessity of individualization is something that I believe in firmly—especially in my work as a nutritional counselor. In the end, there is no “world’s healthiest diet.” There is a vast array of possible diets that we each choose from, and what is “ideal” has to vary based upon one’s own lifestyle. I like to remind clients that the perfect “diet” really involves a complex confluence of factors.

Remember when you learned about venn diagrams? When I’m putting together a meal plan for a client, I always have a few overlapping circles imprinted in my consciousness. One is health: what’s the client’s health history? Is it complex? Normal? Suffering? Another is lifestyle: is this a CEO on the go or a stay at home mom? A student or a post-menopausal breast cancer survivor? A social butterfly or a workaholic? Yet another is personality. Is my client self-assured or prone to insecurity? Is she susceptible to social pressure, or markedly stubborn? Lacking discipline, or too much of a perfectionist? The last is ideology. Am I dealing with someone who believes in animal rights and takes veganism seriously within that belief system? Am I dealing with someone who cares fervently about eating locally, even if that means not eating 100% raw all the time?

To formulate the best meal plan for my client—and to judge what is and isn’t “OK”—I have to consider the dark area in which all of these circles—which is to say, all of these complicated factors—overlap. If someone who’s aiming to be vegan or raw because they suffer from a grievous health complaint asks me about dairy, I’ll mostly likely say that my personal feeling is that dairy is not a health-promoting food, and help him or her to find alternatives. Ditto for a client who is pursuing veganism because of a reverence for animals as sentient beings. If someone who sincerely feels that the raw lifestyle is best for his or her health and has asked me for motivation asks me about cooked food, I’ll do my best to steer him or her away—I’ve been asked for support, and I’m here to provide it.

If I’m dealing with a client who wants to make healthy choices, and enjoys a mostly raw or vegan diet, but isn’t 100% sure if she wants to go whole hog, I need to think with more subtlety. I want to be certain that I make good on my promise to provide support and encouragement in eating a healthier diet, and most of the time (as you know) I believe that plant based and raw foods are the healthiest options. And there will always be certain foods that I really urge clients to avoid: anything that’s heavily processed; white flour or sugar; artificial sweeteners and artificial colorings or flavorings; excessive alcohol consumption; diet soda, etc.

These foods aside, I realize that the degree of how raw and how vegan will have to vary according to the venn diagram that is my client’s life. Is this client the sort of person who adheres to good eating habits easily, but cherishes restaurant dining? If so, I may need to encourage him to aim for a mostly raw and vegan diet most of the time, but to cut himself some slack when dining out. Is this client an athlete who has expressed some concern about protein intake? If so, I might direct her to cooked legumes, grains, and soy products like tempeh or tofu (even though I’m not a huge fan of soy on the whole). Is this client someone with a history of disordered eating? If so, it may be crucial for me to sacrifice rigidity about “all raw” or “all vegan” for the sake of a healthy mindset: any sort of “all or nothing” attitude can easily provoke binges or self-loathing.

Recently, two very different clients asked me about Greek yogurt. The first is an aspiring vegan who is motivated by moral convictions—namely, animal rights. I admire her beliefs, and I want to support her in standing by them. I had the sense that her cravings for dairy were probably going to be short lived; they were habit, more than true need. In fact, she admitted that she doesn’t even like the yogurt much, she was just “used to” eating it for breakfast. So I gave her a push: I told her to do her best to see if she could substitute other breakfast foods she loves for a few weeks, and if it didn’t work out, we’d re-think dairy. A few weeks later, she’s doing find without the yogurt. Success!

(On the flip side, this client loves Boca Burgers, which are more processed than I personally would like. But since they’ve played a huge role in her transition to veganism, I support her eating them–for now!)

My other client has a history with binge/restrict cycles. She tends to be prone to comparing herself to the habits and lifestyles of bloggers and feeling pressure to do the same. She genuinely feels her best on a high-raw and vegetarian diet, and so I like to encourage her in that direction, but I also see that for her, any kind of severe protocol is likely to induce feelings of guilt or inadequacy. Moreover, the list of animal products that this client still enjoys is relatively short, so I don’t have any overarching concerns about her cholesterol levels or acid/alkaline balance. In other words, I may not typically recommend dairy or eggs to all clients or readers, but this particular client isn’t eating them with enough frequency that my concern about them should outweigh my desire to see her reach a place of emotional balance. It seems to me that Greek yogurt plays a small dietetic role in her life—she doesn’t eat it all that often—but an important psychological role: keeping this and a few other non-raw foods in her diet will help this client to not feel deprived; it will help her to realize that you can eat mostly raw and vegan and still enjoy most of the health benefits; it will help to keep her in a place where she isn’t following a dietary protocol simply because she sees that others are. And in doing all of those things, it will help her get back in touch with her intuition, which is her main goal.

The next time you ask yourself if it’s OK to eat something or other, ask yourself what kind of a place that food fills in your life. Is it simply a crappy habit you’re ready to ditch, like soda or Chicken McNuggets? I say go for it. Is it a food that isn’t ideal for you, but you eat as a “guilty pleasure” once in a blue moon? Take stock of where you are: maybe it’s time to challenge yourself to let go, and maybe once in a blue moon is fine for you. Is it a food that isn’t necessarily the most ideal thing you eat, but for whatever reason, plays a part in that finely calibrated overlap of circles—lifestyle, personality, health, ideology? Then think carefully. Weigh those factors, and do what feels right. And remember that there is no gold standard to which you have to adhere—putting aside the worst food culprits, “OK” and “not OK” are usually matters of personal conviction, not irrefutable fact.

You heard it here first, guys, from the lips of someone who believes passionately in the raw and vegan lifestyles: it’s better to do what feels right to you in every way—health, psyche, lifestyle—than to set yourself up for excessive sacrifice and the inevitable binging or imbalance that follows. And if you are a food blog reader, or even if you just tend to read health books or magazines, always remember: the question isn’t “should I be doing what that girl (or author) is doing?” It’s “do I believe in what that girl is doing? Does it make sense to me? Do I think she’s done her homework?” And, finally, “Would what she’s doing make the same kind of sense for me that it does for her?”

The question you might need to ask in the end may very well be, “Why am I paying attention to what that girl’s doing, or feel pressure to change what I’m doing?” But if that’s where this line of inquiry takes you, don’t be afraid to follow.

OK friends. Those are some profound questions for a holiday Friday. I’m upstate for Labor Day weekend with my best friend and her family. Expect a special guest post no matter what, and a recipe if I have time!

Have a wonderful holiday, all.

xo

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