barn doors and broccoli

Don't close the barn door after the horse is gone. Better late than never. What did you learn from these proverbs you probably heard as a child?

You learned that people can say totally opposite things and both believe they're right, thus truly confusing the rest of us. This is what I'm re-learning right now as I read two different books on how we should eat.

The first one, Food Matters by Mark Bittman, http://content.markbittman.com/books/food-matters argues that we need to eat less meat and make more careful meat choices in order to survive as a planet. He also explains lots of things we really do not want to put into our bodies, mostly things with more than ten letters in their names that anyone without a chemistry degree cannot pronounce. Unrefined grains and fruits and vegetables are the best diet for the body and the planet, according to Bittman.

The second, Fat to Skinny by Doug Varrieur, http://www.fattoskinny.com/, encourages me to eat more meat and little to no grain or sugar. (Fruits carry quite a bit of sugar, by the way.) Pretty much anything else goes.

So, to whom do I listen? Well, the first author makes sense, and I definitely feel like he's correct about the dangerous path we're on as a collective people with our eating habits. However, listening to the second has caused me to lose ten pounds, a feat I have not managed in the last four years with any other plan. So, who's right?

And my conclusion is that they both are. Which is also true of the proverbs above, right? Some things are never too late, while others cause lifelong regret. The trick is in knowing how to discern which is which before it's too late. If, in fact, it's ever too late. See what I mean?

So, I'm making peace with both. Less meat with more concern for its origin. More homemade and fewer chemicals. More raw veggies. (No, neither author forbids me to cook them. I just don't like cooked vegetables. A serious flaw in any plan to become a vegetarian.) And at least until goal achieved, very few carbs. Both authors can live with that. And so can I.

One is making me more conscious of how what I eat impacts the earth and my body. The other is making me lose weight, finally. I endorse both.

What conflicting advice have you had to make peace with?